Content warning: This article mentions suicide.
Last February, President Trump issued an executive order entitled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” One day after the policy, the NCAA followed suit and officially prohibited transgender athletes from competing in women’s NCAA events.
In short, this new policy limits women’s competitions to athletes who were “assigned female at birth” and threatens to pull funding from institutions that do not comply. These changes pulled fewer than 10 athletes from competition, therefore stopping the apparently massive issue.
This week, the NCAA launched a new “Community & Belonging Social Media Campaign”, a two-day-long effort in collaboration with its Office of Inclusion. The campaign asks schools to have their student-athletes share their experiences of belonging and community on their team.
As such, the NCAA’s efforts do not enhance or create community or belonging, but rather demonstrate that it already exists within the institution.
The vanity campaign comes at a particularly volatile time for the NCAA, after Lia Smith, a diver at Middlebury College impacted by the NCAA changes, tragically died by suicide.
Lia Smith was from California and was completing a double major in computer science and statistics. Smith was a fierce advocate for transgender rights. After an anti-trans panel was hosted at Middlebury, Smith spoke about the difficulties she faced after the executive order at an opposing event, saying that “It’s also really hard going in a locker room where you’re not welcome, and there’s really not a clear space that I should be going to.”
A day before news broke of Smith’s death, CNN published an exclusive interview with Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer who competed at the University of Pennsylvania and won multiple NCAA races.
While Thomas set many records at Penn, the Trump administration ordered them to be erased and for the school to issue an apology to Thomas’ competitors.
In her interview with CNN, Thomas discussed the difficulty of being an openly trans athlete and the damage the public and government scrutiny had to her mental health.
Similarly, Evie Parts, a runner from Swarthmore College, recently told Teen Vogue how her inability to practice and rejection of her identity severely damaged her mental health, sharing that the NCAA changes led her to suicidal ideation.
Interestingly enough, the NCAA defines belonging as “creating a community that embraces and values all its members and their backgrounds.” Of course, this effort to enhance belonging, or rather the appearance of belonging, does not extend to all members of its community.
In the “After the Campaign” section of the campaign announcement, the NCAA suggests that schools “dive deeper” by reading Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone, which contains the following quote:
“When the culture of any organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of the individuals who serve that system or who are served by that system, you can be certain that the shame is systemic, the money is driving ethics, and the accountability is all but dead.”