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As Riley Gaines has noted, this is the solution: Sports officials with influence, integrity, and courage must speak out and stand up against the unfairness of these policies and the erasure of women’s sports.
Transgender-identifying males have been increasingly entering and winning women’s competitions, and it’s gotten to be too much for at least one high-level sports official.
William Bock III, a member of the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions for nearly eight years, resigned last month in protest of the organization’s policy that allows transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.
In his resignation letter to NCAA President Charlie Baker on February 9, Bock stated that the NCAA’s decision to permit males to compete against women is discriminatory, referring to the policy as “nothing less than institutionalized discrimination, which results in sanctioned cheating.”
“I joined the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions as a public member in 2016 because of the important challenge of protecting and promoting a level playing field in college sports,” Bock wrote. “Although I may not have agreed with the wisdom of every rule in the NCAA rulebook, I believed the intent behind the NCAA’s rules was competitive fairness and protection of equal opportunities for student-athletes. This conviction has changed as I have watched the NCAA double down on regressive policies which discriminate against female student-athletes.”
The NCAA allows male athletes to compete against women as long as the athletes test below a certain testosterone level.
Bock, along with many others, says that suppressing testosterone fails to eliminate the competitive advantage males have over females.
As general counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for nearly 14 years, Bock is well-versed in maintaining fairness and the intricacies of human physiology when it comes to athletics; he was part of the investigation into cyclist Lance Armstrong, one of the world’s most well-known cases involving cheating.
“I understand the effects of male biology and performance-enhancing drugs on sport performance, and I can tell you that the competitive advantage Lance Armstrong obtained through doping pales in comparison to the advantage that Lia Thomas had over female competitors due to retained male advantage,” Bock wrote.
Thomas is the former University of Pennsylvania swimmer who brought the transgender athlete debate into the public eye in 2022. After competing as a male collegiate swimmer and finding little success, Thomas started identifying as a woman and began dominating women’s swimming, including winning a national title. It was Thomas’s inclusion in women’s swimming, and its results, that initiated Bock’s concerns with the NCAA’s policies.
Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer who tied in a national competition with Thomas and was denied the trophy at the time in lieu of Thomas, responded on X to Bock’s decision by saying, “Perfect display of a principled man with integrity. Something our nation is in dire need of…This movement would be over yesterday if more were willing to make sacrifices like Bill Bock. Stop participating in the farce.”
Bock told the sports news website OutKick that, in private, no one at the NCAA disagreed that the gap in male and female performance cannot be bridged through testosterone suppression and no one told him they agreed with the NCAA’s rules. He believes the “ideology on college campuses” is the only explanation.
Bock said that those on college campuses are ignoring women and their Title IX rights to have equal opportunity in sports, and as a result, “women are having their opportunities taken away, because there’s louder voices.”
The inclusion of male athletes in women’s sports has led to the loss of opportunity for female athletes on various levels.
Gaining headlines recently was a college volleyball match between Seneca College and Centennial College in Toronto that featured five transgender players, three for Seneca and two for Centennial. Conservative news organization Rebel News broke the news with video showing the five transgender players all on the court. Rebel News claims that the five male players never left the court, while female athletes remained on the bench.
Activist Scarlett Johnson posted Rebel News’s video on X and wrote, “Men identifying as women take FIVE starting positions on two female college volleyball teams. Actual women sit on the bench watching men in pigtails play the entire game. Five women lost scholarships. The female players lose opportunities & incur injuries.”
In track and field, a high school male who identifies as female won the New Hampshire girl’s high jump state title last month, jumping at least a full inch higher than all female competitors (but a full seven inches below the lowest jump in the corresponding men’s competition).
In January, a biological male who now goes by the name Sadie Schreiner broke two women’s school records at the Rochester Institute of Technology while racing against women, running a time of 25.27 seconds in the 200 meter and breaking the 300-meter record. Schreiner also was part of the first place 4×400-meter relay team.
Olympic marathon runner Mara Yamauchi wrote on X, “Same as in parkrun – males stealing female records which will probably be out of female hands forever. All for what? To indulge men’s feelings. #SAVEWomensSports”
In cycling, a transgender named Austin Killips won a race in North Carolina by a full five minutes over second place female Paige Onweller, who later stated that the winner’s “power was not comparable” and that he should be required to compete in a category of other transgender-identifying males.
Late last year, two transgender cyclists won gold and silver in the Single Speed competition of the Illinois State Cyclocross Championship. Gaines posted on X a photo of the athletes on the podium saying, “Two men take 1st & 2nd at the Illinois State Cyclocross Championships yesterday. @usacycling has 2 categories for men and none for women[.] Any woman who concedes and doesn’t compete, I will personally pay them the prize money they’re missing out on. Stop participating in the farce.”
The gold medalist, who goes by the name Tessa Johnson, has no major accomplishments in men’s cycling but has found success in the women’s division. In October, Johnson and the other male cyclist also finished first and second at the Chicago Cyclocross Cup.
In golf, a transgender athlete won the NXXT Women’s Classic in January and is now seeking to compete in the LPGA tour.
The numerous instances of men winning women’s events and even injuring female athletes led two former Olympians, along with the founder of the Independent Women’s Law Center, to write an article for Newsweek with the title, “Women’s Sports Are Under Threat at Every Level–Including the Olympics.”
Jocelyne and Monique Lamoureaux are women’s Olympic hockey gold medalists, two-time silver medalists, and six-time International Ice Hockey Federation champions, so they know what it takes to make an Olympic roster or compete for championships. They see the inclusion of male athletes as grossly unfair to women who dream of competing.
They blame the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for transferring responsibility for rulemaking to the bodies of individual sports, but urging them to prioritize inclusion, writing,
“The IOC seems to have missed the point: competitive sport is not supposed to be inclusive….
Physiological differences between males and females give men athletic advantages that are quite obvious in physical capacity sports like swimming, weight lifting, and track and field. In head-to-head sports, the inclusion of men not only puts women at a significant disadvantage, it is also quite dangerous. There seems to be a new story every week of a biological female being physically injured by an opposing male player, whether through physical contact or a propelled ball that reaches velocities unseen in girls’ competitions. In the name of inclusion, we are putting our girls at risk of serious injury.
As two of us can attest, making an Olympic roster is incredibly competitive. Of all the talented athletes out there, few get a chance to participate in the Olympic games. And for every trans-identifying male who is ‘included’ on a women’s roster, a female athlete is asked to stay home.”
Sports governing bodies, courts, and governments may think they are doing the compassionate and right thing by allowing transgender-identifying males to compete against women, but all they are doing is setting up a secondary competition category for mediocre male athletes who can’t cut it against the top male athletes.
Just like Lance Armstrong couldn’t genuinely win without blood doping, taking performance-enhancing drugs, and lying about his cheating efforts, men who can’t successfully compete against other men are gaming the system and using their innate biological advantage to steal victories, scholarships, championship qualifications, and other opportunities from women. As a result, there will eventually come a day when there will be no women competing in women’s sports — unless something is done.
So what must be done? Sports officials at the NCAA, the IOC, and other rulemaking bodies must speak out and stand up for women and against rules that encourage cheating. And unfortunately, as Gaines advised, women must also stand up and refuse to compete against transgender athletes — because by taking part, they are implicitly accepting the idea that it’s okay for some people to cheat.
In other words, the solution requires courage and integrity, two characteristics that were once fundamental to good sportsmanship and athletic competition — and must be again.
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