A Biden-appointed federal judge has dismissed former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines’ Title IX lawsuit against the NCAA, closing the case without deciding whether biological males belong in women’s college sports.
Breitbart News reported that U.S. District Judge Tiffany R. Johnson of the Northern District of Georgia ruled the NCAA is not subject to Title IX because it does not directly receive federal funds. The decision handed the NCAA a procedural win and left female athletes who challenged its old transgender policies to carry the fight to a higher court.
Gaines and her co-plaintiffs vowed to appeal. The core fairness question that drove the case, male-bodied athletes competing in and sharing facilities with women, never got a full merits ruling.
The dispute traces back to the 2022 NCAA Division I swimming championships. Gaines, then a Kentucky student, was forced to compete against University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and tied Thomas for fifth place.
Just The News reported that the lawsuit grew out of that championship meet, including competition and locker-room issues involving Thomas. Female athletes argued the NCAA’s policies stripped them of the equal athletic opportunities Title IX was written to protect.
Gaines and more than a dozen other women filed suit in March 2024. They alleged the NCAA violated Title IX by allowing biological males into women’s events and women’s private spaces. The Independent Council on Women’s Sports, known as ICONS, co-sponsored the effort.
Parents and athletes elsewhere have raised the same basic objection in local fights, including a North Carolina father who sued a school district over bathroom policy secrecy tied to his daughter’s privacy.
Judge Johnson granted the NCAA summary judgment and closed the case. She did not rule that men in women’s sports are fair. She ruled that Title IX does not reach the NCAA on the funding theory the plaintiffs advanced.
In the order, Johnson wrote:
“Here, there is no evidence that the NCAA ever received, or could have received, federal funds,”
She added:
“Thus, Plaintiffs’ Title IX claims cannot proceed.”
The court rejected the argument that the NCAA indirectly benefits from federal education dollars flowing to its member schools. That technical holding became the entire case. If the governing body of college sports is treated as outside Title IX, female athletes lose a direct federal path to challenge the policies that control their championships.
ICONS Co-Founder Kim Jones, a former NCAA All-American tennis player, said the organization believes the district court got it wrong. Jones pointed out that the NCAA is the controlling body for more than 1,100 member schools, almost all of which take federal funding, and said the Court of Appeals should find the NCAA subject to Title IX. She said the group will not give up the fight for women and girls’ rights in sports.
Similar procedural exits have appeared in other gender-policy cases, including when a Biden-appointed judge tossed a DOJ lawsuit over California’s transgender athlete policy on procedural grounds.
Gaines answered the dismissal the same day. She called it a temporary reverse and promised an appeal.
“This momentary setback will not deter me or other women athletes in the least. Rest assured, we will be appealing this decision. We are on the side of truth. I am confident Americans will rally to our side to fight the NCAA. Working together, we will defeat the NCAA’s continuing efforts to trample women’s rights in sports.”
ICONS co-founder Marshi Smith went further on the association’s credibility. Smith said the NCAA’s refusal to recognize its responsibility to uphold women’s rights means it cannot be trusted to regulate anyone’s sports, men’s or women’s.
That distrust is not limited to elite swimming. Families have sued school systems over secrecy and gender-policy practices that shut parents out, as in a New Jersey district facing a lawsuit for hiding student gender transitions from parents.
Fox News reported that the challenged NCAA policy is no longer in effect after President Trump’s February 2025 executive order on women’s sports. The NCAA now limits women’s teams to athletes assigned female at birth and says it is complying with that order.
In a statement after the dismissal, the NCAA said:
“The NCAA is proud to continually invest in and expand women’s sports and the NCAA is in full compliance with the Trump administration’s executive order on women’s sports.”
The association got the lawsuit dismissed on a funding technicality even as it now advertises compliance with a White House order that restored sex-based categories. Gaines and ICONS still plan to take the Title IX question to the 11th Circuit.
Judge Johnson’s order also rejected the claim that concussion-research ties to the Department of Defense made the NCAA a federal-funds recipient for Title IX purposes. No evidence, the court held, showed the NCAA received or could have received federal funds in the way the statute requires.
That leaves a stark institutional picture. Member schools live under Title IX. The central body that drafts championship rules and oversees more than a thousand of those schools walked out of this case by arguing it stands apart from the statute.
The Gaines case is one front in a broader pushback against policies that erase sex-based protections in sports and schools. Another recent federal ruling let California keep allowing male athletes on girls’ teams after a DOJ suit was tossed, again without settling the fairness question female athletes keep raising.
Title IX was sold to the country as a guarantee of equal opportunity for women. When male-bodied athletes enter women’s lanes, podiums, and locker rooms, the female athletes who lose roster spots, placements, and privacy are the ones left holding the consequences. Gaines put her name on the complaint. Dozens of women stood with her. A district court closed the file on a funding theory.
Progressive politicians still try to reframe the last decade’s gender experiments as yesterday’s news, but conservatives have refused to treat the woke era as ancient history while women are still fighting for fair competition.
The appeal will test whether the NCAA can govern federally funded campus sports while claiming Title IX stops at the association’s door. Female athletes are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for the category that made women’s sports possible in the first place.
When courts clear the governing body of college sports on a technicality, ordinary women are left to defend the playing field the hard way, one appeal at a time.
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