While the world watched a biological man steal the women’s boxing gold medal at the Paris Olympics, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) sent a letter to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) demanding that they stop such atrocities from happening on American soil.

The time for the NCAA to step up and protect its female athletes is long overdue. While repeatedly stating that they champion women’s sports, the NCAA has thus far done nothing but enable men to steal scholarships and championships from their female competitors. The most infamous example is the 2022 NCAA Swimming Championship where biological male Lia Thomas was allowed to swim against and defeat the women, including Riley Gaines and Young Women for America Ambassador Kylee Alons.

But that is far from an isolated case – earlier this year, a male transitioner from Rochester Institute of Technology, Sadie Rose, broke multiple women’s track and field records and was awarded the Liberty League Women’s Track & Field Performer of the Week. New Jersey’s Ramapo College bolstered its swimming program this year with trans-identifying Meghan Cortez-Fields. Cortez-Fields spent three seasons competing on the men’s team, but after receiving the NCAA’s go-ahead, switched to the women’s team his senior year and proceeded to break two school records.

Time after time, the NCAA has allowed men into the privacy of women’s changing rooms and onto women’s sports teams, putting them into position to steal opportunities from their female competitors and even physically injure them, to which North Carolina volleyball player Peyton McNabb can attest.

Earlier this year, in response to the repeated abuses enabled by the NCAA, 16 female athletes filed a lawsuit against the organization on the grounds of sex discrimination.

Despite all of this, the NCAA has still refused to change its policy. In response, Sen. Blackburn and twenty-three of her colleagues sent a letter demanding that they do so. The letter asks the NCAA to simply “update your student-athlete participation policy to require that only biologically female students participate in women’s sports.” It points out that a number of other organizations, including the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) and the Court of Arbitration for Sport, in addition to more than 20 states, have already enacted similar policies. World Aquatics fortunately barred Lia Thomas from competing in the women’s category at the Paris Olympics. If the NCAA had a clear policy already in place, Thomas would not have been a contender in the first place.

The letter also notes the plethora of research that reveals the physical advantages that men have over women, such as their “larger hearts, higher red blood count, greater lung capacity, longer endurance, larger muscle mass, differences in bone density and geometry, and lower body fat.” But it also points out that these advantages remain even after a multi-year regimen of hormone therapy.

The NCAA regulates athletics at over 1,100 colleges in the United States, affecting the lives and future careers of thousands of athletes, many of them women, every year. There is no reason for the largest American athletic governing agency to continue to drag its feet on this critical issue aside from fear of angering the trans-community.

A policy stating that men and women belong in separate categories has never before been necessary, but that is no longer the reality in which we live. As long as powerful organizations like the NCAA stay silent, men around the world will continue to take advantage of the current rules. This Congressional letter is simply asking them to make a commonsense update to the policy- stating that women’s sports are for biological women only. If the NCAA really cares about its female competitors, it’s time for them to act like it.