Sports Was Just the Beginning, As We've Been Telling You
How did we get here? Oh, Don't Worry I Brought Receipts
How Women’s Sports Became the Wedge Issue That Has Led to A Full-on Government Assault on Trans Lives
Well, it seems our time has come. The time, of course, is that moment that a small but dedicated group of journalists and writers have been warning you all about: the complete and total backlash against trans people by the government and society, which was rooted initially in a very successful cultural push to insist that trans people were ruining women’s sports.
The news last week that the NCAA — the governing body of college sports — decided to outright ban trans athletes from competition, complying preemptively with an Executive Order from the Trump administration, which they did not actually have to do, might seem a bit mind-boggling. Why go after sports on top of doing its damndest to legislate trans people out of existence altogether? And why did the NCAA go along with this so easily? Especially when, by the NCAA’s own admission there are “less than 10” transgender athletes out of the NCAA’s 510,000?
Well, because transphobia in sports is how we got here.
What’s extremely frustrating about this moment — as many of my fellow journalists on this beat have expressed recently, Frankie de la Cretaz, Julie Kliegman, Lindsay Gibbs, Christine Yu, to name a few — is that, those of us who have been watching the culture war boil up and over in the past 7 years have been telling you, if we weren’t careful, this is exactly what would happen. Sports was the soil that this culture war took root in.
I get that this might feel niche, maybe you don’t even care about sports, at all! But whether you’ve been following the rising temperature in the women’s sports stock pot on this topic, or not—suddenly, you’ve probably noticed that it’s getting pretty uncomfortable in here!
The below timeline —AKA what my friends and I have all been yelling about for years — should help bring you up to speed as to how, exactly, we got here, and maybe to think about sports as the civil rights issue it is.
This isn’t totally comprehensive of course, and maybe it was just for me and won’t be useful for anyone else, but I’m trying to find a way to remind people of the truth in this mess and sometimes just laying things out is a way to do that.
Take care of yourselves,
Maggie
*I’m starting at 2015 because I think we can trace the last crest of the rise of women’s sports to about ten years ago, which brought along with it a more inclusive notion of gender, LGBTQ+ issues, and feminism, in general. There is, of course, much more history to this, but here is where this most recent cultural shift came in, IMO.*
2015: A Question About Testosterone
One of the first questions about who gets to participate in women’s sports that was raised during this era made headlines when Dutee Chand, an Indian sprinter went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport because her naturally occurring testosterone levels were considered “too high” for a woman. The CAS actually ruled in support of Chand, saying the international federation for track and field couldn’t prove scientifically that having any limit on testosterone for female athletes was competitively necessary. There was no medical proof, in other words, that naturally occurring levels of testosterone would cause an “unfair advantage” in female runners. (If it seems weird that federations were concerned about hormone levels at all, I highly recommend Rose Eveleth’s podcast series TESTED which ran this summer and tells a lot of the complex history of sex-testing women athletes that brought us to this moment).
2016-2017: Remember H.B. 2?
Then, suddenly, for the first time, many people in the general public started to become aware of the existence of trans people. And guess what? At first, there was a lot of public support for trans rights. This was just a year after the Obergefell Supreme Court decision finally made gay marriage legal in this country and the trans rights movement was quick on its heels. This was during the end of the (first) Trump presidential campaign, and the early days of his (first) presidency, when conservative backlash to the Obama years was strong, but so was a sense of collective “resistance.”
One great example of this was a law known as H.B. 2 which passed in North Carolina in 2016. Also known as the “bathroom bill,” the law targeted trans people’s right to use the bathrooms that aligned with their gender identities. The general public, and yes, even the NCAA were vocally against this discriminatory bill, to the point that the NCAA moved seven games of the huge March Madness tournament out of the state in protest — a giant economic blow. This support for trans rights, even within the sports community, extended to players like Harrison Browne, Layshia Clarendon, and Chris Mosier, who all made headlines in this time period for coming out as trans and/or nonbinary and continuing to play sports professionally. Mosier was even the driving force behind the International Olympic Committee revising their rules about transgender athletes to be even more inclusive towards trans athletes (in case you were wondering, the IOC began allowing trans athletes to compete in 2004).
2017-2019: Conservative Backlash
Alas, backlash continued, and more conservative states tried to pass similar “bathroom bills,” denied insurance coverage for gender affirming care, and Trump issued his (first) ban on transgender military troops.
Re-enter, Caster Semenya. Semenya had previously shot onto the scene in 2009 as an epically talented mid-distance runner from South Africa. She was immediately noted by many in the mainstream media, and many of her competitors, to have “outward male characteristics” (thanks New York Times) and for these reasons had, like Chand, been selected for hormonal testing and, reportedly competed while medically lowering her testosterone levels for several years, until the 2015 CAS ruling. In 2016, she even won the Olympic gold medal in the 800-meter race.
