NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman on Saturday made her “first public comments in response” to an Oct. 27 opinion column in the N.Y. Post in which Angel City FC D Elizabeth Eddy “criticized the league’s lack of a gender eligibility policy and called for the league to adopt ‘a clear standard.’” Berman said, “When we think about our policy, what I can say is that every single player who plays in this league is eligible to play in this league. Otherwise, they would not be playing. And we are proud of every single player who plays in our league.” The NWSL “doesn’t currently have a public policy relating to gender eligibility and transgender athletes, but previously instituted a policy in 2021 that permitted transgender athletes to compete if they had maintained testosterone levels below a certain threshold.” The league “nixed that rule sometime in early 2022, before Berman was named commissioner on April 20 of that year.” Since Eddy published the op-ed, “some NWSL players have become targets of hateful speech” (THE ATHLETIC, 11/8).
NWSL’s Berman addresses player op-ed on gender eligibility
