Texas AG Paxton sues NCAA for allowing transgender women to compete

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued the NCAA on Sunday, accusing the organization of engaging in “false, deceptive, and misleading practices” by allowing transgender women to participate in athletic events it markets as women’s competitions. 

Paxton said the NCAA, which oversees college sports at more than 1,000 colleges and universities nationwide, is duping women’s sports fans in violation of Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a state law that shields consumers against businesses that falsely advertise their products. 

“Consumers purchase goods and services associated with women’s college sports because they enjoy watching women compete against women—not men competing against women,” Paxton wrote in the lawsuit, filed Sunday in a Texas district court. The lawsuit does not mention transgender men who compete in men’s sports.

Paxton said the NCAA is further misleading college sports fans by not identifying which athletes are transgender. The organization is also “jeopardizing the safety and wellbeing of women,” he said, by permitting trans women to compete against cisgender, or non-transgender, women. 

“Men competing in women’s sports is inherently unfair and unsafe due to their physiological advantages,” Paxton wrote in the lawsuit, which repeatedly refers to transgender women as “men.” 

He added in a news release that “radical ‘gender theory’ has no place in college sports.” 

Paxton is requesting the court grant a permanent injunction prohibiting the NCAA from allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sporting events that take place in Texas or that involve Texas schools. Alternatively, he said, the court could order the NCAA to market its women’s events as coed. 

Paxton’s lawsuit comes days after NCAA President Charlie Baker, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts, testified before Congress that there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes he is aware of who currently compete at NCAA schools. He did not say whether that number includes transgender men. 

Baker said the NCAA, which is facing mounting pressure from Republicans and conservative organizations to ban transgender athletes from college sports, would not adopt such a policy because federal courts have consistently sided with participation. 

“We’re a national governing body, and we follow federal law,” Baker said. He added that he’d be open to working with Congress to create a “federal standard” for eligibility. 

The NCAA in 2022 adopted a sport-by-sport approach to transgender participation, and eligibility depends on rules set by a sport’s national or international governing body. 

A spokesperson for the NCAA declined to comment on Paxton’s lawsuit, saying the organization does not comment on pending litigation. They added that the NCAA and its members “will continue to promote Title IX, make unprecedented investments in women’s sports and ensure fair competition in all NCAA championships.” 

The organization is facing a separate legal challenge over its transgender policy from more than a dozen current and former college athletes, who said the NCAA violated their Title IX rights when it allowed Lia Thomas, a former University of Pennsylvania swimmer and the first trans woman to win an NCAA Division I title, to compete in its national championships in Atlanta in 2022. 

Twenty-six states since 2020 have passed laws prohibiting transgender children and teens from competing on school sports teams that match their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, which tracks LGBTQ laws. The majority of bans also affect participation in college sports. 

Federal judges have temporarily blocked laws from taking effect in Arizona, Utah, West Virginia and Idaho, the latter two of which have asked the Supreme Court to review their cases. A Montana judge in 2022 permanently barred the state from enforcing its 2021 prohibition on transgender athletes competing in college sports. 

In April, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, which oversees collegiate sports at 241 mostly small colleges across the country, approved a policy barring most transgender women from competition. President-elect Trump, a frequent critic of trans-inclusive policies, has signaled he will sign an executive order banning transgender women and girls from female sports teams once he takes office in January.