Heath Hutcheson, Campus Carrier sports editor

On April 8, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletes (NAIA) placed a ban on transgender women participating in women’s sports at its over 200 mostly small colleges in the U.S. This makes them the first major college sports governing body in the U.S. to do so. The organization’s Council of Presidents voted unanimously to approve the policy, which will take effect on Aug. 1. The policy will only allow transgender men to participate in women’s sports if they have not yet begun taking masculinizing hormone therapy. However, the policy allows anybody to participate in men’s sports, including trans men and trans women. The decision has resulted in a lot of controversy to which the NAIA’s CEO Jim Carr responded with a statement.

“We know that there are a lot of opinions, and a lot of people have a very emotional reaction to this, and we want to be respectful of that,” Carr said. “But we feel like our primary responsibility is fairness in competition so we are following that path and we’ve tried as best as we could to allow for some participation by all.”

This motion will not have any effect on Berry students since Berry became part of the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) in 2013. Since 2011, the NCAA had allowed transgender women to participate in women’s sports so long as they have gone one year under testosterone suppression until 2022, when they instead changed to a sport-by-sport approach, leaving the decision up to the governing body of each individual sport to determine an athlete’s eligibility. The NAIA’s ban has left many wondering what the NCAA’s response to this decision is if they have one. The director of athletics, Angel Mason spoke about how Berry handles these types of situations under the NCAA.

“When you talk about males transitioning to females, I don’t know that the NCAA is going to take a hard and fast stance,” Mason said. “For us, we will manage situations as they arise. Our primary focus is to be service oriented to the students that choose Berry.”

The NAIA’s decision to put their foot down when implementing this policy is not unusual for them. In the past, the organization had put in standards of operation regarding college athlete’s name, image and likeness (NIL) long before any state legislation. Years ago, they also placed a very firm policy on transfer students which would result in a lot of issues for collegiate athletes transferring from a school under the NAIA to one under the NCAA. 

“Part of why Dr. Briggs originally thought that Berry should leave the NAIA was the fact that he felt like Berry was not in alignment with the NAIA and the member institutions that were a part of the conference we were in,” Mason said. “He felt we were more closely aligned to the Division III philosophy with the NCAA.”

Berry itself has never actually had a transgender athlete, so if Berry was still with the NAIA, the policy would still not have any serious effects on any athletes here currently. But, the goals of the coaches and faculty are always to adapt in ways that best help student athletes to thrive, no matter how they choose to identify.“As far as individuals who have identified as transitioning that have requested to be on a team that is not of their biological gender at birth, or are medically transitioning, we have not had any of those to date,” Mason said. “But that’s not to say that we could not in the future. When it comes to that, we will have to be culturally sensitive to how we ma