Riley Gaines wasn’t invited to the NCAA’s annual convention, but she showed up anyway, along with dozens of her allies in the battle for fairness in female sports.
A coalition of a dozen women’s groups held a rally Thursday outside the NCAA confab at the Phoenix Convention Center, then presented a petition and letter to the NCAA calling on the organization to repeal all rules allowing “male athletes to take roster spots on women’s teams and/or compete in women’s events.”
“Women are deserving of privacy, safety and fairness, and equal opportunity is not anti-trans. It is pro-woman, it is pro-reality, it is pro-truth, it is pro-fairness,” Gaines, an NCAA 12-time All-American swimmer, said at the rally.
Participants waved signs with messages like “Hey, NCAA: Stop Discriminating” and “Equality Isn’t a Game” while listening to speakers including Christy Mitchell, mother of Chelsea Mitchell, a track athlete who sued the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference after losing to a male-born runner who identified as female.
“I’m the mother of three daughters, one of whom is a current NCAA Division I Track and Field athlete,” Mitchell said in her prepared remarks. “I never imagined they would one day have to compete against boys.”
She asked the NCAA leadership to “please stop turning a deaf ear to the concerns of women who are insisting on fair and safe competition.”
Hey @NCAA it’s time to stop discriminating against women. 
— Concerned Women for America LAC (@CWforA) January 11, 2024
Making our message clear out here in Phoenix today that women’s sports are for women only.  pic.twitter.com/QEVfaJc7Sg
In January 2022, the NCAA abandoned its transgender policy, which required male-born athletes to keep their testosterone in serum below 10 nmol/L for a year before competition, and announced that it would defer rules on transgender eligibility to the national governing body for each sport.
Some sports authorities have adopted standards stricter than the former NCAA policy, but the Our Bodies, Our Sports coalition argued that there should be no avenue for male-born athletes who identify as female to participate in girls’ and women’s athletics.
Transgender-rights advocates have countered that “trans women are women” and should be treated the same as biological women, arguing that banning them from female sports is discriminatory.
The coalition letter addressed to NCAA President Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts who took over last year, also called for the association to require member colleges to provide single-sex locker rooms for women.
“Shame on Charlie Baker for continuing to enforce this discriminatory policy,” said Jennifer C. Braceras, Independent Women’s Forum vice president for legal policy at Independent Women’s Forum. “The NCAA may not be bound by Title IX, but the schools that make up its membership are, and the NCAA has an obligation to help its member schools comply with equal opportunity mandates, not subvert them.”
The NCAA has not commented publicly on the letter from the women’s groups.
In addition to the IWF, the Our Bodies, Our Sports coalition includes the Women’s Liberation Front, Women’s Declaration International, Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS), Champion Women, International Consortium on Female Sport, Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, Concerned Women for America, Alliance Defending Freedom, Young Women for America, Independent Women’s Law Center, and Independent Women’s Network.
Twenty-three states have passed measures prohibiting male-born athletes from competing in female scholastic sports based on gender identity, several of which are on hold pending lawsuits filed by transgender competitors.
Ohio could become the 24th such state if the Republican-controlled Senate overrides the governor’s veto of House Bill 68, which would require students in college and secondary school to compete based on sex, not gender identity.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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