The spineless cowardice of the NCAA's anti-trans swerve

A decade ago, the NCAA stood up on trans issues. Now that trans people are under attack, they've given in to bigots.

(I’ve been working on a Super Bowl post all week, because it’s Super Bowl week. But then I got really mad about something. Hope you’re mad about it by the end, too—Rodger.)

In December, NCAA President Charlie Baker went to the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing that was supposed to be about sports gambling, one of dozens of major issues affecting college sports. But two Republican senators—Josh Hawley of Missouri and John Kennedy of Louisiana—sideswiped the hearing, ignoring the proposed topic to badger Baker about the fairness of allowing trans women to participate in women’s sports. At one point, Kennedy asked Baker “why don’t you go on Amazon and buy a spine?” Although we’re on opposite sides of basically every issue, including this one, I’ve gotta say, senator Kennedy made a great point.

At those December hearings, Baker seemed to be getting fed up. Baker repeatedly replied that federal judges had repeatedly ruled in favor of trans participation. He pointed out that out of 510,000 NCAA athletes across three divisions and dozens of sports, fewer than ten are transgender.

He seemed to be sending a message: there are actual issues in college sports. Why are you yelling about one that doesn’t exist?

Two months later, it feels like Baker was sending the Republicans a message—but not the one you might have thought. When Baker said that only .002 percent of the athletes under his watch were trans, he wasn’t standing up for those 10 athletes. Baker was actually saying: there are so few trans athletes, I don’t really care what happens to them.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump issued an executive order trying to prevent trans women from competing in women’s sports, his fourth in a series of orders designed to make life harder and worse for trans people. In theory, the executive order should not apply to the NCAA at all, since executive orders are not laws and the NCAA is not a part of the executive branch of government¹. Regardless, Baker almost immediately issued a statement that the NCAA was eager to align its policies with Trump’s order. Within 24 hours, the NCAA published its new transgender policy.

It’s a sharp contrast to just a few years ago. In 2016, the NCAA was so staunch in its support of trans people that it pulled championships from the state of North Carolina over the state’s bathroom bill. And Baker, then the governor of Massachusetts, signed a bill ensuring trans people could use bathrooms that aligned with their gender identity. “No one should be discriminated against because of their gender identity,” Baker tweeted.

It’s easy to explain the flip-flop: The NCAA has lost court case after court case about their core business model, the premise that colleges should be allowed to profit from athletics without paying the athletes. They’re hoping for Trump and Congress to bail them out through legislation stating that college athletes are not employees. If Republicans hand the NCAA legislative wins, it could save an organization on the brink. Baker has apparently decided not to mess that chance up over a couple of trans kids.

So Baker praised Trump’s order as “a clear national standard" about athlete eligibility. But Trump’s order is pretty clearly not actually about fairness in women’s sports.

If it were about fairness in women’s sports, it would be focused on high-level competition. Instead, this order applies to any sports at any educational institution, including youth, intramural, and club sports.

If this were about fairness in women’s sports… the order would not specifically say it was intended to override existing rules put in place to provide a fair playing field in women’s sports, like the NCAA’s restrictions on testosterone levels. (One of the doctors who helped set those guidelines has now resigned.)

If this were about fairness in women’s sports… the people yelling the loudest might, you know, actually watch or care about women’s sports. They don’t! They actually tend to be people who hate women’s sports! I promise you none of them know who Napheesa Collier or Naomi Girma is! None of these losers know ball!

If this were about fairness in women’s sports… the parts about fairness in women’s sports would not be mixed in with unsubtle suggestions that trans women are sexual predators hungry for access to women’s locker rooms.

If this were about fairness in women’s sports… well, it would just be about fairness in women’s sports. Instead, the right has combined this order with a slew of other transphobic orders, like the one calling trans people too untrustworthy to serve in the military, or the one eliminating healthcare for young trans people.