Then, the international track and field federation released a highly controversial study to back up a new, even more strict, hormone limitation on women athletes. (They funded this study themselves, and it was, by their own admission, “riddled with errors” and later retracted.) In any case, when Semenya went to CAS to fight these regulations, the court sided with the athletics federation. (If you’re curious about reading more in-depth on this particular issue, and how little logical sense it makes, Chapter 6 of my book goes into the errors and the context of these studies in more detail, with footnotes!)
On the public stage, Semenya seemed to open the door back up in the sports world to the idea that some bodies were simply not allowed to exist when it came to women’s sports.
2019: Trans Women Athletes Are Vilified Along the Political Spectrum
All of that 2016, anti-H.B. 2, anti-Trump goodwill had progressed into many more “blue states” having extremely inclusive school sports policies, which allowed youth to participate in sports that aligned with their gender identities.
But one such state, Connecticut, became a hotbed of controversy when two young Black transgender women athletes achieved some success at track meets. Katie Barnes, at ESPN, covered this story in-depth at the time. Their book Fair Play, goes even more deeply into how this particular moment, when a Title IX case was filed against the state of Connecticut, citing these two young transgender women athletes, to supposedly protect a group of cisgender young women athletes, was a huge break in the issue away from a “liberal vs conservative” one to something more complicated.
Suddenly, smaller federations saw openings to begin crafting policies that were exclusionary, because they could frame it in this manner of: Protecting women’s competitive spaces. One place I saw this happen early on was in the (conservative and problematic) USA Powerlifting community when they banned JayCee Cooper from participating in a sanctioned meet and then moved to ban all transgender women from competition.
2020: States Saw Their Opportunity
On March 30, 2020, Idaho became the first state in the nation to bar transgender girls and women from participating in school athletics at any level. Julie Kliegman wrote for Sports Illustrated at the time, “Girls and women who compete in youth, high school and college sports, whether they’re transgender or cisgender, will be subject to being challenged by competitors on their biological sex—in essence, forced to prove their womanhood. If found to not be ‘female,’ they would not be able to compete with girls and women.”
The following year, eight more states had laws banning transgender athletes from participating in school sports, by 2023, the total was 23 states, today it stands at 26. The issue was one Donald Trump cheered on in his waning days of his first term, and even after his presidency. Julie Kleigman, writing in Sports Illustrated in March 2021 about the cultural tide turning against trans athletes: “It’s no coincidence that sports are proving a particularly popular and effective cudgel for legislators targeting transgender civil rights. It’s a sentimental pastime to which nearly everyone has some connection. Sports and cultural issues, of course, have always been inseparable: from Muhammad Ali’s anti–Vietnam War stance, to the implementation of Title IX, to Colin Kaepernick’s protests against police brutality.”
2021: Support for Trans Athletes Began to Waver
In 2021, things started to get a little more tricky. While many were still being vocally supportive of transgender athletes, from college athletes who wanted the NCAA to take action against states with trans athlete bans, as they had in 2017 over the bathroom bills, to a Hulu documentary that focused on the plight of young transgender athletes from a highly sympathetic lens, the faction of support was also splintering. Regardless of the fact that many of these state laws were targeting young children who just wanted to participate in school activities and had nothing to do with competitive fairness, as Katie Barnes wrote for ESPN.
In Feb. 2021, a group of former athletes and advocates for women’s sports came together at a press conference to announce they had created the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group. As Frankie de la Cretaz reported for Them, the group, which aimed to:
influence policy regarding trans inclusion in girls’ sports, held its first press conference to introduce the world to what they said was a “balanced” and “science-based” proposal for “preserving girls’ and women’s sport and accommodating transgender athletes.”
The problem was that this was a group of six cisgender former athletes and advocates, some of whom had made discriminatory statements about trans women athletes in the past. Though the group struggled to answer even basic press questions about transgender athletes, they were hugely influential in the world of women’s sports, and began to court public opinion through op-eds and on social media, drumming up fear and chaos around the issue of trans women and girls in sport. Having otherwise progressive women who were huge supporters of women’s sports suddenly taking this “just asking questions” approach opened the door to a huge shift in the greater cultural conversation around transgender athletes, and eventually, the general public, as Lindsay Gibbs reported on extensively at the time.
2022: Enter, Lia Thomas
In December 2021, Lia Thomas began to make headlines. The swimmer for UPenn began to undergo hormone replacement therapy, AKA medically transitioning, in 2019. According to all of the rules at the time, within the NCAA and USA Swimming, she was allowed to compete in the women’s field. Suddenly, because she started winning, this formerly mostly theoretical issue had a target. Lia Thomas, though competing in women’s college swimming in the Ivy League, not typically a place for any mainstream media coverage, was suddenly taking over news casts. Fox News aired 32 segments attacking Thomas in a matter of 5 weeks. Frankie de la Cretaz reported for The Nation, that CNN spent nearly 15 minutes between December 2021 and February 2022 criticizing Thomas, “but less than two minutes discussing the dozens of bills being introduced across the country banning trans people from sports.”
