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Hailey Davidson has been banned from the NXXT Girls’s Professional Tour after the Florida-based developmental tour introduced a coverage change banning transgender golfers.
The tour introduced modifications to their eligibility coverage on Friday, which can be Worldwide Girls’s Day, in what the tour calls an effort to “defend aggressive integrity.”
In asserting the change, the tour mentioned, “Efficient instantly, opponents have to be a organic feminine at start to take part. This choice underscores the group’s dedication to sustaining the integrity of ladies’s skilled golf and guaranteeing truthful competitors.”
The choice bans transgender gamers, together with Davidson, who gained an NXXT Girls’s Professional Tour in Florida in January for her third-career win on the circuit. Her win ignited one other spherical of criticism for the developmental tour for permitting Davidson to compete, though she met the entire Tour’s necessities to compete, together with common hormonal testing. A number of media shops reporting on Davidson’s win erroneously (and maybe deliberately so) reported that she was near reaching LPGA Tour standing, although that was nowhere close to true.
The NXXT Tour started a partnership this season with the Epson Tour, the LPGA Tour’s developmental circuit, granting exemptions into two future Epson Tour occasions to every of the highest 5 earners on the 2024 NXXT factors record. Davidson is second on the factors record however will now not accrue factors. For any participant incomes the NXXT points-list exemption, the NXXT Tour should have a minimal of 10 occasions with a mean of 40 gamers. Nevertheless, common NXXT Girls’s Professional Tour fields should not at that measurement.
The coverage change was devised after the tour poled its gamers anonymously concerning the prior coverage that allowed transgender gamers to compete on the tour after the met quite a lot of necessities.
“As we navigate by means of the evolving panorama of sports activities, it’s essential to uphold the aggressive integrity that’s the cornerstone of ladies’s sports activities,” mentioned NXXT GOLF CEO Stuart McKinnon. “Our revised coverage is a mirrored image of our unwavering dedication to celebrating and defending the achievements and alternatives of feminine athletes. Protected classes are a basic facet of sports activities in any respect ranges, and it’s important for our Tour to uphold these classes for organic females, guaranteeing a stage enjoying discipline.”
The choice follows an analogous announcement from the Cactus Tour, an Arizona-based competitor to NXXT, to reinstitute their “female-at-birth” eligibility requirement.
Davidson performed school golf as a male at Wilmington College in Delaware after which transferred to the boys’s staff at Christopher Newport College in Virginia. In September 2015, Davidson started present process hormone remedies in preparation for a gender transition. In January 2021, she underwent gender reassignment surgical procedure, which is required below the LPGA’s Gender Coverage.
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