WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) president Charlie Baker appeared before the U.S. Senate on Tuesday to discuss name, image, & likeness (NIL) policy for college sports but also faced questioning over the issue of letting male athletes compete in both athletic programs and changing and shower areas designed specifically for women and girls.
“I’m not going to defend what happened in 2022,” said Baker, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts who took over the NCAA in March. “I wasn’t there. I was still governor of the commonwealth. What I will say is, we have very specific rules and standards around the safety and security of all our student-athletes, and anyone who hosts one of our national championships has to accept that they know what they are and then abide by them accordingly.”
Baker claimed the “rules around transgender athletes generally are more restrictive today than they were in ‘22,” and that no athlete will be “forced into any sort of situation that’s going to make them uncomfortable,” but the senator who questioned him, Republican Josh Hawley of Missouri, expressed skepticism during an interview with former Kentucky swimmer and fairness in women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines.
“He hemmed, and he hawed, he first tried to blame his predecessor,” Hawley said. “So, then I tried to nail him down and say, ‘What’s your policy now?’ That was my question. Are you still forcing women to accept biological men in their locker room without their consent? And then he said, ‘Well, we probably wouldn’t do it that way again.'”
“And I’m like, ‘Listen. You’re the head of the NCAA. Spit it out. Just say you were wrong. What you did was wrong. What you did threatens the safety of women everywhere. Just tell us the truth. Are you doing it now or not?’” he continued.
“First of all, his argument, his responses, they were entirely disingenuous,” Gaines agreed. “To tout about the safety and privacy of all athletes – no, we were utterly disregarded and totally violated. What they were protecting, of course, was the privacy and the safety of a man at the expense of us. The policy that was in place at that national championships, because I asked, the locker rooms were unisex, meaning any man could have walked into that locker room, any coach, any official, any parent, to be totally frank, any pervert who wanted to have full access to that locker room.”
Another questioner, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, pressed Baker on if he has “apologized to the female athletes for the trauma inflicted on them by these decisions,” and “what have you done to prevent anything to prevent these instances from happening again?”
Baker insisted the standards have been “adjusted,” but would not spell out a specific policy, instead offering to “get that specific policy in writing.
Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen [biological men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
As for the locker situation, critics note that forcing girls to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, and changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives potential male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status. In collegiate sports, that issue has been highlighted by University of Pennsylvania swimmer William “Lia” Thomas, against whom female swimmers have been pressured not to speak out.
In Loudoun County, Virginia, former superintendent Scott Ziegler is currently facing charges for allegedly covering up the rape of a female student by a “transgender” classmate in a girls bathroom due to its damaging implications for the LGBT movement. Last month, he was convicted of “using his official position to retaliate against someone for exercising their rights” by firing a teacher who testified about the situation before a grand jury.