Shealeah Craighead / Wikimedia Commons
The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) has banned men from women’s athletic competitions, as indicated in its Athlete Safety Policy released June 18.
Page 5 of the policy states, in a section titled “additional requirements,” that the USOPC is “committed to protecting opportunities for athletes participating in sport.”
“The USOPC will continue to collaborate with various stakeholders with oversight responsibilities, e.g., IOC, IPC, NGBs, to ensure that women have a fair and safe competition environment consistent with Executive Order 14201,” the committee adds.
The reference was to President Donald Trump’s executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”
“It is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy,” the order states. “It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”
Jennifer Sey, who launched XX-XY Athletics in Denver as an apparel company dedicated to protecting women’s sports, expressed gratitude for a “better late than never” move by the USOPC.
In a social media post, Sey added her observation that even the New York Times “correctly said ‘banned from women’s competitions’ not ‘from competition’” in its coverage of the news, a phrase she describes as a sign of “progress.”
The Times noted a letter from the USOPC to its stakeholders, obtained by the media outlet’s “The Athletic” section, in which both USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland and President Gene Sykes stated that all national governing bodies “are required to update their applicable policies in alignment.”
“The USOPC has engaged in a series of respectful and constructive conversations with federal officials,” Hirshland and Sykes wrote. “As a federally chartered organization, we have an obligation to comply with federal expectations.”
So-called “gender justice” activists condemned the policy change.
Referring to Trump’s executive order as “lawless” and “transphobic,” the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) said in a statement Tuesday, “without any process or clarity about its decision,” the USOPC “has let Trump rewrite its rules in a cruel effort to deny transgender women the opportunity to participate.”
Fatima Goss Graves, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement that “[t]he world is watching with alarm at the loss of freedom and opportunity in our country, especially as the United States is expected to host future Olympic events.”
“The Committee will learn — as so many other institutions have — that there is no benefit in appeasing the endless, shifting, and petulant demands coming out of the White House,” Graves added. “By giving into the political demands, the USOPC is sacrificing the needs and safety of its own athletes.”
But the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS) thanked the Trump administration and the USOPC “for taking this important step to preserve fairness and integrity in women’s sports. We also honor courageous athletes like Stephanie Turner, whose sacrifices and advocacy made this policy correction possible.”
Looking ahead, ICONS added that the “next stop” is the “International Olympic Committee.”
“Women across the world deserve the opportunity to compete on a level playing field and to become champions in their own right,” the group asserted.
Former swimmer Riley Gaines – now a conservative commentator – also weighed in on the USOPC policy change, posting to X that while “it’s hard to applaud an organization for merely following the law … nonetheless, this is a win.”
The move by the USOPC comes following the University of Pennsylvania’s (UPenn) decision to revise its policies regarding men competing in women’s sports.
Following a federal civil rights investigation that found UPenn to be in violation of Title IX, the school issued formal apologies to the female swimmers who lost awards to male competitors claiming to be women.
The US Department of Education directed the university to restore swimming honors to female athletes and implement a clear, biology-based definition of sex in all athletic programming.