Don’t let them play you for a sucker. It’s not about protecting athletes. It’s not about protecting women. The so-called “problem” of transgender athletes dominating women’s sports is a ruse. The Trump administration is sportswashing: Using athletics to distract people from its cascade of executive actions on trade, immigration, U.S. foreign aid and more.
President Trump wants you to feel angry about boys taking girls’ roster spots, which is extremely unlikely, so you don’t get angry about millions of toddlers dying because he cut off their aid, which is very likely. He wants you to believe that in pushing the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) to ban transgender women from Olympic sports, as it did this week, he secured a victory for everyday Americans. That way, you won’t think too much about the everyday Americans who will lose health insurance and food aid because of his “big, beautiful bill.” The USOPC’s policy change, quietly updated in a small section of its “Athlete Safety Policy,” removes the decision-making power from the national governing bodies of each sport and requires them to comply with Trump’s executive order. The committee’s previous policy was based on “real data and science-based evidence rather than ideology.”
Look around, folks. The WNBA All-Star Game was last week. Not one player participating was assigned male at birth. Of the millions of men who play intramural basketball in college, not one played his way into the women’s NCAA tournament to shut down Paige Bueckers. The instances of transgender athletes competing at a high level are so rare that each one of them becomes national news: Penn swimmer Lia Thomas, USA Fencing hopeful Red Sullivan. NCAA president Charlie Baker, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, told a Senate panel that out of a half million college athletes, “less than 10” are transgender.
For context: There are around 28 American men who were born with two penises, a condition called diphallia. So let’s assume, just for a moment, that every trans collegiate athlete is faking it. You are still more likely to meet a man who was born with two penises than meet a man who is hiding one just so he can play college sports.
Of course, assuming trans athletes are faking it would be ridiculous. It might sound like something people do. But don’t think about this as a hot-button issue.
Think about it as a sports fan.
Think about all the insanely competitive people you have watched over the years. Tom Brady. Tiger Woods. Michael Phelps.
In my 30 years as a sportswriter, I have been around a lot of those people. I have yet to meet an athlete who is so competitive that he would assume a different gender 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, just to win a sporting event. Anybody who is that competitive would make Michael Jordan seem like he hates keeping score.
And yet, earlier this year, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville told investigative talk-show host Megyn Kelly that “we have entire men’s teams across this country now that are turning trans.” Entire teams! Tuberville did not name them, but he did say this was not a problem in crimson-red Alabama: “Some high school teams in this country—in blue states—are totally biological boys. We get calls all the time about this. Even the parents in the blue states are in an uproar about this.”
Like most Americans, I have always found that the most efficient way to deal with any problem is to call a legislator who doesn’t need my vote. So you can see why parents from blue states would call Tuberville’s office. In March, I emailed Tuberville’s communications director, Mallory Jaspers, with a simple request:
Can you please tell me where this is happening so I can report on it?
I have yet to hear back.
Trump issued his executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” in February. The fact that the USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland waited more than five months to comply with it tells you how little she believes in it. For Hirshland, this was a financial calculation: She does not want to fight people who can cut her funding.
But do you know who will really pay for this? American Olympians who want a clean playing field. The next time Hirshland complains that the Russian Olympic Committee is just a tool of its nation’s propaganda machine, a fair response will be: So is the USOPC.
The decision is not a victory for U.S. athletes. It’s not a victory for women. It’s a victory for Trump, for Tuberville, for anyone playing their con game.
They want you spinning around in righteous rage until you are too dizzy to see what is really happening. The rich get richer, the planet gets hotter, disease spreads wider, corruption goes unchecked, but never mind all that: We stopped Johnny from becoming Julie so he could win a medal! They go this hard after people who don’t exist so you don’t notice how they treat people who do.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as The USOPC’s Transgender Ruling Is Not a Win for Women. It’s Another Trump Distraction. .
