Approaching the NCAA’s updated transgender policy

“I worried my success wouldn’t be attributed to my hard work or athleticism, but simply to being trans.”

“It made me feel awful, knowing my identity and existence are being debated every single day, with the rhetoric only intensifying.”

These quotes are from former NCAA athletes in response to the recent nationwide policy change in the US, which restricts women’s competition to only athletes assigned female at birth, effectively banning transgender women from the category.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the governing body for university sports in the United States, made the change following the Trump administration’s executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” which called for restricting the female sports category to only athletes assigned female at birth without allowances for gender identity or testosterone reduction. Transgender women who are assigned male at birth but identify or have transitioned to female can still participate in practices and receive medical care with women’s teams but cannot compete in the women’s category.

These policy changes take place within a wider debate about transgender rights, something the new administration is trying to settle through a range of new policies. As I will discuss, the debate is highly complex and invokes strong emotions from all sides of the argument. These conversations often involve questions of identity, women’s safety, civil rights, fair sport, and to what extent the government can intervene and shape individual lives.

Transgender sports bans are just one piece of the puzzle, and I recognise that this issue requires more representation and expertise than I can provide here. Especially as a cisgender athlete, I have neither the space nor the capacity to thoroughly defend one position or another in this article.

However, I strongly believe that much of the conversation around transgender athletes is, intentionally or otherwise, dehumanising and discriminatory. Part of settling the debate must involve respecting and integrating transgender athletes into our scientific research and political arenas. The complexities of the issue demand an essential level of nuance, especially if we hope to reach a conclusion.

Charlie Baker, the NCAA President, said that “clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes” and that “President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.” The referenced executive order was passed “to protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports.” These notions of fairness and safety have dominated the discussion about where (and whether) transgender athletes can compete; to understand the debate, we must understand these first.

Fairness and scientific evidence

Generally, sports are divided into separate categories to ensure all competitors have an equal chance to succeed and, in some cases, protect athletes from harm. Men’s divisions are usually separate from women’s divisions because, on average, men are taller and stronger compared to women. Weight classes in sports such as boxing, weightlifting, and rowing have a similar function. 

The NCAA is not the first athletic association to restrict transgender athletes on the grounds of fairness. World Athletics banned transgender women from female world-ranking events in 2023 and World Aquatics, the world governing body for swimming stated in 2022 that anyone who experienced male puberty would not be allowed to compete in the women’s category.

British Rowing (BR) requirements as of September 2023 state that only athletes assigned female at birth can compete (while also emphasising that treating someone less favourably on the basis of gender reassignment is discriminatory). 

This is somewhat inconsistent with the overall British University and College Sport (BUCS) requirements, where transgender women may participate in women’s categories after completing one calendar year of testosterone suppression. U.S. Rowing’s policy as of February 2023 (which does not apply to collegiate events, as these fall under the NCAA jurisdiction) states that women’s events are “for athletes who identify as a woman at the start of the rowing season and/or those who are assigned as female at birth”. Clearly, there are different and sometimes conflicting approaches.

Many of these restrictions, including the BR policy, cite scientific research that transgender women retain biological advantages in bone density, height, and strength after undergoing male puberty, even with testosterone suppression. JRN authors have previously discussed this evidence in response to the BR policy changes in 2023; they found that much of the evidence is contradictory. Indeed, some research (like this and this) finds that transgender women still have an advantage, while other research (like this and this) finds that they do not.

In short, there is very little consensus on the issue, which warrants more studies specific to transgender elite athletes (rather than extrapolating from non-athletic transgender people, for instance). More research is required, which coincidentally means that there needs to be more transgender athletes in competitive sport, not fewer.

At present, fairness is understood exclusively as “physiologically equality”. By relying on the assumption that transgender women are equal to cisgender men, these policies legitimise policing athletes’ participation as if their transgender identity does not exist (something I will discuss later). In fact, cisgender men still have physical advantages over female transgender athletes; is it fair to make them compete in the same category? 

