The NCAA must have the courage, and common sense, the NAIA lacked.
The NCAA’s Board of Governors meets later Thursday and is under heavy pressure to ban transgender women, as the NAIA did earlier this month . But to do so would give in to the fear mongering and misinformation that would have you believe transgender women are overrunning women’s sports, snapping up trophies and scholarships and relegating cisgender women to the sidelines like they were before the passage of Title IX.
None of which is happening.
Though the NCAA doesn’t publish the number of openly transgender athletes, it’s believed to be between 30 and 40, said Anna Baeth, the director of research at Athlete Ally, which works to create safe and supportive environments for LGBTQ+ athletes. That’s out of the more than 523,000 NCAA athletes who competed in Divisions I, II and III in 2022-23 , the most recent data available.
Do the math, and that works out to less than 0.008%.
“We are talking a very, very small number of athletes,” Baeth said.