Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) on Dec. 22 for allegedly misleading sportgoers into believing they were watching a competition between players of one gender.
“The NCAA is intentionally and knowingly jeopardizing the safety and wellbeing of women by deceptively changing women’s competitions into co-ed competitions,” Paxton said in a statement on Sunday. “When people watch a women’s volleyball game, for example, they expect to see women playing against other women—not biological males pretending to be something they are not. Radical ‘gender theory’ has no place in college sports.”
Paxton argued in the lawsuit that the NCAA’s practice of allowing biological men who identify as women to play in women’s sports violates the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which protects consumers from scams.
In response to The Epoch Times’ request for comment, an NCAA spokesperson said though the association doesn’t comment on pending litigation, it will “continue to promote Title IX, make unprecedented investments in women’s sports and ensure fair competition in all NCAA championships.”
“Most consumers know that a ‘woman’ means an adult human female,” Paxton said, a definition that has been commonly understood “throughout human history,” he noted.
By allowing men to compete in women’s college sports, the NCAA is robbing women of their earned positions and lying to consumers about the competitive nature of the sporting event, he said.
“When female athletes are forced to compete against men in women’s sports, they are deprived of titles, records, medals, scholarships, and opportunities to win; opportunities to participate in a fair and safe environment; and the ancillary benefits that sports participation provides,” he said in the lawsuit. “Consumers do not purchase goods and services associated with women’s sporting events to watch men steal medals and records from female programs.”
In March, former college swimmer Riley Gaines and other female college athletes filed a lawsuit against the NCAA for allowing men identifying as women to compete in women’s sports.
In October, 26 college regents in Georgia called on the NCAA to ban men identifying as transgender athletes from women’s college sports.
In its “Transgender Student-Athlete Participation Policy,” updated in May 2024, the NCAA said it aligned with the student-athlete Olympic Movement, which allows for “transgender student-athlete participation for each sport to be determined by the policy for the national governing body of that sport.”
If there’s no national governing body for the sport, NCAA policy guidelines default to the International Olympic Committee’s policy criteria and the 2010 NCAA policy, in addition to a requirement that such athletes “meet the sport standard for documented testosterone levels” before competing.
On Dec. 20, the Department of Education withdrew its 2023 proposed rule that would have prohibited schools from banning male athletes who identify as women from participating in women’s sports.
Citing the complexity of the public comments and legal battles, the department said it chose “not to regulate on this issue at this time.”
Aldgra Fredly and Caden Pearson contributed to this report.