Perhaps we can define fairness itself differently. Instead of physiology, the basis of fairness could be justice, which “involves dismantling oppression and domination to allow people to develop to their fullest potential.” Fundamentally, I believe sport is a place of refuge, community, and self-empowerment, particularly in schools and universities. In fact, studies have shown that transgender and non-binary youth with at least one gender-affirming space such as a sport were 25% less likely to report a suicide attempt. In response to recent changes from the Trump administration, one 17-year-old transgender boy described how “being called your correct name and pronouns, being on HRT [hormone replacement therapy], that can be the difference between life and death.”

A former NCAA transgender athlete said: “I thought I could never be who I wanted to be. When I realized I didn’t have to make that choice, I felt nothing but joy. My fondest memories of swimming are from the moments I could be myself while doing what I loved.”

As the governing body for U.S. collegiate athletics, an odd middle ground between school sport and elite competition, the NCAA will have to decide whether accessibility or fairness should be the priority, however we choose to define it.

Protecting women and girls?

Many arguments in favour of transgender bans (and the aforementioned executive order that enables them) talk about keeping female athletes “safe” and safeguarding their chances of success. Competing against a “man” might result in physical danger and take opportunities away from other women. 

Crucially, this rhetoric of “protect women’s sport” contains an unsaid addendum: protect them from whom? The language of these policies creates a divide between the “female” athletes we are trying to protect and the transgender women we are protecting from: a view where, fundamentally, transgender women are not “real” women. 

In the media and recent government policy, transgender women are often referred to as “biological males” or simply misgendered as “men in women’s races”, which ignores how sex is not a perfect binary and reduces trans women to their physical bodies. By erasing trans identities, this perpetuates a transphobic ideology under the guise of “fairness.” Even if the scientific evidence showed conclusive evidence (which it doesn’t) that transgender women had biological advantages that would warrant “protection”, the language being used and the wider context of these policy changes suggests an underlying rhetoric meant to delegitimise transgender people’s experiences.

For one, transgender bans seem to apply only to a very small set of people. NCAA President Baker reportedly said in a Senate meeting in December that there were “less than ten” transgender athletes. In fact, as of this article published in 2023, there were only 36 known transgender athletes competing at the collegiate level (up to 44 as of 2025) out of the total number of student-athletes in the NCAA – a number hovering over half a million. 

If these policies were truly about protecting and empowering women, then I would expect more requirements to prevent and report sexual assault cases or financially support female athletes from school clubs to elite competitors. Austin Killips, a transgender cyclist previously targeted by President Trump, notes how “[the Trump administration’s] project contains no measures that help female athletes at the professional level as labourers, and certainly nothing that even gestures towards new investment opportunities for girls pursuing their dream.” Despite being framed as a step toward protecting and empowering women, there are no provisions for supporting female athletes (including cisgender women) to make a sustainable living from competing like their male counterparts. 

Setting aside momentarily the scientific evidence described earlier, this particular executive order and the following NCAA policy change take place against the backdrop of wider governmental changes that systematically discriminate against transgender people. Just two weeks before the NCAA announcement, the Trump administration issued an executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, which establishes that there are only two genders in the eyes of the law. In what appears to be an attempt to erase transgender identities and experiences, neither executive order contains the word “transgender” at all.

When we get lost in numerical data about grip strength and bone density, we lose the bigger picture of what’s at stake: a group of people, (who are already fighting an uphill battle for their rights) wanting to be part of a community and find joy in sport. As Pharr et al. describe, transgender sports bans are “a form of structural stigma” that “signal that it is appropriate to discriminate against the excluded group because they are not fully a part of society”.

When evaluating how transgender athletes can participate, it is absolutely vital that we remember that transgender people are people too, that their identities and experiences are just as valid as our own, they deserve a place in society, and they should undoubtedly be key voices in the continuing conversation. While there may (and I stress, may) be some scientific evidence that they have a physiological advantage, that does not preclude us from treating everyone, including our transgender athletes, with dignity and respect.

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FOOTNOTE: English, C., & Pieper, L. P. (2023). ‘This Bill Is About Fairness’: An Argument Against the Prioritization of Competitive Fairness at the Expense of Justice in US School Sport. In A. D. Greey & H. J. Lenskyj, Justice for Trans Athletes: Challenges and Struggles (First edition, pp. 109–133). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=69c4f252-c86c-314d-aa73-851a734da1b9

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