(Headline USA) A top NCAA official resigned this week over the organization’s policy allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports, slamming the policy as unfair and discriminatory toward female athletes, the Washington Examiner reported.
William Bock III, who has served on the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions since 2016, said transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete in events specifically created and set aside for women.
The NCAA’s policy allowing them to do so as long as they can prove their testosterone levels are below the maximum allowable levels for any given sport undermines fair competition, Bock argued.
“Although I may not have agreed with the wisdom of every rule in the NCAA rulebook, I believed the intent behind the NCAA’s rules was competitive fairness and protection of equal opportunities for student–athletes,” Bock wrote in his resignation letter. “This conviction has changed as I have watched the NCAA double down on regressive policies which discriminate against female student–athletes.”
Even if transgender athletes can prove their testosterone levels are below the maximum level allowed, they still would have massive biological benefits over female competitors simply because they were born male, he explained.
“There’s a lot of biological development that starts at birth that allows you to maximize testosterone, and those changes that you get through development—they don’t go away,” Bock said.
“And you’re going to reduce performance by a small amount if you reduce testosterone levels, but you’re never going to bridge the gap between men and women,” he continued. “And so it’s a ruse to say that testosterone suppression, it’s a level playing field, so it’s not true.”
Bock, who also served as the general counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, said his experience with doping cases and his conversations with experts in sports physiology led him to come out against the NCAA’s policy.
“If I’m there in a sport integrity role when there’s massive, essentially authorized, cheating taking place and dramatically harming women—it’s just a contradiction,” he said. “I just felt like I couldn’t seem to do that any longer and needed to resign with the hope that maybe [it] will cause other people to look at the issue more closely.”
