Trans rights are human rights. Period.
On Feb. 5, 2025, on National Girls and Women in Sports Day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning trans girls and women from competing on sports teams that reflect their gender identity. The measure, “No Men in Women’s Sports”, specifically targets athletes who were assigned male at birth and bars them from participating in collegiate sports. Trans men are, at the time of publication, still allowed to compete in men’s sports.
Trump’s executive order comes after years of legislative attacks on trans athletes. States have passed versions of these bills targeting both college and high school athletes and recently Congress has been pushing along a federal ban on trans women from women’s sports.
The cruelty of these attempts to stamp out human expression and individual liberty should make any decent person shudder. According to Charlie Baker, who is president of the NCAA, there are fewer than 10 transgender people competing at the collegiate level out of 500,000 athletes. At the high school level, the reported number of transgender athletes in 2023 was 15. Of those 15, just two were trans girls. The federal government is meddling in the lives of fewer than 20 trans girls and women.
It’s clear that the intention of these bans goes so far beyond these 20 people. These bans are a chilling warning sign of the direction the country is headed. The anti-trans movement has ramped up to a fever pitch over the last five years or so, with misinformation and disinformation to stoke fear about trans people being central to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. It’s very clear this is the first arena the movement feels they can gain some ground to push trans people out of civil society altogether, which is the ultimate goal.
Let me be very clear: These people — Donald Trump and his allies in the anti-trans movement — do not care about women. They do not care about the sanctity of women’s sports. They certainly do not care about the safety of children. Donald Trump himself has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct, including assault, including against minors. He is an adjudicated sexual abuser and owes his accuser E. Jean Carroll over $90 million with interest in damages for the abuse and defamation. Over the last few months, he has invited plenty of people into the White House with similar allegations against them such as Matt Gaetz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Pete Hegseth. Trump also famously had friendships with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell, who were both imprisoned for sexually abusing and trafficking minors.
The evidence of Trump’s disdain for women and their safety is overwhelming and indicates how nakedly cynical the anti-trans movement is. These are people who have no interest in protecting anybody but themselves and are reflexively seeking to control the bodies of others as they’ve sought to do their entire adult lives.
There is no real basis for these attacks other than the hope that they can make you feel sort of confused about gender identity and capitalize on that confusion to police the bodies of children and young adults — especially those who identify as women, whether from birth or through any kind of transition. They’re hoping to hammer home hypothetical stories about men in girls’ locker rooms to play on people’s fears and manufacture consent to make us angrier and more afraid of such a small part of the population.
These people absolutely know that allowing trans athletes to compete in these sports only would benefit society. First off, gender affirmation through socialization can be lifesaving for trans kids. Allowing trans girls to play girls sports would go a long way to improving their quality of life. Secondly, sports have acted as an integrating force and positive change agent in America for decades. Racial prejudice has absolutely been diminished by the integration of sports leagues and it’s highly likely that the visibility of trans athletes would impact our views on gender expression. These are well known dynamics, and well known by the opponents of trans rights. It is obvious that they want to keep anti-trans prejudice high and obvious they don’t care if trans kids are isolated to the point of feeling suicidal.
It’s not alarmist to call it fascistic. In 1933, the Nazis looted, vandalized and burned the Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin. Along with Jews and Communists, queer people were among the first targets of the Nazis, with 50,000 of them being jailed from 1933 to 1945 and 15,000 of them dying in concentration camps.
Hopefully this is not the path America is leading down, but this needs to be a wake-up call for fence-sitters and equivocators. We cannot “both sides” any “debate” of civil and human rights. Any ground given to the anti-trans movement will only lead to further repression of the 1.5 million trans Americans currently in the crosshairs of our federal government and their allies.
What is to be done? Calling out hypocrisy is not enough. Recognizing hypocrisy can be instructive and even radicalizing, but that is Step Zero in what could be a long, ugly fight for the rights of trans people in this country.
Obviously push your representatives. Studies have shown that 70% of Americans want trans people to play in the sports of their choice. Those 70% need to make their voices heard and push their reps at the local, state, and federal level.
Show up to protests. A rally for trans rights drew thousands in Manhattan recently. These kinds of things feel perfunctory but really it’s a great way to physically demonstrate the numbers an issue has behind it.
You should also be unflinching in your defense of trans people in your personal life. It may seem small, but calling out casual bigotry from friends and family members matters. Feel comfortable killing this garbage at the roots and approach this with the assumption that no reasonable person would want to be in the same ideological camp as the band of alleged sexual abusers and pedophiles in Donald Trump’s inner circle.
Where I end my case is with the media. Publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times have been instrumental in mainstreaming anti-trans propaganda over the last few years. The twee “just asking questions” approach from people who know what answers they want to hear has given rhetorical cover to the most nefarious actors in the anti-trans movement.
The media, and in this case the sports media, cannot sit on the sidelines here. If powerful people in this country want to target a few dozen athletes to make the entire country scared of trans people, it is our job to stand up for those athletes and use our platforms for a genuine social good.
This is an opportunity for sports journalists to speak truth to power and we have to seize on it. If we fail to do so, our silence makes us complicit.
