Trump admin demands NCAA return awards given to transgender competitors in female athletic events after prezs executive order
President Trump’s Department of Education is demanding top athletic organizations for colleges and high schools turn over awards, records and titles won by transgender women to biological females who were set to win them.The Department of Education penned a missive Tuesday to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) to comply with Trump’s executive order earlier this month banning men from women’s sports.“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,” the Department of Education’s deputy general counsel Candice Jackson wrote in a letter.
Controversies have erupted over transgender women — individuals who were born male — trouncing biological women in athletic competitions in recent years.Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, 25, for example, had won an NCAA Division I national championship in 2022 for the women’s 500-yard freestyle.At the time, Thomas was the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship.Thomas had also tied in the 200-yeard NCAA freestyle for fifth with Riley Gaines, 24, who has since become a conservative star over her activism for protecting women’s sports.Gaines had complained about having to share a locker room with Thomas.Other examples include CeCe Telfer, who won the NCAA’s Division II 400-meter hurdles in 2019, and high school athlete Soren Stark-Chessa, who won a Class C South girls’ high school title and ran almost a minute and a half faster than the second-place contestant.“We cannot undo the damage inflicted by years of policies and practices that have denied the material reality of sex,” Jackson added in her letter to the heads of the NCAA and NFHS.
“The Department strongly urges the NCAA and NFHS to take imm...