NASHVILLE, Tenn. — NCAA president Charlie Baker said Tuesday the association would welcome federal guidance before it considers any possible changes to rules regarding transgender athletes competing in women’s sports.
“There is no clarity on this from a legal point of view,” Baker told reporters shortly after giving his State of College Sports address to membership at the association’s annual convention.
Baylor president Linda Livingstone, the chairwoman of the NCAA’s board of governors, mentioned the board had discussed the policy on transgender student-athlete participation this year during her opening remarks introducing Baker. She said the NCAA was monitoring potential changes to Title IX and related legal cases.
The brief mention of the policy during a high-profile event, in front of a room filled with hundreds of representatives from across the NCAA’s three divisions and 1,100 schools, was notable. Conservative politicians aggressively hit on the issue of transgender athletes competing in women’s sports during the last election cycle after numerous states passed laws banning transgender athletes from girls sports at the high school and youth levels.
Some lawmakers have criticized the NCAA’s rules, which provide an opportunity for transgender athletes to compete if they meet criteria set on a sport-by-sport basis by national and international governing bodies.
The NCAA has mostly avoided being pulled into the political fray, but with Republicans winning control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in November’s elections, college sports leaders might no longer be able to avoid political pressure to reconsider their policies regarding transgender athletes.
During this fall’s women’s volleyball season, several Mountain West schools forfeited matches against San Jose State, which was alleged to have a transgender athlete on its team. The schools sued the conference and asked for a temporary injunction to have the player excluded from participation during the conference tournament. A judge denied the request, and San Jose State played in the tournament, advanced through the semifinals by forfeit and lost the championship match to Colorado State.
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Livingstone noted the NCAA’s transgender student-athlete policy is reviewed annually by the board.
“I would say that the kind of public attention to that issue has been very significant in recent years, and we do recognize that as we look at what’s going to potentially happen with Title IX regulations, when we look at potential legislation at the federal level, when we look at what’s happening in the courts around the country, and then frankly, what we might anticipate that the new administration will do, it puts it definitely on the radar screen for us,” she said.
“We want to make sure that what we’re doing is in compliance with federal law, and if we anticipate that that could potentially change, we want to be prepared to address that. And so that’s why it was mentioned specifically, because everybody’s talking about it, everybody knows it’s an issue out there, and we don’t want to look like we’re not paying attention to it and taking it seriously.”
Especially as Baker and others in college sports continue to plead with Congress for help in the form of a federal law to regulate college sports.
“You never know, at the end of the day, how issues will sort of intersperse or not with one another. I can say that as somebody who spent 16 years in government,” said Baker, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts. During his time as governor, Baker signed a bill into law that protected transgender rights.
Baker said during a congressional hearing in Washington in December that he believed there were fewer than 10 transgender athletes among the 510,000 competing at schools. He reiterated that while speaking with reporters Tuesday.
“You have federal judges ruling on individual cases. You have states, 26, 27 states with one set of rules, a whole bunch of states with other sets of rules,” Baker said. “I do think we would welcome some clarity somewhere on this, so that everybody has a general understanding about what the rules of the game are.”
(Photo: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
