Women’s advocacy group hand-delivers demand letter to NCAA ‘to keep women’s collegiate sports female’

On Thursday, a bunch of present and former feminine athletes delivered a demand letter to the NCAA calling to finish the apply of permitting organic male athletes to compete on feminine groups. 

A petition and demand letter was hand-delivered by former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines to the NCAA, demanding it “take direct and rapid motion to ascertain guidelines to maintain girls’s collegiate sports activities feminine.”

“On the earth of faculty sports activities, it’s unattainable to supply equal alternatives for each sexes (as required by Title IX) with out female-only groups,” the letter reads. “But the NCAA implements and perpetuates a coverage of permitting male athletes on girls’s groups, at the same time as sports activities governing our bodies and federal courts more and more reject these unjust and inequitable insurance policies that exclude younger girls from their very own groups.”

The demand letter was learn outdoors the NCAA conference in San Antonio, Texas, on Thursday, threatening authorized motion if the NCAA doesn’t “shield feminine athletes from discrimination on the premise of intercourse.”

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“The NCAA can not decide and select which legal guidelines to observe,” says Marshi Smith, an NCAA Champion and co-founder of ICONS. “They need to shield feminine athletes from discrimination on the premise of intercourse, or anticipate we shall be compelled to take authorized steps to compel them to take action.”  

The letter calls for that the NCAA “repeal all insurance policies and guidelines that permit male athletes to take roster spots on girls’s groups and/or compete in girls’s occasions.” 

College of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas and Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines react after ending tied for fifth within the 200 Freestyle finals on the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships on March 18th, 2022 on the McAuley Aquatic Middle in Atlanta Georgia.
(Wealthy von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire through Getty Photos)

It additionally requires guidelines to “preserve girls’s sports activities feminine” and for the NCAA to require schools to supply single-sex locker rooms for feminine athletes.

Gaines, who competed towards Lia Thomas final yr – the first transgender athlete to win a nationwide title – additionally spoke on Thursday, calling for the NCAA to cease discriminating towards feminine athletes.   

“Right this moment, we intend to personally inform the NCAA to cease discriminating towards feminine athletes by handing them a petition that we now have garnered almost 10,000 signatures on in simply a few days,” Gaines mentioned Thursday. 

The NCAA up to date its transgender participation coverage final January to defer to the steering of every sport’s governing physique. The NCAA introduced that its coverage would change into efficient in March, beginning with the Division I Girls’s Swimming and Diving Championships.

Former College of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines, proper, speaks throughout a rally on Thursday, Jan. 12, 2023, outdoors of the NCAA Conference in San Antonio. 
(AP Picture/Darren Abate)

USA Swimming up to date its coverage shortly after requiring transgender athletes who’re competing at an elite degree to have low ranges of testosterone — half of what Thomas was allowed to compete with — for no less than 36 months earlier than being eligible, however the NCAA mentioned weeks later that the Administrative Subcommittee of the Committee on Aggressive Safeguards and Medical Points of Sports activities (CMAS) determined that it wouldn’t alter its testosterone steering, stating that “implementing extra modifications right now may have unfair and probably detrimental impacts on faculties and student-athletes meaning to compete in 2022 NCAA girls’s swimming championships.”

Fox Information’ Ryan Gaydos and the Related Press contributed to this report.