NCAA Pushes Congress to Gut Title IX
A bill would free the association of liability for forcing women to compete against men
By Kim Jones
The National Collegiate Athletic Association presents the Protect College Sports Act as a solution to a host of problems: disarray in college football, conference realignment and name-image-and-likeness payments to college athletes. What the NCAA and its lobbyists aren’t telling anyone is that the PCSA is a Trojan horse for men in women’s college sports.
The PCSA’s overly broad exemption would short-circuit these lawsuits and halt efforts to hold the NCAA accountable under Title IX. By exempting all NCAA eligibility decisions, the bill would shield the NCAA from liability for past and future eligibility decisions that violate Title IX.
Given the NCAA’s longstanding and defiant disregard for the rights of female athletes, it isn’t surprising that the association’s lobbyists have slipped into the PCSA an overly broad exemption from federal law, authorizing the NCAA to harm countless female college athletes—past, current and future. The PCSA exemption would gut the impact of Title IX in women’s college sports, even erasing the need for the NCAA to continue to adhere to President Trump’s executive order, which prompted the NCAA to modify its eligibility policy for men in women’s sports.
It would undo important aspects of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in West Virginia v. B.P.J., which upheld state protections for women and girls in school sports, including college sports. The PCSA would exempt the NCAA from accountability under state laws in 27 states, and from measures on the ballot in several others, which specifically address eligibility for women’s sports teams in college. These state laws became necessary because the NCAA and its member institutions were violating Title IX.
No one should think the NCAA can be trusted on the issue of men in women’s college sports. Even today, the NCAA permits member schools to allow men on women’s teams, and the association’s revised policy allows men to define themselves as women and use women’s locker rooms.
More than 80% of the public believes men shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Female athletes deserve the full protections of Title IX. Regardless of how pressing other issues in college sports may be, neither the president, Congress nor the public should accept a measure that would harm female athletes for decades to come. Solve football, solve NIL, but don’t exempt the NCAA from Title IX and state law.
Ms. Kim Jones is a co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports. She was an All-American in tennis at Stanford.
Donate to help the Independent Council on Women’s Sports fund lawsuits supporting female-only sports & spaces: https://iconswomen.com/donate/
Call your U.S. Senator and speak out against the “Protect College Sports Act”! As it’s written today, the PCSA would gut Title IX protections for girls and women and sends female sports backwards: all without any public debate.”
