President Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to ban biologically male athletes who identify as transgender from women’s sports. This policy is so overwhelmingly commonsensical and popular that even CNN’s polling found 79% of people support this general idea. But one group is melting down over Trump’s executive order: radical LGBT activists.
For example, a spokesman for the left-wing Human Rights Campaign falsely said Trump’s executive order “will attempt to ban transgender youth from participating in sports” and claimed that it amounts to an “attack on LGBTQ+ youth.”
Another left-wing activist organization, GLAAD, blasted Trump’s executive order as an “inaccurate and incoherent piece of paper” and said, “All women and girls, including transgender women and girls, should be welcome to play sports if they want.” Bizarrely, GLAAD warned journalists to avoid apparently “offensive” terminology such as “biological male” or “biological female” in their reporting about this issue.
Transgender athlete and activist Chris Mosier went on CNN and falsely claimed that “there is no evidence that trans athletes have an advantage over anyone else in sports.” Mosier dismissed the backlash against transgender women, who are biologically male, competing in women’s sports as “an obsession with trans peoples’ bodies.”
Almost everything about this backlash is wrong, and it shows just how out of touch and extreme the LGBT activist community has become.
First and foremost, no one is being banned from playing sports. Transgender athletes who identify as girls can still play sports, just in the male division. And, importantly, transgender boys, who are born biologically female, are still being allowed to participate in boys’ sports — because they’re only putting themselves at a disadvantage. This suggests that this policy isn’t, in fact, motivated by targeting transgender people but really is about fairness and safety.
And, despite what activists insist, this policy move doesn’t involve the violation of anyone’s rights. There is no “right” to play in a sports league for the sex to which you do not belong. Male athletes are, by definition, excluded from female-only sports. Transgender-identifying biological males are not being singled out or treated differently — they’re being treated exactly the same as other members of their biological sex in a policy area that is only concerned with biological sex, not self-perceived “identity.”
It is a simple fact that biological males have physical differences that confer a large advantage in most sports. That is why sex-separated leagues exist in the first place. And while these differences can be reduced by medical gender transition, such as hormone therapy, they are not fully eliminated.
It is not crazy or bigoted to want to preserve female-only sports. What’s actually crazy and deeply radical is denying objective, scientific reality, as Mosier so blatantly does, to push an extreme gender ideology at the expense of young girls, who have lost out on medals and scholarships and even been injured by male competitors.
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To be fair, progressive activists are correct when they point out that there is a relatively small number of transgender athletes participating in women’s sports. Yet that number is only growing, and regardless, this debate is really about the basic principle.
LGBT organizations would have a much better shot of convincing everyday people to treat lesbian, gay, and transgender people with dignity and acceptance if they could make commonsense concessions, such as the preservation of women’s sports as female-only, and didn’t so openly and so brazenly deny biological reality.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.