Governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem are risking NCAA ramifications with opposition to transgender policy. That’s according to sports law scholar, Joshua Lens, who wrote an article on NCAA transgender sports participation for a recent edition of the Missouri Law Review. The NCAA adopted a policy last year allowing transgender student-athlete participation to be determined by the policy for the national governing body of each sport. Noem and eight other Republican governors sent a letter this week to the NCAA’s Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports urging a rewrite of the policy. The governors want the NCAA to bar transgender women from women’s sports altogether, which is already a law in South Dakota and over 20 other states. The NCAA has previously shown a willingness to penalize states with anti-transgender laws, like North Carolina in 2016.
