KEEP WOMEN’S SPORTS FEMALE
Open letter to the
NCAA Board of Governors
NCAA: WE WILL NOT ACCEPT REDUCED ATHLETIC OPPORTUNITIES FOR WOMEN.
When colleges include even a single biological male on a women’s college team, they are excluding a female athlete from the roster, and they are denying other female athletes playing time and opportunities to compete.
This isn’t fair. In fact, it’s discriminatory.
Join NCAA female athletes across the country to urge members of the NCAA Board of Governors to reject calls to sacrifice female athletes on the altar of “inclusion” and to stand up for equal opportunity, fairness, privacy, and safety by enacting policies that keep women’s sports female.
OPEN LETTER
NCAA BOARD OF GOVERNORS:
KEEP WOMEN’S SPORTS FEMALE
Dear NCAA Board of Governors,
We are writing to you as female athletes to ask you to follow the lead of the NAIA and protect women’s collegiate sport.
More than 50 years ago, Congress enacted Title IX to ensure equal opportunity in all aspects of education, including athletics. Since then, there has been an explosion in female participation in all levels of athletics, including college sport. But this progress is today being undermined — both by males seeking access to women’s sports and by policies that have the potential to undermine the entire legal rationale for single-sex competition.
The NCAA knows that at the collegiate level there can be no equal athletic opportunity without a separate female sporting category. Yet you continue to propagate a policy that allows male athletes to roster on women’s teams, even as international sports governing bodies and state legislatures increasingly reject these unjust and inequitable policies that harm female athletes.
Over the past year, these harms have become more apparent as three more women’s teams suffered in Virginia, New Jersey and New York, witnessing titles and records fall to a male teammate who switched to the women’s squad. If signed, the first male to verbally commit to a women’s Division I volleyball program is set to seize a women’s full-ride athletic scholarship, breaking another barrier and opening the floodgates for male athletes to acquire financial aid intended for women under Title IX. Women’s teams are already missing almost $1.1 billion in athletic scholarship aid, as compared to their male peers, even after 52 years of federal law requiring equality in athletic scholarships.
Female athletes do not accept this.
Allowing biological males to take awards, roster spots, scholarships, or educational opportunities away from female athletes violates Title IX’s clear statutory prohibition of discrimination “on the basis of sex”, which remains the law of the land irrespective of any administrative rule-making.
We urge you to comply with federal law and the laws of 21 states and enact a policy protecting the integrity of women’s college sports.
SIGN YOUR NAME
This has all gone too far. Add your name to the open letter to the NCAA Board of Governors to keep women’s sports female.
WITHOUT SINGLE-SEX COMPETITION, THERE CAN BE NO EQUAL ATHLETIC OPPORTUNITY.
COMPETITION REPORT
“Competition: Title IX, Male-Bodied Athletes, and the Threat to Women’s Sports” synthesizes the science and explain the changing legal landscape of American sports.
SHARE YOUR STORY
What does being, raising, or watching a female athlete mean to you? Are you a current or former college athlete and have thoughts about biological male athletes participating in female athletics?
