In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order entitled, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” The sole purpose of the initiative is to ban trans girls and women from engaging in competitive women’s sports at the K-12 and college levels.
Are trans girls and women competing with biological females hurting women’s sports, or is it about a few instances where they were favored over their competitor which contextually can be considered unfair?
How many trans women and girls are in female sports, and how many of them actually dominated their sport?
Agenda talking point
President Trump has referenced how trans women are hurting our women athletes like Payton McNabb, Austin Killips, Riley Gaines and more. The gist of the conservative argument is that biological males shouldn’t compete in women’s sports because it is fundamentally unfair.
Jamie E. Wright, a Los Angeles-based employment lawyer, said that “from a lawyer’s standpoint, there needs to be less sort of agenda talking points from both sides and more of the data surrounding around the subject matter because I think it gets lost to people like me who are fully trying to understand it.”
The case of Payton McNabb
Payton McNabb suffered a traumatic concussion and neck injury when a trans player spiked the ball, hitting her in the head. The incident left McNabb paralyzed on her right side and ended her athletic career in 2022. McNabb was a guest at Trump’s joint address to Congress in March.
This unfortunate event fueled McNabb to advocate for the protection of women and girls from biological males in women’s sports — culminating with the Trump administration’s push to ban “men invading women’s sports.”
What makes matters worse, the moment after she got injured, the opposing players and the spiker were on the other side of the net laughing at her while she was seriously injured, according to The Washington Stand.
In hopes of preventing history from repeating itself, she shared her story in a documentary entitled, “Kill Shot: How Payton McNabb Turned Tragedy Into Triumph,” created by the Independent Women’s Forum.
Union Cycliste Internationale
“Victory by [Austin] Killips at the Tour of the Gila in New Mexico quickly led to widespread criticism of the UCI’s transgender policy, with the three-time Olympian Inga Thompson accusing it of ‘killing off women’s cycling,’ and Canada’s Olympic cross-country silver medallist, Alison Sydor, saying it was ‘no different functionally than doping’ as Killips had the advantage of going through male puberty” in 2023, according to The Guardian.
The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) heard the concerns of these female athletes about unfair competition in their sport and they reached their decision in August 2023 with consultation from other national federations.
Their decision was and still is the banning of transgender women who have undergone male puberty from competing in the female category of competitive events. They have renamed the men’s category of competitive events to “men/open.”
The UCI has decided to hold discussions with other sporting unions to collaborate on funding programs aimed at the study of changes in the physical performance of highly trained athletes undergoing transitional hormonal treatment.
UCI president, David Lappartient, has expressed his duty to ensure every athlete has a fair competitive advantage in the sport which is why transgender athletes still have avenues to compete.
Riley Gaines
Riley Gaines raced against Lia Thomas, a transgender female, in the 200 yard freestyle and they tied for fifth place according to Swimming World Magazine in 2022. They both shared the fifth-place podium, but Thomas was given the trophy to hold for the event. The officials told Gaines that her fifth-place trophy would be coming in the mail. The article also states that Thomas is listed ahead of Gaines on the official results page, which meant that she was ahead of Gaines by less than one-hundredth of a second.
Gaines felt disheartened by this result. All of the hard work she put throughout the season would result in her trophy being sent to her in the mail? It’s not like the same thing is happening for the opposing player who tied with her, she actually had the chance to hold the trophy on the podium. She felt like the NCAA was prioritizing a transgender athlete over her and many others.
“It’s almost like they’re trying to back (transgender athletes) more than … 90% to 95 % of the rest of the swimmers who are kind of bummed by and affected by the rules that were in place for Lia to swim,” she said.
She was not upset with Lia Thomas on a personal level. She was upset with the “woke culture” that the NCAA was trying to pander to with the prioritization of a transgender athlete .
As a result, Gaines did the following:
- She testified in support of a bill that would ban trans women from women’s sports before the Kentucky state Senate
- She got hired as the official spokesperson for the far-right organization known for anti trans activism called the Independent Women’s Forum.
- She appeared at the signing of Donald Trump’s executive order banning trans women in women’s sports
What does the data say about trans women in female sports?
In December 2024, NCAA president Charlie Baker testified that fewer than 10 college student-athletes out of more than 500,000 were transgender. This testimony was a result of President Trump’s executive order targeting the rights of trans people. “The order directed federal agencies to withhold funding from schools that allow transgender athletes to compete” according to Laura Barron-Lopez, a White House correspondent for PBS.
Trans-inclusive policies have long existed in the U.S. The NCAA and the International Olympic Committee have a long history of science-based guidelines, developed with medical experts on an ongoing basis to ensure fairness and opportunity.
The reason for the existence of trans-inclusive policies is due to the long standing presence of trans women in sports like Renee Richards. She competed in the 1970s as the first openly trans woman in professional tennis.
“Of the estimated 332 million citizens living in the United States, 1.3 million adults and 300,000 youth ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender, equaling half a percent and 1.4 percent of the population respectively,” according to a 2022 report published by Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA’s Law School.
Now, just imagine how many of them participate in women’s sports; Joanna Harper, a researcher and medical physicist, estimated that the number can’t exceed 100 nationwide.
According to The Story Exchange, studies have shown that the advantages of trans women compared to non-trans women in women’s sports are negligible to nonexistent.
“While trans athletes competing in various sports and athletic events raises interesting considerations of how certain … physiologic factors affect performance, these questions are not exclusive to trans individuals,” according to one study conducted by a group of researchers.
Conclusion
The problem with these controversial events is the narrative behind transgenders competing in women’s sports because it adds to the lack of understanding and empathy for the transgender community.
For example, Riley Gaines would become the center of the trans sports debate in America and it would turn from the narrative of organizations pandering too much to progressive images and ideas into trans people shouldn’t compete in sports according to The 19th.
This idea is very agenda based because there’s minimal to no data to back up how trans people in women’s sports are actually hurting the sport as a whole.
Yes, trans people may hurt our women athletes, but aren’t injuries a risk in any sport? A trans woman beating her competitor in a contest because she’s genetically enhanced due to her internal male characteristics may be a cop-out.
Jenny Nguyen, CEO of the Sports Bra, may have said it best when she pointed out that sports are inherently unfair.
“When we look at elite athletes a lot of their genetic makeup is highly unusual, not considered normal. You look at somebody like Michael Phelps, and he’s got just a gigantic lung capacity, enormous limbs, he’s just built different, but nobody looks at him and says, ‘Wow, he is unlike anyone else, he has an unfair advantage,’” said Nguyen. “There’s such a small fraction of trans athletes. Tiny, that this is not about that, this is about politics.”
Featured image by Karollyne Videira Hubert on Unsplash
