Safeguarding women athletes

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday the 27th of February. Thanks for joining us today. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

First up on The WORLD and Everything in It: women’s sports. Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order designed to keep men out of women’s sports.

TRUMP: I wanna make this is a really good one. Cause it’s a big one, huh?

The NCAA quickly issued a new policy on transgender athletes that seemed to do the same.

REICHARD: But some say college athletes are still at risk. WORLD’s Lindsay Mast explains.

LINDSAY MAST: Kim Jones has a heart for women’s sports.

KIM JONES: Sports was a wonderful place for me to develop as as a complete person, and it's a passion that I wanted to pass on to my kids and actually share with everyone who loves sports.

She became an All-American tennis player at Stanford, then played on the women’s tour. Her kids loved swimming, and in 2018, her daughter made the team at Yale. During her junior year, though, the team faced an unexpected challenge.

CBS: Nobody will touch Lia Thomas.

During the 2021-2022 season, Jones’ daughter, her teammates, and competitors from other teams lost spots in competition to Will “Lia” Thomas.

ANNOUNCER: Lia Thomas is sometimes so far ahead, she’s seen waiting for her competitors to catch up.

After three years of swimming on the University of Pennsylvania men’s team, he spent that year on the women’s team.

Kim Jones started speaking out soon after, and hasn’t stopped.

KIM JONES: Watching sports become a tool to silence and humiliate women was something I was unwilling to let sit still and not a legacy I was willing to leave for the next generation coming up.

She co-founded the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, or ICONS. It’s an advocacy group focused on the protection of female athletes. And she says despite President Trump’s recent executive order on transgender athletes in sports, girls and women still remain at risk.

The NCAA issued its new policy shortly after the President signed the order.

Audio from CBS:

CBS: The NCAA is banning transgender women from playing on women’s teams. This follows an executive order from President Trump that calls for penalties against schools and leagues that allow transgender women to compete in women’s sports.

The policy says that student-athletes assigned male at birth may not compete on women’s teams. Jones says that language— “assigned male at birth”—lacks clarity.

JONES: Instead of defining sex and saying that the women's category in collegiate sports is for female athletes, they have said, they defined a term called sex assigned at birth, which is a designation on a birth record.

Forty-four states currently allow for changes to the sex or gender marker on a birth certificate. Some other countries also allow changes.

While the NCAA says it will not accept amended birth certificates, it leaves the process of certifying athletes up to the schools.

Jones says that’s an ineffective way of keeping men off the women’s teams at the 1100 schools governed by the NCAA.

JONES: It's just a haphazard way of saying we don't want to know. We're just going to take a piece of paper, everything's going to be hidden, and it's up to the schools to make sure that the documents are in order. It's a far worse policy than what we had before, because now there's no method of questioning, there's no method of oversight.

When WORLD emailed the NCAA asking how they would enforce the new policy, they responded but did not answer that question.

Jones says a genetic test involving a cheek swab would be a more accurate way to determine a person’s sex, and therefore eligibility. World Athletics, which governs track and field and running events, is currently considering using such a test, with additional follow-up testing if needed. Similar testing was required at the Olympics for nearly thirty years, until 1998.

Those who favor allowing transgender athlete participation say there are so few of them that the impact is minor. In December, the NCAA President told a Senate Judiciary hearing that he knew of only 10 transgender athletes in the organization. That’s out of more than 500,000 players.

But Kim Jones says participation numbers don’t capture the scope of the impact a male athlete has in female sports.

She illustrates it using a high school boy.

JONES: It pulls down someone in the standings and ability to access a championship meet, to move to the next level, to earn their first spot on a JV team or on a travel squad. It's impacting record boards, finishes. It impacts all the young women watching and on the sidelines recognizing that their teammates or their peers aren't important enough to stand up for. Aren’t important enough for fair and safe rules.

It’s a uniquely unifying issue. A January New York Times/Ipsos survey found nearly 80% of Americans oppose allowing biological males in women’s sports.

JONES: It's the public arena of the difference of the sexes. So you watch absurdity play out right in front of your nose, and injustice happen right in front of your eyes, seeing people applaud it, not willing to change it, it. You're watching something happen in front of you that is so obviously wrong. You can no longer deny it.

But solving the problem will take more than recognition of it. Policies and executive orders can change. Until laws are on the books she says female athletes will remain vulnerable.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lindsay Mast.

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