The Women’s Sports Policy Working Group went all in. Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a former Olympic gold-medalist swimmer, and founding member of WSPWG orchestrated a letter signed anonymously by 16 of Thomas’s teammates to send to the NCAA arguing Thomas should not be allowed to compete. 300-plus NCAA swimmers signed a letter in support of Thomas, however. If you know Lia Thomas’s name but never read any of the interviews she did after finishing competing, I highly recommend you do so. Sports Illustrated has one. As does ESPN.
2022: Federations Begin to Turn Against Trans Inclusion
The NCAA announced in January 2022 that they would no longer have a blanket inclusion policy when it came to transgender athletes, and would instead defer to the criteria for inclusion set by the individual sport governing bodies.
Shortly after, the International Olympic Committee, made a similar announcement. Although, the IOC’s framework suggested that federations should be more inclusive to trans athletes and only have exclusionary rules that are based in science, but as Frankie de la Cretaz wrote in Sports Illustrated, it left the door open to federations to make the ultimate calls, and many continued to rely on unproven testosterone levels.
It didn’t take long for federations that control international swimming, track and field, rugby, and cycling to outright ban transgender athletes and/or make far more exclusive rules for transgender athlete inclusion, which the journal Science wrote were “highly discriminatory and not based in evidence.”
2023: Gender-Affirming Care Gets the Same Playbook
Arkansas, Arizona, and Alabama, all states which had already enacted trans sports bans, passed bans in 2021 and 2022 on gender-affirming health care for trans youth. Once these laws went through, the dominoes fell, with 19 more states passing laws blocking young people from accessing life-saving medical care in 2023. Many of those reporting on these attacks noted that it seemed that once public opinion had swayed against trans athletes, fear-based media coverage of a similar ilk led many to “question” the safety of gender-affirming care, despite this care being considered best practice according to all of the major medical institutions. The arguments felt familiar.
Today, 26 states have transgender medical care bans in place, (nearly the same list of states as have banned trans youth from school sports), though these laws have been challenged in courts all the way up to the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule on this case in spring of 2025.
2024: Trump’s Resurgence, Campaigns on “Protect Women’s Sports”
By the time Trump was the obvious nominee for President, transgender people’s very existence had been highly politicized, to say the least. The winningest issue when it came to the court of public opinion was the issue of keeping trans women out of women’s sports, so that’s what Trump and many other Republicans ran on, or scored political points with, in 2024.
Meanwhile, trans athletes continued to speak out about just wanting to be normal kids, to live without being discriminated against, and to play the sports they love and sometimes, yes, excelled at. And sports federations just continued to make it harder and harder for trans people, and especially trans women and girls, to participate in any sports, from rock climbing, to disc golf, to chess.
2025: Here We Are, With No One Protecting Women’s Sports at All
Yes, on International Girls and Women in Sports Day, President Trump 2.0 signed an Executive Order banning all transgender girls and women from school sports, surrounded by sweet, smiling, onlooking young girls. While this order isn’t technically legally binding, it has already caused harm, as Julie Kliegman wrote for Slate. The NCAA took no time at all to follow suit in updating their bylaws to outright ban trans women from NCAA sports. More schools, states, and federations could follow suit, acquiescing on this issue to avoid losing funding or going to court. U.S. Congress is moving to make Trump’s order a law the old -fashioned way, too, as Michael Waters writes for Defector.
So, does all of this effort and energy to push trans women out of sport (and potentially entirely out of existence) mean more support will be given to equality for women’s sports? Obviously not. As the Dept. of Education announced yesterday it would be rescinding weeks old Biden-era guidance that ordered schools to equally distribute NIL money to college athletes, citing Title IX. So, schools now, apparently don’t need to give women college athletes equal funding at all. Thanks to Nancy Armour for putting this bluntly: “It was never about protecting women’s sports.”
That’s obvious, now, of course, given the full onslaught of laws and executive orders and changes in policy aimed at erasing transgender people not just from sports, but from our society in general. Sports was just where it all started.
Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.
You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens
You can order my book Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books) from your favorite local bookstore, request it from your local library, or push this quick order button from Bookshop.org. If you’ve read it, I’d love if you’d leave it a glowing review at Amaz*n or Go*dReads. I’ve heard that it makes a great gift for a feminist, runner, or history buff in your life. Also, a good sneaky way to get people who might not be thinking about gender, to think more broadly about gender! Shhh, don’t tell!
This is so good. Thank you.
Really well said. 💔