In a podcast with Charlie Kirk, the California governor put his electoral ambition ahead of trans people. But what do trans athletes themselves have to say?
Sadie Schreiner puts a transgender flag in her hair before heading to the awards stand after finishing third in the finals of the 200m race at the 2024 NCAA DIII outdoor track and field championships at Doug Shaw Memorial Stadium on May 25, 2024, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
(Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, stands for nothing besides his own career. Recently he hosted Turning Point USA’s fascistic and rapidly aging youth leader Charlie Kirk on his podcast and agreed with Kirk that transgender people don’t belong on the sports field, calling it “deeply unfair.” Newsom explained that his reasons had to do with his “reverence” for sports and concerns for his two daughters. He then revealed that his actual motivations were nakedly opportunist. Democrats, he said, were getting “crushed, crushed” for supporting transgender athletes. He then affirmed his support for LGBTQ people on everything but sports. Yet this position ignores what is plain to see: The “pro-trans in everything but sports” position can metastasize into not just a broader anti-trans stance, the forcible erasure of transgender people from society, but also line up behind Trump as the savior of girls from the trans hordes.
While Senate Democrats rightly stood united recently in stopping Trump’s trans sports ban, Newsom seems to be leading the way for other Democrats to sacrifice trans athletes for their electoral ambitions instead of making an affirmative case for their presence. This, as the United Nations has asserted, is a human rights issue that transcends sports. Athletic competition has the capacity to unite people. Under the right circumstances, diverse teams can help communities and families stop seeing marginalized people as an “other” and start seeing them as part of the same whole. Sports at its best can challenge the hate constantly generated by the right-wing media machine.
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This, above all else, is why the Musk-Trump administration has been so single-minded and vicious about hounding tans people—with an especially intense focus on trans women and nonbinary trans folks—on the playing field. The GOP’s view on trans people is eliminationist and exterminationist, and it has discovered over the last five years that sports is an effective way to advance its position. And Newsom knows this. These bans were never an issue until Republican operatives made it one. It’s not about fairness. It’s about the Republican Party feeding off hate. The GOP requires constant scapegoats to distract the public from its attempt to rob the country dry. Elon Musk, who both craves the death of democracy and disowned his own trans child, is doing this right in front of our eyes.
Our task is to break free from Newsom’s abhorrent framing. Containing trans exclusionary policies to sports is a fantasy. And the “unfair advantages,” while they make more sense to people the more the assertions go unchallenged, are scientifically fallacious (though I know science is not in vogue right now), deeply caricatural, and widely misunderstood. We are also seeing the voluntary compliance of organizations like the NCAA, changing their once lauded, inclusive guidelines to acquiesce to the Trump administration.
The goal for this article is to start conversations with family and friends for whom this issue has them stuck as to what side they should stand on. (Sometimes it’s enough to ask, “Are you with Megan Rapinoe and Billie Jean King or J.K. Rowling and Donald Trump?”) Instead of Newsom, we should listen to trans athletes themselves, who are so often absent from a conversation that revolves around their tormentors.
When I reached out to the trans triathlete Chris Mosier, he was at the Minnesota statehouse in St. Paul, protesting a bill that would ban trans athletes from girls high school sports. The bill that failed by one vote. I mention that because these aren’t just athletes. They are fighters for their own self-emancipation and dignity.
Below are segments of interviews with ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio who has argued for trans rights in front of this Supreme Court; Mosier, a triathlete and the first trans-athlete to make Team USA; the political sportswriter and author Frankie de la Cretaz; Harrison Browne, the first openly transgender professional hockey player and coauthor of the recent book Let Us Play; Travers, a coach, author, and professor at Simon Fraser University who goes by just their surname; and the former college basketball player—and one of the few college athletes to kneel during the anthem to protest racialized police violence—Max Nagle.
This is what they had to say:
Chase Strangio
The deputy director for transgender justice at the American Civil Liberties Union
It is hard to stomach the Trump administration’s continued attacks on trans athletes in the name of protecting women and girls. What the many attacks have in common is that they do absolutely nothing to invest in women’s sports while making all women and girls more vulnerable to surveillance, privacy invasions, and inequitable playing conditions. At the end of the day, President Trump cannot undermine the will of the people as expressed through Congress. Title IX [the 1972 legislation protecting people against sex and gender discrimination] still stands, and it prohibits sex discrimination in education, including in sports. Congress failed to advance a bill that would accomplish Trump’s preferred policy outcome of banning trans women and girls from sports. The president cannot override the other branches of government, and we should not de facto grant him that power by complying in advance with his lawless executive orders.
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Travers
A professor of sociology at Simon Fraser University and author of The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution
It is particularly painful to see the NCAA, an organization that played a leading role in establishing transgender inclusive policy in sport, fall in line with hateful and unscientific policy attacks on transgender people. In 2011, the NCAA adopted a leading-edge policy for the participation of transgender athletes. Under this policy, transgender women were required to undergo one year of hormone suppression or to have had access to gender-affirming healthcare to prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics consistent with “male” puberty. This depended on access to the very gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth that has been eliminated in many jurisdictions. The International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletics Federations, now World Athletics, followed NCCA’s lead by adopting this policy for international competition with the 2015 IOC Consensus on Sex Reassignment and Hyperandrogenism. Hateful anti-trans campaigns and organizing in the United Kingdom and the United States have pushed back against the recognition and inclusion of transgender people in society, with special attention to sport participation. These campaigns are not based on scientific evidence but rather social prejudice and political opportunism. Anti-trans bans in sport need to be understood as part of a concerted effort to drive trans people out of public life and end our very existence. Anti-trans sport bans do not protect cisgender women and girls; instead, they bring about greater scrutiny and gender policing, as we have already observed in the case of the two women boxers during the Paris Olympics and the hate-filled campaign against soccer star and BBC Athlete of the Year, Barbra Banda, initiated by J.K. Rowling. Transgender people represent normal, healthy gender variation and will not be eradicated by any means.
