The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics announced a policy Monday that all but bans transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports at its 241 mostly small colleges across the country.
The NAIA Council of Presidents approved the policy in a 20-0 vote at its annual convention in Kansas City, Missouri. The NAIA, which oversees some 83,000 athletes competing in more than 25 sports, is believed to be the first college sports organization to take such a step.
According to the transgender participation policy, all athletes may participate in NAIA-sponsored male sports but only athletes whose biological sex assigned at birth is female and have not begun hormone therapy will be allowed participate in women’s sports.
A student who has begun hormone therapy may participate in activities such as workouts, practices and team activities, but not in interscholastic competition.
Until college is free college athletics are a major way low income kids can get a college education. Everyone in college sports isn’t thinking about getting drafted into the NBA or NFL. Most are just trying to find a way to pay for college that doesn’t stick them with thousands of dollars of debt.
So they are a BIG deal
They are a big deal for the same reason rich people’s charities are a big deal- government has failed the poor. Athletics should not be a way into college just because you have a physical advantage over other poor people. There is nothing equitable about that. That is, in my opinion, not a defense of college athletics and more than it’s a defense of the Salvation Army.
I agree but as of now our system is what it is. So I personally think it’s less productive to complain about college sports instead of our broken education system.
I would also say that conflating the fact that specific college sports are taken way too seriously and made way too big a deal of doesn’t reflect athletic scholarships as a whole, considering people don’t go crazy about college wrestling or college field sports. When was the last time you heard of a college pole vault star? If there were some sort of “scandal” involving a transgender person in women’s college pole vault, would we even hear about it?