Texas AG Ken Paxton Sues NCAA
Continuing his full-tilt anti-trans hate campaign, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has now filed suit against the NCAA for… allowing trans players? Even though they barely do?
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just filed a lawsuit so frivolous and ass backwards that I intend to nominate it for Assigned Media’s Garbage Lawsuit of the Year Award 2024, an award that I just invented for this article as part of an award ceremony that does not (and will never) exist. That’s how bad it is!
Thanks to reporting from Berenice Garcia at The Texas Tribune, we know that Ken Paxton has filed suit against the National Collegiate Athletics Association over the participation of transgender athletes in collegiate sports, which he considers “false advertising.”
No, really!
The NCAA, if you aren’t a sports fan, is an athletics association that sponsors collegiate competitions for sports like baseball, basketball, football and soccer, just to name a few, chiefly in the United States. Thanks to a revision to their competition rules in 2022, the NCAA has handed off responsibility for determining whether or not trans athletes are eligible to play primarily to national and international governing bodies for individual sports or, failing that, prior International Olympic Committee rules, cowards that they are. For sports like track and field, cross country, and aquatics, that means a total disqualification of transgender student-athlete participation, since the governing bodies of those sports have issued blanket bans.
All that to say, the NCAA hasn’t exactly been inclusive of transgender student-athletes in the past few years, in spite of an IOC-funded study that proves without a doubt this is a mistake.
AG Paxton asserts that any participation of transgender women in female sports (they always forget about trans men, somehow) violates the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Furthermore, in an announcement about the lawsuit he said, “The NCAA is intentionally and knowingly jeopardizing the safety and wellbeing of women by deceptively changing women’s competitions into co-ed competitions.
“When people watch a women’s volleyball game, for example, they expect to see women playing against other women—not biological males pretending to be something they are not. Radical ‘gender theory’ has no place in college sports.”
Ignoring AG Paxton’s use of the meaningless term biological males (and yes, it is meaningless), it seems relevant that NCAA president Charlie Baker testified before congress earlier in December that he was aware of less than 10 transgender players in the NCAA, as compared to their total player count of 510,000 student-athletes.
If you keep up with the news at all, you probably know that Texas is no safe place for trans athletes, or in fact trans people period. Last year Senate Bill 15 was passed in Texas forcing trans athletes to compete on teams that align with the gender they were assigned at birth, enshrining into law the kind of myopic, asinine views that lead to trans men like Mack Beggs being forced to compete against women if they want to compete at all. Back in August, AG Paxton decided that trans Texans can’t change the gender marker on their licenses anymore, and also tried to solicit DPS workers to start building a list of anybody who made the attempt. Which, for the record, isn’t even the first time AG Paxton has tried to assemble a list of transgender Texans for… reasons.
It’s unclear where this lawsuit will go, since much of what AG Paxton is asking for is already NCAA policy, which he would know if he knew anything at all. Perhaps he’s just posturing for the sake of the culture war, like most of his assbrained contemporaries in conservative politics. One thing’s for sure, though:
He’s going to an awful lot of trouble over less than ten trans athletes, and it’s as disgusting as it is pathetic.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
