A National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) official has resigned in protest of transgender policies that "discriminate against female student-athletes."
William Bock III sent a scathing letter resigning from the NCAA Committee on Infractions earlier this week.
The Washington Examiner reports Bock "submitted his letter of resignation to NCAA President Charlie Baker on Friday, citing the college sports organization’s policy to allow transgender men to compete in women’s sports as a primary reason for his departure. Bock has served as a committee member since 2016 and is stepping down from his role more than a year before his current term is set to expire in August 2025."
In his letter, Bock stated that he had previously believed the NCAA intended to promote competitive fairness, but that changed as he watched them enact the discriminatory policies.
“Although I may not have agreed with the wisdom of every rule in the NCAA rulebook, I believed the intent behind the NCAA’s rules was competitive fairness and protection of equal opportunities for student-athletes,” Bock wrote in the letter. “This conviction has changed as I have watched the NCAA double down on regressive policies which discriminate against female student-athletes.”
In 2022, the NCAA began allowing biological males to compete against women and girls as long as their testosterone levels met a certain lowered threshold.
Bock rejected this policy and explained that going through male puberty gives boys and men an advantage over female athletes — even if they are now suppressing their hormones.
“There’s a lot of biological development that starts at birth that allows you to maximize testosterone, and those changes that you get through development — they don’t go away,” Bock wrote. “And you’re going to reduce performance by a small amount if you reduce testosterone levels, but you’re never going to bridge the gap between men and women. And so it’s a ruse to say that testosterone suppression, it’s a level playing field, so it’s not true.”
Bock explained that he previously served as the general counsel for the Anti-Doping Agency and knows full well how testosterone can impact performance.
Allowing males to compete against women, he argued, is "cheating."
“If I’m there in a sport integrity role when there’s massive, essentially authorized, cheating taking place and dramatically harming women — it’s just a contradiction,” Bock's letter continued. “I just felt like I couldn’t seem to do that any longer and needed to resign with the hope that maybe [it] will cause other people to look at the issue more closely.”
