NCAA Could Have Kept Men Out Of Women’s Sports All Along

The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced an about-face on its 2022 “participation policy” for transgender-identifying athletes this week: No longer are men allowed to self-identify their way into women’s sports.

“The new policy limits competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only,” the NCAA said in a press release, forced to acknowledge the genetic differences between men and women while bitterly clinging to the anti-science trans-speak “assigned at birth,” as if chromosomal makeup is arbitrary.

Regardless of the continued language manipulation, however, the policy change stands — and it’s a direct result of female athletes demonstrating the myriad ways male athletes have harmed them, plus a strong leader in the White House who is willing to listen and act.

On Wednesday, just one day before the NCAA policy reversal, President Donald Trump signed an executive order (titled simply “Keeping Men Out Of Women’s Sports“) that stripped all funding from educational programs that let men and boys infiltrate women’s and girls’ athletics. “It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly,” the order reads, not only for reasons of “safety” and “fairness,” but also to preserve “dignity, and truth.”

The NCAA allowing males to compete against females “is demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports,” Trump’s order says.

The president is clearly listening to the many brave women who have risked their reputations and much more to share their stories of discrimination and danger. One of these women, NCAA Division 1 athlete Sia Liilii, then the captain of the University of Nevada, Reno, women’s volleyball team, led her teammates in protesting and then forfeiting a game against San Jose State University’s women’s team because it included a trans-identifying male player. As IW Features highlights in a documentary about Liilii’s experience, her school refused to support its own women’s team.

During the 2022 season, swimmers for the University of Pennsylvania were forced to change in the same locker room as their infamous male teammate Lia Thomas. One swimmer, Paula Scanlan, told IW Features that this was especially traumatic for her, as she “had joined UPenn’s swim team to heal emotionally after she was sexually assaulted in a bathroom at the age of 16.”

“In a lot of ways, my experience of being assaulted helped me see very quickly what was so wrong about having to undress in front of and be teammates with a male,” Scanlan told IW Features. “It opened me up to seeing this situation on my swim team for what it was — I understood going through something that was unjust, I understood the feeling of your voice being drowned out by a million people.”

The problem of males in female sports extends beyond the NCAA. Other athletic organizations such as the Ladies Professional Golf Association have destroyed women’s competition by permitting male participation. Boys victimizing girls in their own sports also begins much earlier than college and the pro leagues. Just ask Payton McNabb, who during a high school volleyball match suffered a traumatic brain injury thanks to a high-powered spike from a trans-identifying opponent.

As IW Features detailed, a “medical evaluation revealed that the ball’s impact caused neurological impairments, including a concussion, vision problems, and partial paralysis to the right side of her body. The year following her traumatic brain injury, was full of ‘blank spaces’ that she’ll never remember, McNabb said.”

The NCAA reversal would never have been possible without female victims documenting the many ways men have destroyed their sacred athletic spaces and physically harmed them. But some of these women have been telling their stories for years. The high-profile dustup between Lia Thomas and opponent Riley Gaines occurred in 2022, for instance. So what’s changed?

Then-President Joe Biden wasn’t just an impotent leader. He actively cheered men taking over women’s private spaces, from sports and locker rooms to prisons and bathrooms. He issued biology-defying executive orders and celebrated “transgender visibility” days. When a trans-identifying shooter murdered six people in cold blood at a Christian school in Nashville, Biden exploited the tragedy to praise the “joy, strength, and absolute courage [of] transgender and nonbinary Americans.” He championed all the wrong things.

It’s about time we have a leader like Trump back in the Oval Office, once again listening to the everyday victims of men in ladyface. And what do you know? It only took two weeks and one strongly worded executive order to get the NCAA to bend the knee.

Kylee Griswold is the managing editor of The Federalist and a contributor to IW Features. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in communication arts/speech and an A.S. in criminal justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.