Texas sues NCAA to demand ‘sex screening’ of student athletes
Ken Paxton has served as the attorney general of Texas since 2015. (Getty)
The state of Texas have launched a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to force the organisation to screen the biological sex of student athletes.
The Republican attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, is currently seeking a court order requiring gender screening for athletes and seeking an injunction to prevent the NCAA from “falsely and deceptively claiming that only biological women may participate in female-specific competitions”.
This comes after the NCAA already changed its policy for transgender athletes earlier this month just one day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to ban transgender women from competing in women’s and girl’s sports.
His executive order also threatens to withhold federal funding from any schools or universities that allow trans women and girls to compete on women’s and girl’s sport teams.
But, Paxton’s lawsuit is signalling that the NCAA hasn’t gone far enough to prevent trans athletes from competing.
The lawsuit claims that the NCAA has no mechanism for screening the biological sex of athletes, suggesting that “the NCAA’s lack of sex-screening has allowed (and will continue to allow) biological men to surreptitiously participate in ‘women’s’ sports categories”.
Paxton also said that the NCAA has left “ample opportunity for biological men to alter their birth records and participate in women’s sports”.
The organisation denies this, telling the Associated Press that any student athlete who is “assigned male at birth may not compete on a women’s team with amended birth certificates or other forms of ID”.
However, the policy allows athletes who are assigned male at birth to practice with women’s teams and receive benefits such as medical care.
The NCAA has 1,100 member schools covering 500,000 athletes, with NCAA President Charlie Baker saying in December that he was aware of only 10 transgender athletes competing across the organisation.
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