NCAA immediately acts to implement total ban on trans athletes
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Well, you can’t say this isn’t exactly the level of fortitude and commitment to equality one expects from the peonage sports cartel:
On Wednesday, Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to ban trans athletes from competing in girls and women’s sports. A few hours later, NCAA president Charlie Baker showed everyone just how little moral courage he has.
Like all of Trump’s executive orders, the one he signed yesterday does not actually change the law of the land, nor does it create a clear path for enforcement. The executive order relies on a new and perverse interpretation of Title IX—the federal law that prevents schools that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of sex—arguing that schools that allow trans people equal opportunities to participate in sports are actually in violation of Title IX. The Trump administration is now threatening to pull federal funding from schools that protect the rights of trans people. The administration’s interpretation of Title IX will certainly be challenged in court, and it’s not clear how the administration plans to identify schools that are running afoul of this executive order.
None of that stopped Baker from signaling his eagerness to adopt Trump’s deranged culture-war edict as official NCAA policy. Shortly after the executive order was signed, Baker released a statement saying that the NCAA would “take necessary steps to align NCAA policy in the coming days,” and extolling Trump’s order for how it “provides a clear, national standard.”
As always, these trans sports bans are a solution in search of a problem. Baker knows this better than anyone else; while testifying in front of the Senate last month, he said that he believed there were fewer than 10 transgender athletes currently competing among the NCAA’s 510,000 athletes. As Michael Waters has previously pointed out on Defector, these bans are not actually about fairness in sports, and successful enforcement is not the ultimate goal. Trump’s executive order seeks to do the same thing that the state-level and Congressional trans sports bans seek to do, which is create a world in which trans people are not welcome.
People who otherwise show total contempt for women’s sports cynically claiming to protect them by ordering a handful of athletes to be permanently excluded in the face of zero evidence that they represent any threat to the security or competitive balance of actually existing athletic competitions is a gross spectacle, and the NCAA immediately acting to comply ditto.