‘Naked men’ allowed to ‘disrobe in front of non-consenting college women’: lawsuit
The National Collegiate Athletics Association was hit with a lawsuit Thursday from 16 female athletes who say they were forced to compete against and share locker rooms with men.
The federal lawsuit argues the NCAA’s rules about transgender athletes violate women’s rights under Title IX, The Free Press reports.
Women’s rights advocate Riley Gaines, a plaintiff in the case, said Thursday on X the NCAA has refused to listen to female athletes’ concerns.
“The NCAA continues to actively and openly discriminate against women on the basis of our sex. We issued a legal demand letter last year, but they haven’t listened,” Gaines said.
The Free Press reports more:
At the center of the class-action lawsuit is Lia Thomas (pictured), the trans athlete who dominated the 2022 NCAA Swimming Championships while a student at the University of Pennsylvania. The suit states that both the NCAA and Georgia Tech, which hosted the event, knowingly violated Title IX, the federal statute that guarantees equal opportunity for men and women in college education and sports.
The lawsuit, the first federal action of its kind, seeks to change the rules, rendering any biological males ineligible to compete against female athletes. It demands the NCAA revoke all awards given to trans athletes in women’s competitions and “reassign” them to their female contenders. It also asks for “damages for pain and suffering, mental and emotional distress, suffering and anxiety, expense costs and other damages due to defendants’ wrongful conduct.”
The case also alleges the NCAA violated female athletes’ Fourteenth Amendment rights by allowing “naked men possessing full male genitalia to disrobe in front of non-consenting college women.”
The rules create “situations in which unwilling female college athletes unwittingly or reluctantly exposed their unclad bodies to males, subjecting women to a loss of their constitutional right to bodily privacy,” according to the lawsuit.
Former North Carolina State swimmer Kylee Alons, a plaintiff, told The Free Press she found a “dimly lit storage and utility closet” under the bleachers to change in during one competition with Thomas.
“I was literally racing U.S. and Olympic gold medalists and I was changing in a storage closet at this elite-level meet,” Alons said. “I just felt that my privacy and safety were being violated in the locker room.”
Gaines, who also competed against Thomas as a student at the University of Kentucky, said they filed the lawsuit because the NCAA keeps running “from accountability and responsibility and upholding the civil rights law that is Title IX.”
If the athletes win their case, it “could impact eligibility rules at all 1,100 colleges and universities represented by the NCAA, making it such that all athletes born as males would be barred from competing in women’s sports,” according to The Free Press.
Notably, the attorney leading the lawsuit is Bill Bock, a former member of the NCAA Committee on Infractions, according to the Independent Council on Women’s Sports. Bock resigned from the committee in February after expressing frustration with the NCAA’s transgender rules, The College Fix reported.
MORE: NCAA leader resigns over transgender policy: It’s ‘massive, essentially authorized, cheating’
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