This week the Trump Administration instructed the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to immediately rescind the records and awards of the biological male athletes who participated in women’s sports at the collegiate and high school levels
The Department of Education wrote a letter to the NCAA and the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) demanding that they take action to restore the awards, records, and titles that female athletes would have won had they not been displaced by male athletes who identified as female.
“The NCAA and NFHS should also immediately act to rectify the injustices that female athletes across the nation endured during the years that NCAA and NFHS policies promoted and facilitated men competing on women’s teams,” Deputy General Council Candice Jackson wrote.
The letter, written to NCAA President Charlie Baker and NFHS President Bob Lombardi, said that the Education Department would be enforcing Title IX to “hold educational institutions accountable for depriving female athletes of the awards, records, points, prizes, titles, trophies, announcements or other recognition assigned in favor of male athletes who were allowed to compete in female sports.”
This would mean stripping male athletes who identified as female, like University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who won the women’s NCAA Division 1 championship in the 500-yard freestyle, of their accolades.
“Whether the number of records in women’s events attributed to men is 1 or 1 million, every official record of women’s performances must accurately reflect the achievements of female athletes, not of male ones,” Jackson wrote.
Additionally, the United States Department of Education announced on Wednesday it is rescinding former President Joe Biden’s last-minute guidance that made name, image and likeness (NIL) compensation subject to Title IX, calling the previous guidance “profoundly unfair.”
Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor announced the decision in a statement on Wednesday.
“The NIL guidance, rammed through by the Biden Administration in its final days, is overly burdensome, profoundly unfair, and it goes well beyond what agency guidance is intended to achieve,” Trainor said.
“Without a credible legal justification, the Biden Administration claimed that NIL agreements between schools and student athletes are akin to financial aid and must, therefore, be proportionately distributed between male and female athletes under Title IX. Enacted over 50 years ago, Title IX says nothing about how revenue-generating athletics programs should allocate compensation among student athletes.”
The previous nine-page memo released on Jan. 16, just days before President Donald Trump was due to take office, made NIL payments subject to Title IX regulations. Universities were told that NIL compensation must be treated like any other financial aid available to student-athletes, like scholarships, regardless of sex.
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