Since its creation in 1972, Title IX built infrastructure to grow organized women’s sports in the United States. However, since 2022, transphobes have weaponized sports to discriminate against transgender women. Trans panic arguments claim that banning transgender women from participating in athletics is a goal embodied by American conservative approaches to feminism. Not only are these arguments hateful; they’re not made for the betterment of women’s sports. Transphobes are using women’s athletics as a trojan horse to discriminate against transgender people.
On Feb. 8, the NCAA updated its regulations to ban “student-athlete[s] assigned male at birth” from competing in women’s sports, which Trinity applied on Feb. 17. The NCAA made this change in line with the Trump administration’s Feb. 3 Executive Order 14201. By design, this executive order doesn’t explain how transgender athletes affect sports, deliberately using vague language from Executive Order 14168’s definitions on sex and gender.
Vagueness is inherently dangerous here, creating leeway for discrimination within the federal government. However, these orders aren’t restricted federally, opening the levees for loathsome rhetoric to become tangible policy in state legislatures. Look no further than Iowa’s removal of civil protections based on gender in state civil rights laws in February 2025.
Regardless of how transphobes claim their allyship, there will be serious consequences for transgender people in this new era of transphobia. The Trans Legislation Tracker indicates that there are nearly 800 anti-transgender bills slated in 2025 — a number that continues to grow — where Texas leads the charge with over 120. To borrow a baseball pun: I hope they bat well under the Mendoza line.
One of the prevailing narratives demonstrated in the recent executive orders is that transgender participation in women’s sports is an existential threat to women. There are over 500,000 student-athletes under the NCAA banner, a number that Title IX has grown. NCAA President Charlie Baker estimated in front of the U.S. Senate that roughly 10 of them, to his knowledge, were openly transgender. I did the math: That’s about 0.002%. For perspective, the 2024 YR4 asteroid has higher odds — 0.004% — of hitting Earth. AP reported in 2021 that lawmakers can’t find trans participation in local sports. It’s clear that this “crisis” is fabricated from a numerical standpoint. However, transphobes hitched their wagons to drum up misguided feelings towards transgender people.
Let’s use “Take Back Title IX” ringleader Riley Gaines, who graced Trinity with her presence last semester, as an example of transphobic activism towards women’s sports. What are the arguments being made here? When she’s not selling shirts embroidered with “BOYcott” or “Save Women’s Sports,” she’s lobbying Kentucky’s state congress to uphold bans on transgender participation or trying to get trans women banned in chess.
As Trinitonian news editor Katie Amdur reported, Gaines claims she isn’t anti-transgender, instead framing her stance as pro-woman. This is a lie clearly demonstrated when she peddles conspiracy theories from discredited sources about Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif. Sure, genetics will always play a factor in athletics, but trying to systematize “biological” to maintain gender binaries in sports is practically impossible.
Khelief was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman, but got thrashed with abhorrent transphobic reactions during the 2024 Olympics solely on misogynistic observations — implicitly confirming that gender is socially defined in the worst way. If testosterone — which all people have varying levels of — was the only meaningful difference, then gender-affirming care should be supported across the board.
From college to international, it’s clear that these arguments aren’t based on supporting women in sports. People being different has always been part of sports. Would Michael Phelps’ biological lung advantage render him to the same criticism had he been a woman? No, because the same boxes aren’t applied to men.
To put it bluntly, transphobes use sports as a way to discriminate against transgender people, and simply do not care about women’s athletics at large. I don’t see people like Gaines and her cabal of grifters highlighting successes such as the University of Nebraska’s women’s volleyball, which smashed the attendance record for a women’s sports game with over 90,000.
Similarly, Caitlin Clark outdrew men’s March Madness for the first time ever in 2024, and she did it with over four million viewers. If transphobes cared about Title IX as they claim, tennis star Billie Jean King’s birthday would be a national holiday for ensuring equal pay in the US Open. These lists of triumphs will surely continue, with or without the supposed assistance from transphobia.
Putting trans women in the crosshairs is blatantly hateful, and transphobes demonstrated that their beliefs are flexible to cisgender women. Transphobia in women’s sports is not based on facts and is not meant to uplift women — it’s designed to hurt people.
