How the NCAA Helped Trump Score Big on Transgender Issues

The University of Pennsylvania agreed to publicly affirm its commitment to barring transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports, the Education Department announced Tuesday, in a resolution with the Trump administration that will also require the school to modify a trio of records and apologize to several female competitors.

“While Penn’s policies during the 2021-2022 swim season were in accordance with NCAA eligibility rules at the time, we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules,” Penn President J. Larry Jameson said in a statement. “We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”

The agreement was born from the saga that began in 2021, when Lia Thomas, who identifies as a transgender woman, began swimming on the women’s swimming team at Penn—ultimately setting three program records and clinching the NCAA Division 1 championship title for the 500-yard freestyle event. Thomas’ participation during the 2021-2022 season poured fuel on a present but somewhat nascent national conversation about whether it is ever fair for someone born a biological male, with the associated physical advantages, to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.

“Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action,” said Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a statement yesterday. It is, by pretty much every measure, a big victory for President Donald Trump and his administration. It didn’t have to be.

That’s because the NCAA—which in February reversed its policy allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports—should never have set such a policy to begin with. Much of the blame here has fallen on Penn. That is misguided, at least in part, as the problem is a much broader one: Competing universities adhere to the eligibility requirements set by the NCAA, lest they risk inviting legal scrutiny. It was the NCAA’s policy that was unfair to female competitors. It was unfair to Thomas, who became a national villain for participating and a symbol of institutional rot in collegiate athletics. And it set the stage for the Trump administration to make a very, very easy layup, as the vast majority of Americans support trans-identified athletes competing in the category corresponding to the sex they were assigned at birth.

Something being popular, however, does not necessarily mean it is right. Far more important here is the science. “There are profound sex differences in human performance in athletic events determined by strength, speed, power, endurance, and body size such that males outperform females,” write Michael J. Joyner, Sandra K. Hunter, and Jonathon W. Senefeld in the Journal of Applied Physiology. They note that “differences in athletic performance exist before puberty” and conclude, most relevantly, that “testosterone suppression among XY athletes who have experienced masculinizing puberty, modestly reduces athletic performance, but a large male-female performance gap remains.” (Thomas began hormone replacement therapy in May 2019, more than meeting the NCAA’s one-year minimum requirement.)

And while Joyner, Hunter, and Senefeld do not call out Thomas by name, they appear to find the situation somewhat dispositive in the context of the broader debate. “A case report of an adult testosterone-suppressed XY swimmer (transgender woman) demonstrated [that] although swimmer performance times slowed, both relative competitive success and relative ranking/placement markedly improved competing in the female category compared with success and ranking in the male category,” the three write. In the 500-yard freestyle, Thomas ranked 65th nationally for men’s swimming—and won the national title in women’s. The researchers found about a 5 percent performance decline after hormone therapy, “a magnitude which is ∼50% smaller,” they write, “than the typical male-female performance gap.” Other studies come to very similar conclusions.

That should be neither a surprise nor a partisan talking point. Men have more muscle mass, larger hearts, greater bone density, and deeper lung capacity than women. That is not bigoted—it just is. Some things transcend ideology or political affiliation.

It is why in 2017, two years after Allyson Felix, the Olympic dynamite runner, ran a personal best of 49.26 seconds in the 400-meter final at the 2015 Beijing World Championships, men and boys around the world reportedly beat that over 15,000 times. It is why, if I may betray my affection for figure skating, it is still novel for women to land the triple Axel—which requires 3.5 rotations in the air—whereas it has long been all but mandatory for a man if he wants to compete successfully at the national and international levels. The reason is not a mystery.

In a compelling essay, Reason‘s Natalie Dowzicky, a former NCAA Division I swimmer, wrote in 2022 that she had “tried to calculate how much total time I spent swimming or training” since she began the sport and that it was “in the ballpark of 21,900 hours—2 and a half years of my life.” Declining to acknowledge the science may be well-intentioned; transgender people certainly deserve respect, kindness, and decency, which are often conspicuously missing from the conversation around transgender issues generally. But for the last several years, many people have refused to concede that there is a cost when it comes to sports: fairness to female athletes, who compete in a sex-segregated category specifically because of the real physical distinctions at play.

It is not unlike Trump to weaponize his immense power and influence to retaliate against people and institutions in gross ways. He has targeted law firms he dislikes. He filed a laughable $20 billion lawsuit against Paramount for editing an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris in a manner that offended his ego. His administration directed that a doctoral student be arrested and deported after she co-authored a benign pro-Palestine op-ed, which is still the government’s only public justification for the case against her. 

His critics may very well see the resolution with Penn as yet another line item on that list—one more victory for the president wielding his pulpit against an enemy. Penn, after all, is not the actual root of the problem. But some of those same people may miss that they could have avoided the defeat altogether if those at the top had acknowledged reality from the start.

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