(The Center Square) – North Carolina’s two senators and 23 Republicans are calling on the association’s president to ban men from participating in women’s sports in the NCAA.

U.S. Senators Thom Tillis and Ted Budd signed a letter to NCAA President Charlie Baker on Tuesday.

The minority party lawmakers in the chamber called on Baker and his nearly $1 billion nonprofit organization, which represents 1,098 schools, to follow the lead of the NAIA, the Court of Arbitration for International Sport and more than 20 states in protecting women’s sports.

While the senators stop short of calling the NCAA a hypocrite, they say the rules banning testosterone as a performance-enhancing drug are “intellectually dishonest.”

A copy of the NCAA’s audited financial statements show that revenues in 2023 were $1.3 billion and net assets were $870 million.

The nearly 20,000 teams include nearly half a million college athletes.

The senators wrote: “The science is clear. Men have innate athletic advantages over women due to their anatomy and biology – including larger hearts, higher red blood cell counts, greater lung capacity, longer endurance, greater muscle mass, differences in bone density and geometry, and lower body fat.”

“If you compare the athletic performance of adult men with the athletic performance of adult women in sports that require endurance, muscular strength, speed and power, men outperform women by 10 to 30%.”

The lawmakers wrote: “There is a consensus that male hormones give athletes a material and competitive advantage in sports. It is intellectually dishonest to allow biological males to compete in women’s sports while considering testosterone to be a performance enhancer. These facts can no longer be ignored by the NCAA.”

The letter was written by Senators Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, the latter a former college football coach.

There were also two signatures on the letter from Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Idaho. There were no Democrats, and 26 Republicans did not sign.

In Tillis and Budd’s home state, there were strong opponents of the Title IX changes, most notably from Payton McNabb, an ambassador for the Independent Women’s Forum, and several college-level officials, including nationally recognized basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell.

Kylee Alons, a two-time NCAA champion and 31-time All-American at NC State, is one of 16 college athletes suing the NCAA for allowing men posing as women to compete against them and use the same locker rooms.

The letter is supported by Riley Gaines, a 12-time All-American swimmer at Kentucky, as well as Concerned Women for America, Heritage Action, the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, the Independent Women’s Forum, the Independent Women’s Law Center, Champion Women, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and the Our Bodies, Our Sports Coalition.

Gaines is a plaintiff along with Alons in the lawsuit against the NCAA.

Nancy Hogshead, Olympian and founder and CEO of Champion Women, said, “I was at the NCAA meeting when Pat Griffin and Helen Carroll presented their transgender inclusion policy for adoption. We were told that a year of cross-sex hormones would take away the advantage of men who wanted to compete with women. We were assured that the science was clear. Years later, we now know that the science the NCAA relied on was wrong and that newer research shows that no hormones or surgery can threaten the male athletic advantage. The NCAA should recognize the now well-established science and change its policy to protect women’s sports.”