It's bigotry or bust for the Trump administration
On National Girls and Women in Sports Day, the president banned transgender girls and women from school sports.
By Shalise Manza Young
In yet another move that won’t lower grocery bills or help raise wages but will add wood to his always-burning culture war, President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order banning transgender girls and women from female sports in K-12 schools and colleges.
Adding insult to appalling attack, Trump’s order came on National Girls and Women in Sports Day, the annual celebration of female athletic achievement. The Women’s Sports Foundation, started by equality and tennis icon Billie Jean King 50 years ago, co-created the Day in 1987 and has long been unequivocal about its support for transgender girls and women in sport.
Demonizing trans girls and women and stripping them of civil protections under the guise of “protecting girls” was one of Trump’s signature campaign promises. Wednesday’s edict followed a broad – and broadly vague – order he signed within hours of being sworn into office last month, when he declared that there are only two sexes and banned federal funds from being spent on “gender ideology.”
During his administration, President Joe Biden expanded rights for transgender and gender non-conforming students under Title IX, the 1972 act that prohibited sex-based discrimination in schools that receive federal funds and unintentionally paved the way for significant growth of girls and women in sports. Last month, a federal judge in Kentucky who was appointed by President George W. Bush struck down the new regulations, and Trump has since done even more to strip trans people of basic rights.
You’d think, given how much Trump and his acolytes obsess about trans women and girls that they’d be overrunning fields and courts and pools everywhere, crushing the athletic hopes and dreams of cisgender athletes. Nothing could be further from the truth.
NCAA president Charlie Baker testified at a December Senate hearing ostensibly about sports gambling, but the issue of trans competitors inevitably came up. Far-right senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) pushed Baker on the topic, but Baker was unable to sufficiently appease the men.
And then Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked the question that should have ended the argument forever.
“How many athletes are there in the United States in NCAA schools?,” Durbin inquired.
Baker: “510,000.”
“How many transgender athletes are you aware of?,” Durbin asked.
“Less than 10,” Baker said.
Less than 10. And Baker didn’t specify how many of those are trans women, the only focus of MAGA’s trans ire. However, given that Baker said in an interview last month that “there is no clarity” on rules for trans women competing, given different guidelines in different states, the NCAA might welcome this draconian decision.
It’s exceedingly difficult to find a definitive number of adolescent trans girls who compete at the high school level nationally, but it is an incredibly small number. When Ohio Republican lawmakers introduced a ban in 2022, there was only one trans girl playing for a high school team in the state, and the only reason she was on her school’s varsity softball team was because there weren’t enough girls to field a junior varsity roster.
Think about that. It’s hard enough being a teenage girl and harder still in this social media age, but these young people are now dealing with the knowledge that legislatures in 27 states, Congress and now the president have targeted them, even though they’re part of a tiny number of humans who just want the joy of playing a sport and being part of a team.
Given all of that, it’s no wonder that in states that have passed bills aimed at writing trans people out of society, suicide attempts among trans youth have increased as much as 72 percent.
As a mother, I am angered and saddened. As a former high school and college athlete whose own middle school thoughts of suicide dissipated when I found track and field, my heart is broken.
Time and again, studies have shown that participating in sports can provide short- and long-term benefits, especially for girls and women. Studies commissioned and published by the WSF last year showed athletic participation for adolescent girls leads to lower incidences of depression and anxiety versus those who don’t participate in sports, and 69 percent of women who have leadership roles outside the home played sports in school.
It’s impossible to think trans girls wouldn’t experience those same benefits when they take part in sport.
But it’s not just trans girls and women negatively affected by Trump’s order: There have already been stories of parents and other family members claiming girls as young as 9 are transgender. In all cases, the girls were not – they were just successful. Trump directed the Justice Department to enforce his new rule, but how will that happen? Random FBI agents (the ones who are left a few months from now) being allowed to look in the panties of a teenage girl because someone’s mommy is upset her daughter lost? Isn’t this about “protecting girls”?
And we all remember the furor caused by author J.K. Rowling and others this past summer when they claimed Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif was trans. Not only is she not, but the allegation put her in danger. Algeria has criminalized all homosexual behavior and prohibits transgender identity.
Anti-trans advocates invariably claim that boys or men are unfairly being allowed to compete against girls, but a study published last year in the British Journal of Sports Medicine and commissioned by the International Olympic Committee found that among a cohort of 35 women transgender athletes, all of whom had been undergoing hormone replacement therapy for at least a year, had higher grip strength than the cis women but performed worse on cardiovascular tests and had reduced lower-body strength. These findings don’t close the door on the fairness issue but, at minimum, they give reasonable people pause.
Some observers believe bans on trans girls and women in sports are the first steps in the wholesale elimination of Title IX and the protections it offers, which, beyond ensuring there are an equal number of women’s and men’s roster sports in college athletics departments, also provides safeguards for those who make sexual harassment or assault allegations on college campuses. Project 2025 alludes to such a move.
Getting rid of a groundbreaking law focused on equity and equality isn’t how most of us would define protection for women and girls, but, unfortunately for everyone, that’s never been what Trump and his base care about. For them, it’s bigotry or bust.
Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.
It is so disappointing to see how human nature is so immune to change. Since the end of WWII, we have being educated about how dictatorships manipulate public opinion by demonizing innocent minorities in order to galvanize their supporters against a non-existent threat to their way of life. We lionized the "Greatest Generation" as the saviors of democracy against the evil of Hitler and his minions. Yet we have still fallen prey to a copycat autocrat using the same playbook to grab power and is now using that power to do exactly what every other current and historical dictator has done or is doing. Will Americans wake up in time to prevent a total collapse of our Constitutional Democracy or will we end up like the Germans (historical), Italians (historical), Hungarians (current), Russians (current) and Chinese (current) under the thumb of an immoral, self-indulgent and ultimately destructive maniac and his childlike billionaire minions?
It is horrifying how the president of the USA ordered this with such flourish and obvious glee as if he had resolved the biggest threat to women's safety, ever. When all it is, is kicking that one trans female athlete off a team in a four-state área. Folks, if Trump can do that with such vitriol and demonic joy for such an infintessimal thing, and yet be cheered on by millions, then most definitely the worst is yet to come. And he will do the worst, he always does.