Officials with Lambda Legal have issued a statement condemning the National Collegiate Athletics Association’s willingness to capitulate to Donald Trump’s executive order, which the president signed on Wednesday, Feb. 5, banning transgender athletes from playing sports at schools that receive federal funds.
Earlier today, NCAA President Charlie Baker issued a statement saying NCAA would be “align[ing] NCAA policy” with order banning transgender girls and college athletes from participating in all types of athletic activities, from the playground to elite intercollegiate competition.
Shortly after, Lambda Legal Senior Attorney Carl Charles issued ta written statement saying Lambda Legal “could not be more disappointed” with Baker’s willingness to ban trans athletes, noting that schools receiving federal funds constitute “the overwhelming majority of schools in our country.
Noting that Baker and NCAA leadership said the organization “strongly believes” that a clear, consistent rule of excluding these students will “best serve today’s student-athletes.”
But, Charles said, “It’s hard to fathom how this can be so.
“A ‘clear, consistent’ directive to exclude based on disinformation only serves to reward ignorance and prejudice, and to inflict gratuitous pain,” Charles said. “And make no mistake, the definition of sex in President Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order, which is imposed by this sports order, is simplistic, scientifically erroneous nonsense.”
Trump’s Jan. 20 order claims to, according to its title, defend women from “gender ideology extremism” and “[restore] biological truth to the federal government.” In actuality, however, the order and its definitions demonstrate, at best, a complete misunderstanding of basic science and, at worst, a blatant disregard for scientific fact and truth.
Trump’s order declares: “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
The order goes on to define terms like “man” and “woman” based on whether a person “at conception” belongs “to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” or that “produces the small reproductive cell.”
Trump’s executive order “barring trans students from their schools’ sports programs [based on the claim] they create danger for non-transgender girls and women is a pernicious falsehood.”
Carl Charles, Lambda Legal senior attorney
Trump’s order, Charles points out, “ignores variations of human development, documented for almost a century, that are undeniable fact.” And this new order “barring trans students from their schools’ sports programs [based on the claim] they create danger for non-transgender girls and women” is a”pernicious falsehood,” Charles added.
He continued, “Blanket exclusions of vulnerable minority groups — driven by falsehoods and fearmongering — never serve anyone well. Not those ostracized and not the dominant majority either, as our country’s shameful history of other blanket exclusions based on falsehoods repeatedly has taught.
“The NCAA’s fast, wholesale embrace of this order is even harder to understand because the organization’s mission only concerns collegiate competition,” Charles said. “The order, on the other hand, applies to all types of K-12 athletic activity — including kindergarten games, middle school track meets, high school scrimmages snf college intramural tournaments, as well as elite intercollegiate competitions. No matter the sport and level of participation, deeming the participation of transgender girls and young women an unfair safety threat unjustly denies them the proven health, social, and relational benefits of sports participation that should be available for all youth, full stop.”
Charles suggested the NCAA’s “apparently eager capitulation might be understandable given the heavy-handed coercion — blackmail really — by the president. But, he added, “how fast and far this prestigious organization has fallen from its leadership in 2016 against North Carolina’s notorious anti-trans law, HB2, which was explained with similar smears. Then, as a sharp rebuke to the discrimination and fearmongering leveled by state legislators, the NCAA directed the relocation of its high-profile championships to another state.
“Now, less than ten years later, it offers an empty promise ‘to help foster welcoming environments … for all student-athletes,’ while abandoning those who need that welcome most,” Charles charged.
“We look forward to the day when the NCAA recovers its footing and is again able, per its mission, to ‘provide a world-class athletics and academic experience for student-athletes that fosters lifelong well-being’ for all athletes, not just those who are cisgender,” Charles said.
“And for now, we applaud the informed voices of those organizations and the more than 400 current and former NCAA, professional, Olympic and paralympic athletes who called on the NCAA last year to ensure that ‘the lifesaving power of sport is accessible to all athletes…including transgender athletes.’”
— Tammye Nash