Trump blocks trans women from women's sports.

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Correction.

We have a trifecta of minor corrections to issue. In Friday’s piece on the D.C. crash, we stated that it was the deadliest air accident since November 11, 2001 — the correct date is November 12 (a typo). In yesterday’s piece on DOGE, we said 51% of Harris voters preferred a smaller government — the correct number was 22% (we referred to the wrong number on the same line). We also said in that edition that scientific research was the #5 area where U.S. voters think the government overspends — it is actually #8 (it is the fifth-least area where voters think the government spends too little).

These are our 128th, 129th, and 130th corrections in Tangle's 288-week history and our first correction since January 28. We track corrections and place them at the top of the newsletter in an effort to maximize transparency with readers.

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Quick hits.

1. Hamas said it would delay its next planned hostage exchange with Israel, accusing Israel of violating the terms of their ceasefire agreement. (The announcement) Hours later, President Donald Trump said Hamas must release all remaining Israeli hostages by Saturday or “all hell is going to break loose.” (The comments)
2. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove directed federal prosecutors to drop the corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams (D), saying the case had been tainted by publicity and was hindering Adams’s ability to do his job. Adams had been charged with bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy, and soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals in exchange for political favors. (The dismissal) 
3. A federal judge in Rhode Island said the Trump administration must immediately comply with his order to unfreeze federal grants following complaints by several attorneys general that the directive was not being followed. (The order)
4. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to deputize some law-enforcement workers in his department, including IRS criminal investigators, to assist in immigration enforcement. (The report)
5. An investment group led by Elon Musk said it offered $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly rejected the offer. (The offer)

Today's topic.

Excluding trans women from women’s sports. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order called “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” prohibiting all participants who do not meet the government’s definition of biological females from competing in girls’ and women’s sports. The order directs the federal government to withhold funding from K-12 schools and colleges that do not comply, drawing authority from Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. Furthermore, it requires representatives of the governing bodies of major sports to standardize eligibility requirements for sports, including the Olympics, within 60 days. 

The executive order is worded broadly but specifically applies to transgender women and girls, referencing President Trump’s January 20 executive order defining sex at conception. Specifically, the order calls sports-specific guidelines that base participation on testosterone levels, allow athletes to compete in divisions matching their ‘“sincerely held’ gender identity,” or avoid explicitly outlining policies regarding “trans-identifying athletes” as unfair and unsafe. 

President Trump has signed three previous executive orders outlining new gender policies; the orders recognize and define two biological sexes, ban federal funding for gender transitions for minors, and direct the Department of Defense to create a policy on transgender servicemembers.

“From now on, women’s sports will be only for women,” Trump said at a signing ceremony at the White House. “With this executive order, the war on women’s sports is over.” 

The executive orders have already prompted a reaction from government and non-governmental actors. A number of government websites have changed or removed information to comply with Trump’s orders, including a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage outlining health risks to gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Following the most recent executive order on Wednesday, 15 state attorneys general signed a joint statement committing to providing “gender-affirming care.” On Thursday, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) revised its policy to state, “A student-athlete assigned male at birth may not compete on a women’s team." 

Trump’s recent order has prompted a wave of both backlash and support. “LET ME BE CLEAR: This. Doesn’t. Protect. Women,” Rep Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) wrote in a post on X. “I’m grateful to President Trump for signing his executive order banning male athletes from women’s sports, because it will protect future generations of female athletes from having to experience what I did,” said Paula Scanlan, a teammate of former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas.

Below, we get into what the right and left are saying about the order. Then, Tangle Editor Will Kaback gives his take while Executive Editor Isaac Saul is on paternity leave.

What the right is saying.

• The right supports the order, framing it as a common-sense policy with broad support.
• Some note that the issue seems to have unified Americans despite our polarized politics. 
• Others say the left’s critiques of the action fall flat.  

National Review’s editors called the order “a victory for women athletes.”

“As long as we’ve had organized sports, no one thought it would be a good idea for men to compete against women, until the last several years. As part of the trans craze, male athletes infiltrated women’s competitions, teams, and locker rooms. The consequences were woeful, and sometimes, men claimed a spot on each rank of the podium in women’s divisions,” the editors wrote. “The Department of Justice is instructed to coordinate and provide the necessary resources to enforce these policies. But perhaps only minimal enforcement efforts will be needed, since it seems that even the most high-profile organizations have already proposed plans to make changes.”

“Not every athletic association or competition circuit that permits athletes to compete in divisions with respect to preferred ‘gender identity’ has the same policies. Some guidelines require nothing more than an explicit statement of an athlete’s ‘gender identity,’ whereas others require males to receive hormonal treatment for a minimum time period and reduce testosterone levels below a certain level,” the editors said. “Progressives aren’t going to give up on this issue, although polling shows that a supermajority of Americans want women’s athletics to be women-only. Organizing sports by sex — rather than the nebulous concept of ‘gender’ — is only common sense, and the executive order is a big step toward finally restoring it across the land.”

In City Journal, Leor Sapir explored why Trump’s action was “hugely popular.”

“Of all the policy areas affected by gender ideology, sports may strike some as the least consequential. Forcing women to share homeless shelters or prison cells with men poses more obvious dangers, especially considering that male inmates identifying as women are more likely to have convictions for sexual offenses,” Sapir wrote. “But sports are important, too—not only because they are a vital human activity, but also because, for better or worse, the U.S. higher-education system showers so much attention and so many resources on male and female athletics. For many girls, excellence in high school sports punches their ticket to prestigious universities and lucrative scholarships.”

