On Friday, William Bock III, a former general counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and a lawyer with an impressive resume, resigned from his post at the NCAA, citing the organization’s refusal to protect girls’ sports.
Bock has served in the role for eight years and still has more than a year in his current term. But Bock has chosen to stand up for women and said he can no longer stomach the organization’s radical policies.
In a letter first obtained by the Washington Examiner, Bock shared, “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.”
“This conviction has changed as I have watched the NCAA double down on regressive policies which discriminate against female student-athletes.”
Bock pointed to the NCAA’s three-phase participation policy implemented in 2022 allowing transgender student-athletes to play in their desired sports so long as they met certain requirements.
Bock rejected that policy, arguing that biological development occurs before and around the time of puberty and puts biological men at an advantage.
“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 said. “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.”
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“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,” he said. “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.”
Former champion collegiate swimmer and women’s rights advocate Riley Gaines applauded the announcement.
“NCAA official resigns in protest of transgender policies that ‘discriminate against female student-athletes’”
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— Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) February 13, 2024