02 ISSUE IV
MARCH 2025
MARCH 2025
It was never really about sports
After decades of competition that was open to trans athletes, how did we get here? Media coverage of transgender women in sports has something to do with it.
By Emma Jehle
There have been few encouraging moments since the United States formally began its descent into fascism with the inauguration of Donald Trump’s second presidency. Still, one was when Maine Governor Janet Mills shot back at the president, “see you in court,” after Trump, during a meeting of governors at the White House, singled her out and threatened her over transgender girls competing in school sports in her state.
Since Trump took office, the torrent of executive orders targeting transgender people has been totalizing and cruel. Among other anti-trans efforts, the White House not only seeks to eliminate any possibility for trans women and girls to participate in athletics, under the guise of “protecting women,” but even seeks to mandate gender variance out of existence by defining people only by what reproductive cells they produce “at conception” – nevermind the fact that gonads don’t begin to develop in a fetus until 6 or 7 weeks of gestation, and nevermind the millions of intersex people in the United States some of whose bodies may not produce reproductive cells at all.
The executive actions build on the tsunami of state-level anti-trans attacks that began with the 2020 passing of Idaho’s HB (House Bill) 500 – which barred transgender girls in the state from high school sports. Since then, half of U.S. states have banned transgender students from competing on teams consistent with their gender. And in the ensuing years, many states have either attempted to ban or have banned books mentioning queer or trans identities, the ability to update gender markers on legal documents, gender-consistent access to public restrooms or other sex-segregated spaces, and even some or all of gender-related healthcare for trans youth.
Nearly 40% of transgender youth live in states that have passed bans on gender-affirming care, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Many of those states have litigation proceedings challenging those bans. Still, sports bans seem to have been the kick-off, so to speak, for the sustained moral panic (Steve Bannon, a former Trump advisor, calls this strategy “flooding the zone”) that has led to these continued efforts at the total legal dehumanization of transgender people and trans women in particular. Trans men are almost always an afterthought.
Yet, major governing bodies of athletic competition like the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which governs college sports in the U.S., had trans-inclusive policies in place for at least a decade in the case of the NCAA, and over two decades for the IOC, though that framework has evolved over the years. Currently, IOC guidelines for trans athlete participation are inclusive, but rule-making is left to individual sports’ governing bodies. Key to these past policies was established science related to testosterone, intersex conditions, hormone replacement therapy, and athletic performance that ultimately supported the inclusion of trans athletes.
As two trans women rose to athletic prominence in the early 2020s – American college swimmer Lia Thomas and New Zealand Olympian weightlifter Laurel Hubbard – trans women’s inclusion in sports exploded as a political issue and so did corresponding media coverage. Though neither of those women demonstrated total athletic dominance over their cisgender competitors – a commonly cited threat – many of sports’ governing bodies both at international and national levels have since tightened restrictions or banned trans women outright from competition. And just a day after Trump issued his executive order – the offensively named “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” – the NCAA also capitulated, limiting participation in women’s sports at the collegiate level to people assigned female at birth who are not undergoing hormone therapy. After decades of competition that was open to trans athletes, how did we get here?
The answer, like gender, is complex. How trans women athletes are covered in the news, explains a lot. Several analyses of international media coverage of the issue since 2020 reveal that news sources, rather than acting as sites of neutrality and objectivity, overwhelmingly framed the participation of trans women athletes as “legitimate controversy,” used delegitimizing writing techniques to suggest that transgender identities are false, often described “fairness” as something that’s only applicable to cisgender women, perpetuated moral panic, gave equal weight to anti-trans talking points, and amplified reductive, historical ideas about sex and gender as “common sense,” including “male” competitive hegemony – all while excluding trans athletes’ own voices.
For instance, in an analysis of 620 news articles from before, during and after Hubbard’s bout in the 2020 Tokyo Games (which were postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic), researchers found that news media framed her participation as a legitimate controversy, working to “subtly delegitimize trans participation in elite sport by placing it squarely in the court of public opinion” via ‘both sides’ sourcing, relying on faulty ‘science’ to prove ‘objectivity,’ and framing IOC policy and leadership as conflicted on the matter of trans athletes. This matters because how mainstream news media discuss transgender individuals, either in a legitimizing or delegitimizing manner, significantly impacts policy and public perception.
At the beginning of March, the New York Times asked 10 columnists and writers to rank what mattered most during Trump’s first full month back in office on a scatter plot where the vertical axis represented importance (more important at the top, less at the bottom) and the horizontal axis represented impact (negative impact to the left, positive to the right).
The group ranked Trump’s total assault on trans Americans, which includes the complete erasure of legal recognition for millions of people, as the least important policy area and second most positive.
Meanwhile, since her comment, Maine Governor Janet Mills has had six federal agencies putting pressure on the state in the form of investigations or threats, according to a ProPublica report, for the two trans girls participating in high school sports there; a clear attempt by the Trump administration to force states to conform to its policies regardless of state laws. It’s starting to feel like it was never really about sports.
Emma Jehle is a video producer and journalist on the Digital + Video team at Reuters.