The largest college sports governing body in the country has completely banned transgender women student-athletes from competing in women’s sports, following President Donald Trump’s executive order threatening federal funding for schools that allow trans girls on girls’ teams. 

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) on Thursday rescinded its former guidance for transgender student-athletes, which had been in place since 2010 and was amended in 2022. For the last 15 years, the organization had allowed trans women to compete on women’s teams after completing one calendar year of testosterone suppression treatment. In 2022, the NCAA called for each sport’s national governing body to set rules for transgender student-athletes, an approach that aligns with Olympic standards.

Now, the NCAA says that only cisgender women can compete in women’s sports. Transgender girls and women in school sports are still allowed to practice on women’s teams, the group said in a news release, and trans student-athletes are still eligible to receive standard benefits like medical care. Sports with mixed men’s and women’s NCAA championships, like rifle, are exempt from the new policy, which is effective immediately. 

Although the NCAA’s new policy follows Trump’s pledge to “keep men out of women’s sports,” it appears to allow an exception for transmasculine people. The policy also bars transgender men on testosterone from competing in women’s sports, but those students can still practice on women’s teams, if wanted. Anyone, regardless of gender identity, can compete in men’s sports. 

Out of over 500,000 student-athletes attending NCAA schools, fewer than 10 are transgender, NCAA President Charlie Baker said during a congressional hearing in December. 

“The NCAA is an organization made up of 1,100 colleges and universities in all 50 states that collectively enroll more than 530,000 student-athletes. We strongly believe that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions. To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard,” Baker said in a statement Thursday. 

However, the scope of who could potentially be impacted by the executive order is not clear. Experts and LGBTQ+ advocates — as well as congressional Democrats — have argued that blanket bans on trans girls’ participation in sports has the potential to endanger all girls and women. 

Last month, as the House passed a bill to ban trans girls from girls’ sports in schools, House Democrats raised alarms about what enforcement of the ban could look like. They pointed to state examples of a cisgender girl in Utah enduring harassment after being publicly, and falsely, portrayed as transgender, and Florida’s high school athletics association asking students for information about their sex assigned at birth. 

As Trump signed the executive order on Wednesday, he stated that two gold-winning Olympians are transgender women. This is false. The Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, a featherweight boxer from Taiwan, were subjected to global scrutiny last year after Trump and other powerful figures targeted them for being transgender — which they aren’t. 

This kind of misinformation is part of how anti-trans rhetoric fuels violence toward women of color, including cisgender women, experts and transgender athletes told The 19th.

The NCAA noted Thursday that individual schools have autonomy to determine their own policies around athletic competition and that schools are ultimately responsible for certifying student-athlete’s eligibility for competitions. Information that documented the NCAA’s prior policymaking for transgender student-athletes, including submission guidelines and appropriate testosterone levels for each sport, was deleted from the organization’s website as of Thursday.