Should the NCAA’s Transgender Records Stand?

Rule changes in sports have the potential to rewrite the record books. Usually, a change in how the game is played—to improve player safety or to speed up the action on the field—shifts the incentives for certain actions, resulting in unprecedented numbers of those moves. But when the rule changes are at the level of policy and affect who plays the game, the consequences not only rewrite the record books going forward but may require a revision of the sport’s history books.

Two major-league sports provide recent examples of the latter. In 2024, Major League Baseball integrated into its official history the career statistics of over 2,000 players who played in seven Negro Leagues between 1920 and 1948. This resulted in many MLB players—from legends of the game to active major leaguers—being bumped down the all-time rankings. The National Football League made a similar but smaller integration in 2025, incorporating statistics from the All-America Football Conference—which operated from 1946 to 1949—into the NFL’s official history.

Even if a player of the wrong sex finishes last, the integrity of the competition is fractured. Now that the NCAA has at least ostensibly limited “competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only,” the organization will eventually have to confront its own history. The NCAA’s policies on transgender athletes, starting in 2010, breached the sex-defined categories. Men’s and women’s sports effectively became “open,” to the pronounced detriment of women’s sports and female athletes. Predictably, this led to male athletes winning women’s championships and setting records in women’s events. More prosaically, but to wider effect, males in female sports have altered the course and history of every competition. Even if a player of the wrong sex finishes last in a race or comes off the bench for the last five minutes of a game, the integrity of that “men’s” or “women’s” competition is fractured because it is no longer sex-defined.

The historical records of collegiate sports no longer reflect the true meaning of the words “men” and “women.” The NCAA’s self-inflicted predicament is unique for several reasons. First, the NFL and MLB addressed errors of exclusion. The NFL’s record books, pre-2025, included other predecessor leagues but not the AAFC. Major League Baseball excluded the players themselves before continuing to segregate Negro League records from the National League’s and American League’s stats. By incorporating Negro League records into Major League Baseball’s records, the MLB acknowledges and celebrates the athletic achievements of these players and teams, even though it cannot correct the injustice that created the situation in the first place. The NFL, on the other hand, essentially corrected an administrative error.

The common thread between the NFL’s and MLB’s changes is that “they—either the people in question or their records—should have been here all along.” The NCAA, meanwhile, is confronting the opposite problem: an error of inclusion. The historical records of collegiate sports from the past decade and a half no longer reflect the true meaning of the words “men” or “women” that appear at the top of each page, next to the name of the sport.

Second, unlike in most other revisions and reassessments of sports history, everyone involved during the NCAA’s trans era was playing by the rules as written. Recruiting or retention violations (e.g., improper payments) have long been a recurring reason for the NCAA to vacate a title, a season, or multiple seasons. Aside from the punishment, there was an implied corrective: If not for the improper recruiting or retention in question, some of those players wouldn’t have been there, and, in the absence of those players, we can’t say for sure that the disciplined team would have had the season it did. This is similar to the logic of moving “clean” athletes up one place each time a competitor tests positive for performance-enhancing drugs at the Olympics or Tour de France. The dirty athlete broke the rules, making himself ineligible before the race, so he should never have been on the start line.

However, trans-identifying athletes who competed in the wrong category for their sex were acting in accord with the NCAA’s policy on transgender athletes. There is no violation of “black-letter” law where they are concerned.

This raises two of the most important considerations for how the NCAA should proceed. First, all the accountability—blame, if you wish—rests with the NCAA itself. They were the adults in the room, literally and figuratively. They made and repeatedly affirmed the decision that sex-based categories were dispensable in sport. Transgender athletes acted within the policies the NCAA wrote. Under all but the most cynical interpretations of why trans-identifying male athletes competed in the female category, these athletes did what athletes do: They find and pursue the biggest advantage afforded them at the margins of the rules.

Second, sports histories can be either normative or narrative. They can either reflect what should have happened, at the expense of what we can call “competitive accuracy,” or they can provide an objective recounting of what actually happened, wherein the omitted names and numbers speak to the history as much as those on the page.

Sports histories can either reflect what should have happened or what actually happened. Any reassignment of records or titles, including the integration of two (or more) leagues’ records into a single list, reflects a normative view of history. Again, such a move states, “This is how it always should have been.”

