A federal judge has dismissed the remaining claims in a high-profile lawsuit challenging the NCAA’s former transgender athlete policy, handing the organization a legal victory while leaving the central argument surrounding transgender participation in college sports largely unanswered.
U.S. District Judge Tiffany R. Johnson of the Northern District of Georgia granted the NCAA’s motion for summary judgment in the lawsuit brought by former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines and more than a dozen other current and former college athletes.
The plaintiffs sued in 2024, arguing that the NCAA violated Title IX by allowing transgender women to compete in women’s college sports. Much of the case centered on the 2022 NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships, where University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I individual championship.
Thomas’ victory has since become one of the most frequently cited examples in the national political campaign to restrict transgender athletes, despite the relatively small number of transgender competitors participating in college athletics.
But the court did not rule that Thomas competed unfairly. It did not find that transgender women violate the rights of cisgender athletes by competing alongside them. And it did not determine whether the NCAA’s former transgender participation policy violated Title IX.
Instead, the lawsuit ran into a considerably less dramatic legal problem: money.
Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in education programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance. The plaintiffs argued that the NCAA qualified as a recipient of federal funding because of its involvement with the Department of Defense in concussion research.
Johnson previously allowed the case to continue so the parties could conduct limited discovery into that relationship. According to the court’s findings, however, the NCAA and Defense Department separately contributed money to research conducted through Indiana University. Federal funds did not pass through the NCAA.
The judge therefore concluded that the NCAA was not a recipient of federal financial assistance for purposes of the plaintiffs’ Title IX claims.
That distinction matters, particularly as transgender athletes remain the subject of an outsized national political debate.
A dismissal based on the NCAA’s funding status is not a judicial finding that transgender participation is inherently unfair or unlawful. It also does not establish the opposite. The court simply never reached that question.
Meanwhile, the NCAA policy challenged in the lawsuit no longer exists.
In February 2025, following an executive order from President Donald Trump directing federal agencies to restrict transgender participation in women’s sports, the NCAA changed its rules. Its current policy limits competition on women’s teams to athletes assigned female at birth. Transgender women may practice with women’s teams and receive certain associated benefits but cannot compete.
Gaines and the Independent Council on Women’s Sports have said they plan to appeal the dismissal.
For transgender athletes, that means the legal and political battle surrounding their participation is far from finished. But one thing this ruling does not provide is the sweeping judicial declaration about transgender athletes that either side of the debate might be tempted to claim.
The case was dismissed because of how Title IX applies to the NCAA, not because a federal court finally settled the question of whether transgender women belong in women’s college sports.