Much like Baker and the NCAA, my views on this topic have also changed since 2016. At the time, I was preparing to cover the Olympics in Rio, and the IOC had recently changed its policies to include more trans athletes (although, in the end, no trans athletes competed in those games.) I’d see stories popping up asking whether this was fair. The premise that an athlete who transitioned might have a competitive advantage sounded broadly reasonable, and as someone who writes a lot about women’s sports, I was willing to listen.

Maybe you were willing to listen, too. That was the point. Over the past decade, it’s become clear that the women’s sports debate was merely an entry point to broader transphobic bigotry. It’s hard to get too upset about someone else’s gender identity. It doesn’t affect anybody else! Who cares? But then you wonder… “are trans women better at volleyball than cis women? Seems reasonable!” And every time a sensible people treated that question as a legitimate one, it gave the anti-trans movement cover, and allowed them to push the envelope a little bit farther.

The more I listened, the more it became clear that they weren’t really interested in the facts, even in this specific case. There are studies suggesting that trans women may actually be at an athletic disadvantage compared to cis women². They don’t care. They hounded athletes like Imane Khelif and Caster Semenya, both of whom are cis women, and not trans. They tried to say that the trans San Jose State volleyball player was clearly taller and more powerful than all the other women’s volleyball players, when nobody even knew she was trans until her senior year, and when Texas and Penn State were clearly taller and more powerful. (Again: These people do not care about women’s sports enough to watch the good volleyball teams. Learn ball.) And when you realize they don’t care about the facts on this, their most reasonable argument, the one that’s supposed to sound the best, that takes away their launching point for all their other anti-trans garbage—and it makes clear why they’re trying to do all this stuff.

Sydney Bauer recently wrote about how competing as a rower both before and after transitioning saved her life. Remember that this order does not exclusively apply to elite athletes competing for gold medals and championships to all levels. Many of those women and girls are competing for all those beautiful reasons that sports make us feel good about ourselves—the camaraderie and teamwork, the ambition to be a little bit better than you were yesterday. Taking that away from trans people isn’t about fairness in women’s sports: It’s about taking away every possible source of refuge and community from trans people at a time of increasing cruelty.

Republicans think that because they won an election, they have a mandate to bully trans people out of existence. Worse, some of the people on my side seem to agree, arguing that we shouldn’t push back on trans rights, because it’s a losing issue. The way I see it, Republicans won slightly less than 50 percent of the vote in a deeply strange election where the major issue seems to have been inflation. (Which Trump is already clearly making worse, but, alas.) That doesn’t give them a mandate on anything, let alone killing our trans friends.

But even if Republicans did win in a landslide, and even if the #1 issue was persecuting trans people… that would be all the more reason to defend trans rights. The time to stand up for people being persecuted is when they’re being persecuted. That’s today.

The NCAA sees things the opposite way. They were willing to stand up for trans people when it seemed like the popular thing to do. Now that the transphobes are in power, they’ve switched sides, because staying on the right side of the people in power suits their broader goals.

The NCAA could have pushed back. They could have pointed out that they’d already given consideration to the issue of trans women in sports, come up with their own guidelines and restrictions, while Trump’s order was based on nothing. Instead, they folded, legitimizing the premise that this is actually about fairness in women’s sports, spreading the word that Trump has provided a “clear national standard.” In doing so, they’ve given cover to the other anti-trans garbage Trump and his lackeys are going to try to pull in future. I guess Charlie Baker never bought that spine off of Amazon.

1. The order does direct federal agencies to stop distributing money to colleges with trans athletes competing in women’s sports, which would be devastating for NCAA institutions which receive federal grants, which is basically all of them. But again: Trump’s order does not actually change the law, and as Baker pointed out in his Senate hearing, federal courts have repeatedly sided with trans participation in sports.

2. Apparently, hormone therapy changes your body a lot, which makes it hard to be an elite athlete. Who knew! I mean, except trans people. They knew.