Republican AGs Ask NCAA To Strip Medals From Trans Athletes
Move comes on the heels of UPenn deal with Trump administration to scrub Lia Thomas’ titles.
Featured image: Photo by Greg Bartram/NCAA Photos via Getty Images
In a letter to NCAA President Charlie Baker, 28 GOP state Attorneys General asked the governing body for intercollegiate sports “to restore to female athletes all championships, titles, wins, awards, records, and other recognitions that were wrongfully awarded to male athletes competing in NCAA women’s category events.”
Riding the nefarious winds of Trump’s January 20, 2025 Executive Order, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism…”, the AGs accuse the NCAA of enabling “biological men” to compete against women and denying “deserving women” the recognition they have earned.
They point to the February 5, 2025 Executive Order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” – and Trump’s directive to the Secretary of Education to prioritize Title IX enforcement actions “that deny female students an equal opportunity to participate in sports and athletics events by requiring them, in the women’s category, to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.”
One day after Trump signed that EO, the NCAA updated their policy to limit competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth.
Led by Lynn Fitch, the anti-abortion Mississippi Attorney General who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, the AGs expressed appreciation for that February update, but stated that the policy falls short: they want to kick trans athletes out of practice too.
Under constant threat of funding cuts, there has been no shortage of acquiescence by universities – whether in admissions or curricula or athletic governance as has been seen since the launch of Trump 2.0.
On July 1st, The University of Pennsylvania announced plans to ban trans women from competing in women’s sports. The move followed a civil rights investigation by the Department of Education into Lia Thomas’ participation on the Penn women’s swim team. (Thomas had competed when rules allowed trans women to participate in female sports after one year of testosterone suppression treatment.)
It also followed a threat in March, to freeze $175 million in federal funding to Penn as a Trump-induced punishment for allowing Lia Thomas to swim in 2022.
As part of the deal with the Trump administration, Penn agreed to revoke Thomas’ records and to strip all trans athletes of awards and records earned in the past. Earlier this month, conservatives salivated over that development and Trump released the money to the university.
It remains to be seen how many athletes would be affected by a potential erasure of the records of their achievements. According to Baker’s testimony before a Senate Judiciary Committee last December, there are fewer than 10 transgender competitors in the NCAA, which governs 510,000 athletes at over 1,000 schools across the country.
