NCAA and USATF work to allow males in women's sports
The vast majority of women and girls have no guarantee of female-only competition
Trans-identified male hurdler Cece Telfer competed unattached in a college track meet at Boston University. He qualified for the final in the women’s 60m hurdles, taking a spot from a female athlete, then false started in the final.
Why was he allowed to enter and run a women’s event? I mistakenly thought World Athletics’ protection of the female category, even if not directly applicable, would have been adopted by any thinking sports organization.
You’ll recall that Telfer competed for three years on Franklin Pierce University’s men’s track team with less than mediocre results before switching to the women’s team and winning a national championship in the 400m hurdles in 2019. Those would be the women’s hurdles, the ones that are 9” lower than men’s.
Telfer was a beneficiary of a policy the NCAA had quietly instituted in 2010, vaguely mentioning testosterone suppression for one year, but there were no particulars about who would monitor these levels, at what interval, and who recorded this data. The NCAA was not terribly worried about unfairness to women. As The Daily Signal wrote, “The NCAA in 2011 published an explainer calling it “not well founded” to assume “that being born with a male body automatically gives a transgender woman an unfair advantage when competing against non-transgender women.”
Ten years and all the well founded science in the world later, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) used those exact words, no presumption of advantage, in their 2021 Framework for Inclusion and Fairness (sic). But if any sport wanted to create their own policy, the IOC said fine, go for it.
And World Athletics did. As of March 31, 2023, World Athletics banned anyone who had gone through male puberty from competing in the women’s category. As we’ll see, the NCAA, USA Track & Field, and the IOC are colluding via a morass of confusing rules and obscure loopholes, to continue to shoehorn males into female sports, even as scientists have proven it’s unfairness, and public sentiment is against it.
I tried to find out why Telfer was able to compete in a women’s event. Since Boston University hosted the track meet, I emailed and called the head track coach, the athletic director, and the director of sports communication. None got back to me. I also called the coach of the runner who was bumped out of the final by Telfer, but he also did not return my call. To his credit, Stevie Keller, the director of track and field at North Dakota State University, whose athlete was two places from making it to the final in the race Telfer ran, answered my call.
“Have you ever been to a track meet,” he asked. “You have no idea who the other athletes are. It’s just something they [meet organizers] missed. That’s on them. I don’t need to comment on this.”
I have been to track meets. And I agree, coaches are doing well to keep track of their own athletes. Monitoring the eligibility of other athletes is above their pay grade and beyond the scope of their capabilities at the time.
So, here’s where it gets tricky. The current NCAA trans policy is a masterpiece of doublespeak circularity. That’s meant to hide the misogyny. The latest version, updated for clarity (ha!) in April of 2023, says that the NCAA aligns with the IOC. The IOC, after saying they thought males should not be presumed to have any advantage over females, despite 120 years of Olympic results that refute that ridiculous statement, punted to individual sports to craft their own trans policy. Thankfully, World Athletics came to this sensible conclusion: “The female category exists to give female athletes equal opportunity in our sport by excluding male advantage. The integrity of the category would be compromised if male advantage was included. We cannot, in all conscience, leave our Transgender Regulations as they are at 5nmol/L for at least 1 year when we are unsure about the impact of doing so across all our disciplines. The Council has agreed to exclude male-to-female transgender athletes who have been through male puberty from female World Rankings competition from 31 March 2023.”
You’d think that would be a slam dunk for track, that the NCAA would adhere to World Athletics’ policy and ban anyone who had been through male puberty from the female category.
But if they followed World Athletics’ rules, they’d actually have to protect women’s sports, something the NCAA has fought vigorously to avoid. That ball-centered org fought for ten years to avoid instituting Title IX in 1972, and in the current class action lawsuit sixteen female athletes are bringing against the NCAA, it’s expected that the NCAA will contend they are not covered by Title IX and are, therefore, free to screw women over to their hearts’ content. That’s the legalese, but you get the idea.
So instead of following World Athletics’ policy, the NCAA skipped on down the heirarchy, moral and geographic, to the policies of the national governing body of each sport, which for track is USATF. That change was effective immediately (2022). But in three phases over a three-year period (?) We’re in Phase Two.
Here’s that rule: “Beginning Aug. 1, 2022, participation in NCAA sports requires transgender student-athletes to provide documentation that meets the above criteria for the 2010 NCAA policy, plus meet the sport standard for documented testosterone levels at three points in time: 1. Prior to any competition during the regular season; 2. Prior to the first competition in an NCAA championship event; and 3. Prior to any competition in the non-championship segment.”
Got that? First off, this addresses student-athletes. Telfer is not a student, and is not competing on a team. Neither that link to the 2010 NCAA policy nor the “sport specific standard” (USATF’s) specify what that testosterone level is. Since Telfer competed in a regular season meet, was he required to submit one testosterone document? Taken when (testosterone taken just before a test can then clear the system and the athlete can train and compete with full male levels of testosterone)? Who receives this T documentation? That’s not a policy, that’s an invitation for abuse.