But sport is much more complex than that. Every moment in sport is a butterfly flapping its wings, a new set of initial conditions in a complex system. Even in sports that are more “closed,” such as swimming or sprinting, disappearing a competitor from the history books does not tell us how that race would have played out had he or she not been at the start line.

Disappearing a competitor from the history books does not tell us how the race would have otherwise played out. Let’s take a simple example. A runner in third place may run conservatively in the latter stages of a race, aiming to secure his or her place on the podium, rather than try to catch the second- or first-place runner and risk “blowing up” and falling back into fifth. That same runner, were he or she in second place at the same stage of the race, would go all-out in pursuit of a first-place finish. The potential reward of a gold medal is worth the risk of blowing up.

Airbrushing the lead runner out of the race does not preserve the order of the finish. The remaining athletes’ tactics would have changed based on their positions at every stage of the race. Moreover, if the point of the hypothetical is that the lead runner should have been ineligible because of sex (or doping or recruiting violations), then another runner would have taken his or her place in a limited field, further scrambling our attempt at a linear replacement in the record books.

Then there’s the knowledge gap that often accompanies males in female sports. Say three women are fighting for second place behind a male. One does not know that she is competing against a male and decides to go all-out because she is unaware of her category-level disadvantage. Another is looking at the increasing gap between herself and the lead runner and thinking, “What is going on here?” That causes her to lose both the plot and her hopes for a podium finish. The third knows that the runner out front is a male, so she is fighting for an “honest second.” Her honest second does not become a factual first just because we retcon the record books to show only the females in the female race.

Another way of framing this normative vs. narrative question is by placing the NCAA’s options on a scale from Kafka to Orwell. The most Kafkaesque option is to leave everything exactly how it is: a precise and objective historical record of the absurd situation in which female athletes competed in the female category against male athletes, all of whom followed the rules that explicitly permitted such a scenario.

Next on the scale is the asterisk. Sports junkies love asterisks as much as team partisans hate and fear them. They’re a permanent, open-ended invitation to endless interruptions that begin, “Well, you know, that was the season when …” Placing an asterisk next to a trans athlete’s name or record says, “This is what happened, but there’s important context. See the footnote.”

Stepping into Orwell’s territory, there’s the purge. Vacate the titles, rescind the records and awards, and surgically erase the moments that should not have happened. The blank space denies the trans athlete his or her purloined place in that sport’s history and serves a similar function as the asterisk: a cue to recall the full context.

Fully Orwellian is a reassigning of the title or record, a move that achieves the desired normative history by recording outcomes that never happened (e.g., Susie’s first-place finish).

Placing an asterisk next to a trans athlete’s record says, “This is what happened, but there’s important context.” Among the greatest dangers of rewriting history is the likelihood of forgetting it. However, an asterisk could ameliorate this risk. Strip the accolades and place in history from the athletes who should not have been there and give the affected female athletes a nominal compensation for what should have been theirs. The asterisk will direct the reader’s attention to the necessary context, this time explaining, “This is not what happened, but …”

When Major League Baseball announced its integrated record book in 2024, the league’s official historian, Jon Thorn, wrote:

How are we to understand MLB’s new database? By realizing that statistics are shorthand for stories, that history is not product but process, and that the reasons for the very existence of the Negro Leagues are worthy of our study.

With only two edits, that should be the NCAA’s—and any other similarly situated sports organization’s—mission statement in figuring out what to do with their record books. Each entry on a stats sheet condenses an incredible human story—all the things that keep us watching, playing, and coaching sports—into a few digits. String a few of those together and a narrative emerges. History is both normative and narrative in how it is recorded but also in how it unfolds. The NCAA surrendered the norms of competitive fairness and player safety that undergird sex-based categories in sport. That led to the record books of the last 15 years being as they are—and to the present debate over the process and product of that history.

As stated above, we all know what happens to those who don’t learn the lessons of history. Any option—from Kafka to Orwell—that erases or omits the uncomfortable contours of recent sports history will continue the harm onto future generations of sportspeople.

George M. Perry is a sports performance coach, sports businessman, and writer. Before going into the sports industry, he was a submarine warfare officer in the United States Navy and briefly attended law school.