The NCAA Policy ‘Protecting’ Women’s Sports Is a Head Fake. Don’t Fall for It.

President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders, but few have received as much media attention as his directive protecting women’s sports. And few subsequent developments were as gratifying as the National Collegiate Athletics Association’s about-face on women’s athletics, which reversed the NCAA’s previously trans-inclusive policy and relegated women’s collegiate athletics to biological women, alone.

Or did it?

The NCAA—a nonprofit membership organization that regulates student athletics among 1,100 schools in the United States—organizes the athletic programs of colleges and universities within its three divisions. It oversees the sports participation of approximately 500,000 college student athletes who compete annually in college sports.

As a nonprofit organization, approximately 96% of its $1.28 billion in annual revenue is distributed among its member colleges and universities, making NCAA membership—and a division ranking—incredibly lucrative. It’s this profitability that now has member colleges and universities over a barrel on women’s sports: Keep your NCAA ranking or violate Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination in government schools, putting your federal funding at risk.

The NCAA released its “Participation Policy for Transgender Student-Athletes” one day after the president’s executive order on women’s sports. Its title alone presents the first problem: There are no “transgender” student athletes in American collegiate athletics. All athletes are either male or female, regardless of their purported “gender identity.”

The policy then defines terms: “Sex Assigned at Birth: The male or female designation doctors assign to infants at birth, which is marked on their birth records.”

Infants are not assigned a sex at birth. Their sex is objectively identified at birth. What’s more, while the reference to “birth records” may seem to be a backstop against gender orthodoxy in sports, 44 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia now allow individuals to change their birth records to whatever sex they identify with, regardless of their underlying biology. There is no way to determine whether a birth record has been amended.

The NCAA policy concludes by noting that “As with all other NCAA eligibility criteria, member schools remain responsible for certifying student-athlete eligibility for practice and competition.” This directive puts member schools right back where they started from when the NCAA issued its first missive on “trans-inclusive” athletics policies. Schools themselves will need to make determinations on which athletes are male or female and will be left holding the bag for whatever eligibility determination they make.

Meanwhile, rather than, for example, requiring uniform cheek swabs to determine natal sex and participation eligibility, the NCAA gets to shirk all responsibility for enforcing its toothless policy.

With its many deficiencies, the NCAA’s new policy runs contrary to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and the global Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights. It’s also contrary to Trump’s recent executive orders “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” and Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

If the NCAA’s leaders really want to keep college athletics separated by biological sex, they should tear up their policy and try again.