On Wednesday, Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to ban trans athletes from competing in girls and women's sports. A few hours later, NCAA president Charlie Baker showed everyone just how little moral courage he has.
Like all of Trump's executive orders, the one he signed yesterday does not actually change the law of the land, nor does it create a clear path for enforcement. The executive order relies on a new and perverse interpretation of Title IX—the federal law that prevents schools that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of sex—arguing that schools that allow trans people equal opportunities to participate in sports are actually in violation of Title IX. The Trump administration is now threatening to pull federal funding from schools that protect the rights of trans people. The administration's interpretation of Title IX will certainly be challenged in court, and it's not clear how the administration plans to identify schools that are running afoul of this executive order.
None of that stopped Baker from signaling his eagerness to adopt Trump's deranged culture-war edict as official NCAA policy. Shortly after the executive order was signed, Baker released a statement saying that the NCAA would "take necessary steps to align NCAA policy in the coming days," and extolling Trump's order for how it "provides a clear, national standard."
As always, these trans sports bans are a solution in search of a problem. Baker knows this better than anyone else; while testifying in front of the Senate last month, he said that he believed there were fewer than 10 transgender athletes currently competing among the NCAA's 510,000 athletes. As Michael Waters has previously pointed out on Defector, these bans are not actually about fairness in sports, and successful enforcement is not the ultimate goal. Trump's executive order seeks to do the same thing that the state-level and Congressional trans sports bans seek to do, which is create a world in which trans people are not welcome.
It's been almost eight years since the NCAA refused to hold championship events in North Carolina after the state legislature passed a transphobic bathroom ban. In 2016, when he was still the governor of Massachusetts, Baker signed a transgender rights bill into law. Perhaps Baker has simply become a more bigoted person since then; maybe he is just a coward who is hoping to curry favor with a conservative administration and Congress in the hopes that they will finally intervene and put a stop to the inevitable professionalization of college sports.
Baker's reasons for aligning with Trump's bigotry are known only to him, but I do think that this moment reveals something important about the people and institutions that have previously been relied on to protect the rights of trans people. People like Baker never actually considered the rights of trans people to be as immutable as everyone else's. Those rights are instead up for constant negotiation, to be used as leverage in one direction or the other depending on what the cultural and political landscape calls for.
What's clear now is that Baker is no longer fit to lead the NCAA. Confronted with the choice between ignoring a flatly ludicrous executive order spasming out from the fried brain matter within Donald Trump's skull or allowing the NCAA to become yet another conquered territory in the right wing's culture war, Baker chose the latter. He has joined a project, the only aim of which is to drive trans people out of society, and he should be forever disgraced.
