Disc golf debate reignites over transgender eligibility in women's divisions

Natalie Ryan’s 105 career events, 30 career wins and $5,355 in 2025 FPO earnings make her more than a name in a culture fight. In disc golf, her case sits on the fault line between competitive fairness, record keeping and who gets to play in women’s divisions.

The PDGA’s first major rewrite took effect on January 1, 2023, after a year of study by a seven-expert medical and scientific subcommittee and consultation with members, transgender disc golfers, touring professionals and the Disc Golf Pro Tour. The December 2022 policy allowed some transgender women into female divisions only after 24 months of continuous hormone therapy and serum testosterone below 2.0 nmol/L. The association said it was trying to balance fairness and inclusion, and it also pointed to the International Olympic Committee’s fairness framework as a guide.

That balance did not last. In December 2023, the PDGA removed a pre-puberty transition requirement after being named in lawsuits in California and Minnesota. The board said judges in both states had overridden the policy, the legal landscape had become more fragmented, and the organization could not afford to keep funding multi-state litigation while facing a net operating loss. The revised rule took effect on January 1, 2024, and was scheduled to remain in place through the 2025 season.

The biggest one-off exception came at the 2023 Professional Disc Golf World Championships in Augusta, Georgia, where the PDGA granted an event-specific eligibility adjustment at the request of the local organizing committee. That mattered because the event had already been awarded in December 2021, before the policy changed. For organizers, the difference was not theoretical: one rule determined field composition, title access and whether a major championship’s results would carry the same legitimacy in the record book.

Ryan’s federal case, Ryan v. Professional Disc Golf Assoc., was filed on February 22, 2023, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California and terminated on December 19, 2023. The broader sports world has moved in the same direction since then, with the NCAA changing its transgender participation policy in February 2025 to limit women’s sports to athletes assigned female at birth. Disc golf is now caught in a larger national argument, but the stakes remain specific: who tees off, whose wins count, and whether women’s divisions are defined by inclusion or by sex-based eligibility rules.