NCAA Cowardly Kowtows to Crooked Trump
As has become customary among household name organizations, the NCAA has given in to Trump’s demands about trans student-athletes just as quickly as they possibly could.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Yet another capitulation: The National Collegiate Athletic Association, better known by its acronym NCAA, has sided with Donald Trump over the transgender community by banning trans women from women’s competitions in collegiate sports competitions nationwide.
The amendment to the NCAA’s eligibility standards comes less than a week after Donald Trump signed an executive order, named the “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” because Trump is a loathsome bastard, barring transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
In a speech following the signing of the executive order last Wednesday, Trump said, “The radical left has waged an all-out campaign to erase the very concept of biological sex and replace it with a militant transgender ideology. With this executive order, the war on women’s sports is over.”
I don’t know who “the radical left” is, but I can tell you that the only real threat to women’s sports is underfunding and pay disparity between male and female athletes. When you consider that Charlie Baker, the NCAA’s current president and cowardly dog rolling over to show his belly to Donald Trump just as quickly as he can, has testified to congress that there are fewer than 10 transgender student-athletes in collegiate sports (as compared to more than 530,000 cisgender student-athletes), it seems clear that transgender girls aren’t much of an existential threat to “fairness in women’s sports.”
Baker assured the public that the NCAA would comply with the president’s demands as quickly as possible and, true to his word, the organization banned trans women competitors just over 24 hours later.
The new policies explicitly bar trans women from competing in the women’s category, which they have restricted to “student-athletes assigned female at birth,” but graciously notes that the men’s category is “open to all eligible student-athletes.” If this transparent and despicable attack on trans women wasn’t enough, the NCAA goes on to handily glaze Donald Trump as thoroughly as they can manage in the back half of their update.
“We strongly believe that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today's student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions,” the NCAA says. “To that end, President Trump's order provides a clear, national standard," NCAA President Charlie Baker said.”
Of course, it won’t be nearly that simple. The EO clashes directly with anti-discrimination laws in many states, like Illinois and New York, and litigation against the fed is unavoidable.
This betrayal from Baker and the NCAA isn’t entirely unsurprising. What about academic institutions, though? What if they refuse to adhere to Trump’s policy demands? It’s the same stick they’re using to cow hospitals into refusing adults gender-affirming care: withdrawal of federal funding.
“We’re putting every school receiving taxpayer dollars on notice,” Trump said, following his signing of the executive order, “that if you let men take over women’s sports teams or invade your locker rooms, you will be investigated for violations of Title IX and risk your federal funding, there will be no federal funding.”
This executive order is wide-ranging, too: it could potentially impact visa policies for international athletes traveling to America, as one White House official said, “If you are coming into the country and you are claiming that you are a woman but you are a male here to compete against women, we’re going to be reviewing that for fraud.”
Like with the rest of the executive orders Trump has issued since January 20th, in particular the anti-trans orders, it’s unclear exactly how this ban will shake out in courts across America. You can safely anticipate one thing, though: a generation of court cases fighting this kind of blatant discrimination starting over the next four years.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