My phone calls and emails to USATF went unanswered. After determined pestering, USATF promised me last year they were working on aligning their ancient piece of crap trans policy with World Athletics’ shiny new reasonable one, and that they’d let me know just as soon as they had that hammered out. I have yet to hear from them.
The NCAA could have no finer partner in this crime against women than USATF. All USATF had to do was fall in line with World Athletics last year, but they just couldn’t bring themselves to respect women’s rights. Instead, their stated policy went from vague to a protocol for fraud.
Here’s a gem: “This policy requires that certain medical benchmarks be achieved before an athlete may compete as the opposite gender for medals, prize money and other benefits. The intent of this policy is to establish competitive eligibility and to help ensure fair competition. The policy also contains safeguards to protect the privacy of any athlete(s) making the request for eligibility.”
Certain medical benchmarks? Seems like that might require a bit of elaboration. The fact that USATF plainly states they intend to hide the identity of a male who’s misrepresenting himself from female competitors is chilling.
Instead of showing leadership and declaring the women’s category for natal females only, USATF shrugged and punted their responsibility as a governing organization. This, further on in their trans “policy”: “Each year in the United States, tens of millions of Americans run in road races, and millions compete in track and field. In most cases, entries for these races are at the discretion of the runner entering, and race directors rely upon the entrants to accurately provide their name, age, gender, nationality and other details.” What’re ya gonna do, right? In much the same way that, since people speed, we should do away with speed limits?
Of course, if there’s an award (?) or prize money on the line, USATF generously allows a woman who is directly affected by a male winner to question that person’s eligibility in person or in writing, in situ, as the awards ceremony is going on presumably. Further, USATF emphasizes, “In cases where an athlete’s gender is at issue, USATF urges that extreme care should be taken to respect the privacy of the parties affected at every step of the process.” An instance in which a woman would question the sex of a trans-identified male given these strictures overburdens the imagination. This entire “policy” is an invitation to males to self ID into the female category, along with a not-so-subtle threat to women to put up and shut up.
Adding to the shit show above is the fact that some college track meets fall outside the jurisdiction of the NCAA, USATF, and World Athletics. Telfer told CNN, in the wake of World Athletics’ 2023 policy change, that he would continue competing “however and wherever I can.” Telfer said he planned to compete in the Bryan Clay Invitational, a college meet in California which, according to Telfer’s agent, was a free-for-all for unattached males who identified as female. Telfer finished 73rd in the 400 meter race at that meet.
As we’ve seen, even if a meet organizer had all these confusing overlapping policies at hand, it would be nearly impossible to determine if Telfer was eligible to compete. The process of entering a college track meet as an unattached athlete is the final nail in the coffin of any practical method of keeping males out. Telfer likely registered as a female online. It’s unlikely he flagged himself as a trans-identified male. Would the meet organizer recognize Telfer’s name? If so, would this person know whether Telfer was eligible to run this meet? Would the meet organizer know whether documentation of testosterone level was required, and whether those levels were met? Would there be time between Telfer’s registration and the meet itself to receive that paperwork? And finally, if requirements were not met, would a meet organizer have the courage to tell a male athlete he was ineligible for the women’s category?
Telfer’s presence at that meet say great big NO to all those questions.
While World Athletics is to be commended for their protection of the female category and women’s right to fair sport, that only means trans-identified males will not be in women’s fields at the Olympics or Diamond League track meets or the elite fields at major marathons. Those protections don’t really matter to the huge swaths of collegiate, recreational, and competitive runners that fall under the auspices of the NCAA’s and USATF’s cowardly, misogynistic “policies.” The vast majority of female runners have no guarantee ever, anywhere that they will be competing in a female-only category.
To what Stevie Keller of NDSU had to say, two things. First, meet directors do have to pay some level of attention to who enters and what may be lying beneath the word "Unattached" because there are issues around eligibility, red shirting, etc. When the NCAA writes clear rules and specifies responsibilities and enforcement procedures, entries are monitored - even if just retrospectively.
That also points in the direction of meet management providers, like Athletic or Direct Athletics. They maintain some amount of biographical info about the runners, to ease the registration process and enable record keeping, searching, etc. Maybe they need a "blue check" to note those runners whose info has been verified. Then the absence of a blue check becomes an asterisk in case something crops up post-race.
Second, not knowing specifically what you asked, it's noteworthy that Keller took the admin / logistics route in his answer - rather than the Coach of Athletes Who Got Screwed by Competing Against an Ineligible Athlete route.
I've talked to a couple coaches of athletes who finished behind Telfer on a much bigger stage than this meet, and they were similarly "Meh" about it. Aside from my own level of competitiveness as a coach, I feel like I'd be letting down my athletes if I couldn't be arsed to show some emotion when they were wronged.
Guess that's one more reason I've never fit in among T&F coaches!
"They thought males should not be presumed to have any advantage over females, despite 120 years of Olympic results that refute that ridiculous statement." Following the same fantasy, Mike Tyson has no advantage over a middleweight or featherweight male fighter.