Why a Defense Bill Now Governs Who Can Play Women’s Sports at U.S. Military Academies

The new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) does far more than authorize nearly a trillion dollars in defense spending. Quietly embedded in the 2025 bill is a provision that bans “biological males” from women’s sports at U.S. military academies, locking Trump-era gender policies into one of Washington’s least vetoed, most durable pieces of legislation.

On its face, this looks like a narrow culture-war skirmish folded into an annual defense package. In practice, it’s a significant escalation: it binds service academies to the most restrictive end of the national debate over transgender participation in sports, aligns military education with recent bans on transgender service, and turns the NDAA into a vehicle for codifying a broader ideological project on gender and biology.

How We Got Here: From Integration to Restriction

Military academies have historically mirrored national shifts on gender and identity, often with a time lag and considerable resistance:

• 1970s–80s – Women arrive at the academies: West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy opened to women in 1976, amid intense debate over unit cohesion and physical standards. Similar rhetoric about “fairness” and “readiness” was used then, though directed at women rather than transgender athletes.
• 1990s–2010 – LGBTQ shifts: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” gave way to open service for gay, lesbian, and bisexual troops in 2011. Courts and policymakers largely moved in the direction of inclusion.
• 2016 – Transgender military service opened: The Obama administration allowed open transgender service, with the Pentagon developing medical and readiness frameworks to manage transitions and deployments.
• 2017–2020 – Restriction returns: The Trump administration imposed significant limits on transgender service. Lower courts fought parts of these policies, but a Supreme Court order in 2019 allowed the Pentagon’s restrictions to take effect pending litigation.
• 2025 – Sports and service converge: The NDAA provision, coupled with a federal appeals court allowing Pentagon restrictions on transgender service members to be enforced, marks a coordinated tightening of rules governing gender identity in both service eligibility and academy life.

The use of explicit “biological male” language—rather than more flexible gender identity frameworks—reflects a broader trend in Republican-led legislation across states, where over 20 states have passed laws limiting transgender girls’ and women’s participation in female school sports since 2020.

Why This Fight Is Playing Out in the NDAA

There’s a strategic reason culture-war policy is being embedded in a must-pass defense bill. The NDAA is one of the few pieces of legislation that regularly attracts broad bipartisan support—the 77–20 Senate vote this year is typical. Presidents are historically reluctant to veto it because doing so risks being painted as undermining troops and national security.

Attaching the sports ban to the NDAA achieves several things for its backers:

• Durability: NDAA provisions are notoriously hard to unwind. Even when political control shifts, amending or repealing specific sections requires political capital and new legislation.
• Political cover: Lawmakers who might be wary of stand-alone anti-trans bills can say they simply voted for “the defense bill,” not each social provision inside it.
• Normalization: Treating transgender participation as a defense-policy issue implicitly frames it as a matter of readiness, cohesion, and national strength—not just civil rights.

In other words, this is not just about who runs on which field at Army–Navy. It’s about baking a particular view of sex and gender into the institutional DNA of the armed forces.

What the Ban Really Does at the Academies

The provision “permanently prohibits men from playing on women’s sports teams at all military academies,” using sex assigned at birth as the determinant. In practical terms, that means:

• Transgender women (male at birth) cannot compete on women’s teams at West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, or the Merchant Marine Academy, regardless of hormone therapy or legal gender markers.
• Transgender men (female at birth) may be barred from men’s teams if the implementation mirrors the biological logic, although the politics and litigation around this are likely to be different.
• Nonbinary cadets and midshipmen receive no clear recognition under a binary biological framework, forcing them into one of two categories for athletic purposes.

Because many academy teams are embedded in NCAA competition, the new rule interacts with broader college sports policy. The NCAA’s February 2025 decision to align with Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” order already tightened gender eligibility. The NDAA effectively removes any remaining discretion for the academies by transforming the policy into federal law, not just league rules.

Readiness, Identity, and the New Litmus Test for Military Culture

Supporters frame the change as a straightforward fairness issue. Opponents see it as part of a broader campaign to define national strength in explicitly traditional, biologically rigid terms. Both sides are ultimately arguing about what kind of institution the U.S. military should be in the 21st century.

Three deeper dynamics are at play:

1. Sports as a proxy for military values
   Service academy athletics are not just extracurriculars; they’re a core training ground for leadership, cohesion, and the warrior ethos. Controlling who counts as a legitimate competitor in women’s sports is, in effect, a way of drawing the boundaries of belonging and legitimacy in the officer corps.
2. Defining “fairness” through biology rather than policy design
   Instead of nuanced eligibility standards based on hormone levels, transition timing, or performance metrics, the law opts for a bright-line birth-sex rule. That sidesteps complex science but creates hard cases—like transgender women who have been on hormone therapy for years and no longer enjoy the physiological advantages the policy is ostensibly targeting.
3. Signaling to allies and adversaries
   Allies such as the U.K. and Canada have wrestled with trans inclusion in their militaries and sports systems, often landing on more individualized approaches. The U.S. shift toward categorical bans sends a domestic political signal but may complicate messaging abroad, particularly where LGBTQ inclusion is framed as part of democratic values.

