USA Hockey, the governing body for ice hockey in the United States, has quietly banned transgender athletes from hockey leagues that match their gender identity, according to a newly discovered policy document.
The organization adopted, but did not publicly announce, a new Participant Eligibility Policy last November that enacted major new restrictions on trans athletes’ participation in the sport. USA Hockey’s previous policy, approved in 2019, allowed trans women and girls to participate in competitive women’s leagues after completing one year of testosterone suppression, and required trans men to compete in men’s leagues if they had begun testosterone, while allowing nonbinary players to register for any league for which they met the requirements.
The new policy eliminates all such allowances, permitting athletes only to register for hockey programs “based on their sex assigned at birth.” Trans men who “have undergone any male hormone therapy” are also barred from participating in women’s leagues, however, and will seemingly be limited only to co-ed programs, based on the new policy’s language. (The document asserts that the “vast majority” of USA Hockey programs are co-ed and not restricted by sex, including youth leagues, school athletic programs, and leagues for disabled players.)
As USA Hockey did not make a public statement about the updated policies, their adoption managed to fly under the radar until being discovered last week. Harrison Browne, the first out trans hockey player, condemned the changes in an Instagram Reels post on January 22.
“It’s no surprise that men’s hockey is not a safe environment for gender non-conforming individuals and the women’s side is often the only place for most queer people to play. Barring trans individuals from these spaces essentially bars us from hockey,” Browne wrote in a caption to the post. “Horrible.”
According to the USA Hockey document, the organization adopted its new eligibility rules at the direction of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC), which it says “requires that each sport’s national governing body […] must update and adopt their own policies to follow federal guidance.” The USOPC updated its own policies last year to bar trans women from women’s Olympic competitions, in compliance with one of many anti-trans executive orders by President Donald Trump.
The document states that the new eligibility rules will take effect April 1, 2026. After that date, trans athletes will effectively be ineligible for national teams under USA Hockey’s purview, which includes the U.S. Olympic and International Ice Hockey Federation teams, as The Hockey News noted.