Harrison Browne
An ice hockey center who played for the Metropolitan Riveters and Buffalo Beauts of the National Women’s Hockey League
Trans people and athletes are being attacked from all angles in the United States. At a time where we need allies and support the most, it’s devastating to see so many sport governing bodies, especially the NCAA that fosters education and growth first and foremost, not stand up for their athletes who have done nothing but want the right to play their sport as themselves. These bans against trans athletes are not about fairness or safety for cisgender women; they’re about retaining funding and money that might otherwise be withheld. I remember being so proud to be an NCAA athlete in 2017 when they actually used their power and influence to stand up for human rights and dignity. What happened to those days?
Chris Mosier
Triathlete, first openly trans athlete to compete for Team USA
Since Trump’s executive order, I’ve been contacted by young athletes and parents sharing their experiences of having their seasons and opportunities ripped away from them. But the disappointment and fear stem from more than just losing access to sports. We know this is not about sports. And it’s not about healthcare or drag queens or library books either. It’s about trying to make it so that trans people cannot live safe and open lives. The truth is, there are many people who support us. Today, on a Monday afternoon, hundreds of people showed up to rally in support of trans youth in Minnesota. In the middle of the work day and school day, people showed up. And they’re doing it across the country. The attacks on trans athletes signal a deeply concerning future: No one will be safe from this administration. Its actions are not based on facts or science. They are for optics. This is political theater, and my community is the first with the largest target on our backs—but we will not be the last. As an athlete myself, I’m less worried about competing and more concerned with the ways in which this rhetoric has influenced the way people think about, talk about, and treat trans people. Traveling feels unsafe. I’m getting threats and hateful messages every day—simply for existing. That’s a clear indication that my presence is more important than ever.
And one note about the NCAA: Executive orders cannot and do not change law. The sports executive order does not change Title IX—only Congress can do that. The NCAA made a choice. They chose to discriminate. It is clear the NCAA was simply waiting for this opportunity to pass a ban and use this executive order as cover—but they didn’t have to. They chose to throw their 10 or fewer trans athletes under the bus for their own political gain.
Frankie de la Cretaz
Freelance sports writer, author of the Out of Your League Substack and the book Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League
While it is encouraging that Senate Democrats unanimously voted against the federal ban on trans women and girls in women’s sports, I worry that they are still missing the point from a political and cultural standpoint. Framing trans participation in sports as not a problem because there are so few transfeminine athletes only serves to erase the transfeminine athletes who are playing, while simultaneously implying that it would become a problem if more trans girls wanted to participate in sports.
The real issue is that denying a group of people their basic human rights is morally reprehensible and illegal, regardless of the size of that community. The other reason that trans women and girls in sports aren’t a problem is the fact that research shows us, again and again, that trans women are not a threat to cis women or to women’s sports, no matter how many of them are competing. In terms of pushback, the best places for us to look are to club leagues. These are spaces who are much more willing to fight for inclusion while also thinking creatively and expansively about how sports should be organized and who they are for. The Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, which is the governing body for roller derby, has always been trans inclusive and has never wavered on that. In light of attacks on transfeminine athletes, it has stood firm in its commitment to being a league that is expansive when it comes to who can participate. This is also notable because roller derby is a contact sport, which often face the harshest critiques about trans women’s participation. Another place to look is to the International Flipper Pinball Association, the governing body for pinball. It, too, has held firm to its inclusive stance (and while some people may argue that pinball is not a sport, if chess can ban trans women from the women’s division, I think we can look at pinball). When it comes to scholastic- and elite-level organized sports, I’m much less optimistic. Despite all the science showing why trans women and girls should be able to play women’s sports, I fear that we are going to go backward before we go forward, and I don’t know how long that slide will be.
Max Nagle
Former college basketball player, freelance journalist
This issue is so frustrating for me, because I feel like as a society, we don’t have enough trans knowledge in general to be able to talk about trans athletes and sports. As a country, we barely have healthcare! It’s an incredibly nuanced thing. Again, I don’t think people are capable of thinking critically enough. There’s still way too much ignorance and misinformation and misunderstanding about us. Because we immediately think the worst—we think unfair advantage, we think ruining women’s sports. That to me just shows how lacking in critical-thinking skills we are right now. It also shows how deeply ingrained parts of the patriarchy are in our society still when we think about male dominance, and the fact that we’re basically saying anyone who is assigned male at birth is automatically and inherently going to be better at any sport than anyone who is assigned female at birth no matter what. And that’s just not true.
If we could start there and then realize that this is not a “one size fits all” issue, we could maybe get somewhere. This isn’t an issue that has one solution, and it shouldn’t. It should depend on age, sport, and level of competition. That’s the short-term focus needed, I think. We are not going to be able to convince people outright that trans women are women so they should play women’s sports. We are a long, long way from that.
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