What Experts Are Watching

Military, legal, and sports experts say this provision may be more consequential than its one-paragraph length suggests.

On institutional precedent

Dr. Shannon Minter, a long-time civil rights litigator, has argued in similar contexts that once Congress anchors a biological definition of sex in federal law, “it becomes the template for future restrictions,” from housing to promotions. The academies, as federally run institutions, are likely to be among the first test beds.

On recruitment and talent

Retired Lt. Gen. Dana Born, a former dean of the faculty at the U.S. Air Force Academy, has warned in speeches that “any perception that the military is closing doors based on identity rather than capability risks shrinking the pool of highly motivated, high-achieving applicants.” While specific data on transgender applicants to the academies is limited, broader surveys show that younger Americans—especially those with the academic profiles the academies seek—tend to support transgender rights at much higher rates than older cohorts.

On litigation

Legal scholars expect challenges under equal protection and Title IX frameworks. Courts have been divided: some have upheld school-level bans on transgender athletes; others have struck them down. The federal nature of the academies, and the national-security framing, may give the government more leeway, but it also raises the stakes: any ruling will echo well beyond college sports.

Data Points the Debate Often Ignores

The political debate frequently outpaces the data. A few figures help ground what’s actually at issue:

• Trans population size: Estimates from recent Gallup and Williams Institute data suggest about 1.6 million Americans identify as transgender, including roughly 5% of adults under 30. But transgender women in competitive women’s sports are a small subset of that population.
• Incidence in sports: State athletics associations that track participation report low single- or low double-digit numbers of transgender athletes per state in many cases—hardly the tidal wave often portrayed in rhetoric.
• Military demographic trends: The services are already struggling with recruiting younger Americans. Surveys from the Pentagon and outside organizations consistently find that perceptions of inclusivity, or the lack of it, influence whether young people consider military careers.

In short, the policy is sweeping, but the immediate population directly affected at the academies is likely to be small. The larger impact is symbolic and institutional.

Looking Ahead: Where This Fight Goes Next

Several trajectories are worth watching over the next few years:

• Court challenges: Expect lawsuits from civil rights groups on behalf of affected cadets or applicants, likely framed around equal protection and Title IX. The national-security context may be invoked by the government to defend the law.
• Policy diffusion: Once a standard is set at the academies, pressure may build to harmonize ROTC programs and even high school JROTC and feeder programs with similar rules.
• Internal military policy: The ban interacts with the Pentagon’s broader restrictions on transgender service. As those policies are litigated and potentially revised by future administrations, the clash between statutory and regulatory frameworks could make the academies a legal minefield.
• Political escalation: With some Republicans already urging international bodies like the Olympics to adopt similar bans, the U.S. stance at elite military institutions may be used as a rhetorical template: “If it’s good enough for the military, it should be the standard for everyone.”

The Overlooked Questions

Much of the public debate is framed as a simple fairness argument. But several critical questions are being sidelined:

• How will the academies handle cadets who transition while enrolled? Will they be forced to leave teams, or even separate from the academy, mid-career?
• What support structures—medical, psychological, social—will exist for transgender cadets affected by both sports and service restrictions?
• How will this interact with allied training programs, exchange cadets, and joint operations with militaries that take a different approach to gender identity?
• And perhaps most fundamentally: if the core claim is about competitive advantage, why has Congress chosen a birth-sex line rather than performance-based criteria that might be more closely tailored to the stated concern?

The Bottom Line

The 2025 NDAA’s ban on “biological males” in women’s sports at U.S. military academies is not a minor footnote in a $901 billion defense bill. It’s a clear statement that Congress is willing to use the machinery of national security policy to cement a particular vision of sex, gender, and fairness—one that treats biological definitions as fixed and paramount, even in institutions that depend on attracting and retaining a diverse, high-performing officer corps.

In the short term, only a small number of cadets and midshipmen will be directly affected. Over time, however, this provision may shape who sees a place for themselves in the military, how the U.S. is perceived by allies and adversaries, and how far Congress is prepared to go in using defense policy as a vehicle for broader cultural battles.

What happens next—in the courts, in academy admissions, and in future NDAA negotiations—will reveal whether this is a high-water mark in the campaign to restrict transgender participation in public life, or a new baseline from which more sweeping policies will be built.