President Trump’s Department of Education is demanding top athletic organizations for colleges and high schools turn over awards, records and titles won by transgender women to biological females who were set to win them.
The Department of Education penned a missive Tuesday to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) to comply with Trump’s executive order earlier this month banning men from women’s sports.
“Whether the number of records in women’s events attributed to men is 1 or 1 million, every official record of women’s performances must accurately reflect the achievements of female athletes, not of male ones,” the Department of Education’s deputy general counsel Candice Jackson wrote in a letter.
Controversies have erupted over transgender women — individuals who were born male — trouncing biological women in athletic competitions in recent years.
Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, 25, for example, had won an NCAA Division I national championship in 2022 for the women’s 500-yard freestyle.
At the time, Thomas was the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship. Thomas had also tied in the 200-yeard NCAA freestyle for fifth with Riley Gaines, 24, who has since become a conservative star over her activism for protecting women’s sports.
Gaines had complained about having to share a locker room with Thomas.
Other examples include CeCe Telfer, who won the NCAA’s Division II 400-meter hurdles in 2019, and high school athlete Soren Stark-Chessa, who won a Class C South girls’ high school title and ran almost a minute and a half faster than the second-place contestant.
“We cannot undo the damage inflicted by years of policies and practices that have denied the material reality of sex,” Jackson added in her letter to the heads of the NCAA and NFHS.
“The Department strongly urges the NCAA and NFHS to take immediate action and require its member institutions to do the same: correct the records for all women’s competitions to reflect and honor the achievements of female student-athletes, and return to female athletes the titles, awards, and recognitions they earned and deserve.”
A spokesperson for the NFHS later told The Post “that no record listed in the [national high school records book] was set by a transgender female athlete.”
The Post also reached out to the NCAA, which oversees sports regulations for more than 1,100 institutions of higher education across the US and Canada, for comment.
Trump’s sweeping executive order on “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” called on the Department of Education to pursue “all appropriate action to affirmatively protect all-female athletic opportunities and all-female locker rooms.”
It also threatened Title IX investigations against schools that fail to comply with the order.
Title IX, which was passed in 1972, bars sex discrimination in schools and other institutions that get federal money.
“By sending these letters, the Department demonstrated that it will not only fight for equal opportunity for present and future female athletes but also for past female athletes who had their accolades stolen to receive the recognition they rightfully earned,” Department of Education official Julie Hartman told The Post.
Last week after Trump’s executive order, the NCAA announced that was updating its policy to limit “competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only.”
But Hartman explained that the DOE wants the NCAA to go further and rectify the situation for biological female athletes who lost awards to transgender athletes.
“While the Department acknowledges the NCAA amended its policy with intent to align with President Trump’s Executive Order, officially correcting the records is another critical action to rectify the miscarriage of justice against female athletes allowed under the Biden Administration,” Hartman said.
