More than a dozen House Republicans are calling on the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to ban transgender women who were born male from participating in female college sports teams.
“We are deeply concerned about the future of women’s sports and upholding the critical Title IX protections for women’s sports with the NCAA’s current policies,” said a letter led by Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., and signed by 16 fellow Republican lawmakers.
The group of 17 lawmakers wrote to NCAA President Charlie Baker after the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) announced last week that it was banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports, though they can still participate in team practices and non-competition activities.
The NAIA is a collegiate athletic league made up of smaller and private universities that governs roughly 83,000 student athletes, which is smaller than the over 500,000 student athletes across the NCAA’s three divisions.
“This policy appropriately recognizes the natural advantages that biological men have in certain athletic competitions. A 2022 study entitled ‘Transwoman Elite Athletes: Their Extra Percentage Relative to Female Physiology’ concluded that ‘many anatomical sex differences driven by testosterone are not reversible,’” the GOP letter said.
“Further, this study found that given that ‘estrogen therapy will not reverse most athletic performance parameters, it follows that transgender women will enter the female division with an inherent advantage because of their prior male physiology.’ The NCAA’s current transgender policy fails to take these scientific facts into consideration.”