“Sports is the policy area where public opinion shifted earliest and most clearly against gender ideology. A 2022 Pew poll, for example, found that while only 46 percent of American adults agreed that it should be illegal for kids to receive ‘gender-affirming care,’... 58 percent said that athletes should compete in the category of their sex,” Sapir said. “By January 2025, a New York Times/Ipsos poll reported, 79 percent of Americans agreed that ‘athletes who were male at birth but who currently identify as female’ should not be eligible for female sports… It’s hard to think of another issue in contemporary American politics where the American public is split 80-20.”

In The New York Post, Isaac Schorr wrote “Trump is not the radical — he’s simply undoing radical things Dems did.”

“After President Trump signed an executive order compelling America’s schools to allow only women to compete in women’s sports, the usual suspects gnashed their teeth… The talking point was as simple as it was ubiquitous: With a stroke of his pen, Trump had launched an unprovoked attack on an embattled community,” Schorr said. ““Balderdash. In truth, it was the Democrats who declared cultural war on their political opponents and waged it unreservedly from the confines of the Oval Office.

“Within hours of taking office a little over four years ago, President Joe Biden had signed an executive order asserting that ‘Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.’ Another way of putting that is: Girls should not have the right to learn and compete without boys invading their most private, intimate spaces,” Schorr wrote. “Now that Trump has undone that evil, we’re meant to take him to be a power-hungry monster? That dog doesn’t hunt anymore. Americans have come to realize that for the most part, it’s not the right that is pushing an agenda.”

What the left is saying.

• The left opposes the order, calling it a cruel attack on a vulnerable group.
• Some criticize mainstream outlets on the left for contributing to public skepticism about transgender rights.
• Others say this is a complicated issue, but Trump’s approach is calculated to do harm.

The New York Times editorial board criticized “Trump’s shameful campaign against transgender Americans.”

“Some of the most deplorable episodes in U.S. history involve the government wielding the power of the state against minority groups: Black people, Indigenous people and gay people, to name just a few. Though these campaigns might have received popular support at the time, history has consistently judged them as immoral, illegal and un-American,” the board wrote. “Rather than understanding this history, President Trump is borrowing from the worst of it… the chaos of these past few weeks shouldn’t mask that in this period, he has also waged as direct a campaign against a single, vulnerable minority as we’ve seen in generations.”

“It should be recognized that society is still grappling with the cultural and policy implications of the rapidly shifting understanding of gender. There are some issues — such as participation in sports and appropriate medical care for minors — that remain fiercely debated, even by those who broadly support trans rights. There should be room for those conversations. But what shouldn’t be debated is whether the government should target a group of Americans to be stripped of their freedom and dignity to move through the world as they choose. This is a campaign in which cruelty and humiliation seem to be the fundamental point.”

In her Erin In The Morning newsletter, Erin Reed said outlets like The New York Times have been “influential” in fueling attacks on the trans community.

“The New York Times Editorial Board published an opinion piece decrying the state of transgender rights under the Trump administration… What the piece conveniently omits, however, is the Times’ own complicity. No other major paper has done more to legitimize the very arguments fueling these attacks than The New York Times itself,” Reed wrote. “No hand-wringing over Trump’s most extreme policies can undo the reality that the paper helped lay the groundwork for them, lending credibility to the very narratives that now fuel sports bans and healthcare restrictions. These so-called ‘middle-ground’ arguments—that a little discrimination was a reasonable compromise—were always a smokescreen for a broader campaign to eliminate trans existence from public life.”

“Even in an article where The New York Times acknowledges that Trump’s attacks on trans people have gone too far, the paper continues to frame issues like youth healthcare and sports as ‘reasonable’ areas for restrictions—playing directly into the very strategy that anti-trans activists designed,” Reed said. “The bans were never about fairness in sports. They were always about manufacturing fear, normalizing discrimination, and laying the foundation for broader rollbacks of transgender rights. And The Times played right into it.”

In The Washington Post, Sally Jenkins argued Trump’s “ban on trans athletes seeks to demonize, not protect.”

“There is a reverse bigotry in the accusation that those who object to transgender athletes in girls’ high school sports or misuse pronouns are handmaidens or fascists who don’t toe the correct intellectual line. But there is a cavernous cruelty, and the distinct smell of autocratic sauerbraten, in the Trump administration’s targeting — no, terrorizing — of athletes who represent just 0.6 percent of the American population,” Jenkins wrote. “How you do something matters as much as what you do. Donald Trump doesn’t just want transgender athletes out of track meets and swimming pools; his latest executive order is calculated to inflict maximal fear and public humiliation on them.”

“Plenty of citizens reasonably object to transgender athletes in women’s sports, treatment for gender dysphoria in the young, or pronoun policing, but they manage to do so with civility and respect for fellow souls,” Jenkins said. “Trump’s order and his language in presenting it seem calculated to provoke hostility and misunderstanding, and they’re liable to poke collateral holes in the civil rights of all of us. That is quite possibly the point: to dragoon good people into a dark place they never intended to go.”

My take.

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• Trump’s order fulfills a popular campaign promise, but I think it is too broad to address the nuance of this issue.
• The justification for the scope of this action is based on shaky premises.
• I support some restrictions on participation in girls’ and women’s, but those decisions are best made at the community and sport-specific levesl. 

Note: For simplicity’s sake, I am going to refer to the debate about transgender women and girls participating in female sports as “trans women in women’s sports” — I will distinguish between women’s and girls’ sports when necessary.

When Tangle has covered transgender topics in the past, Isaac has grounded his take in an idea that is worth repeating here: We should approach this topic with humility, and resist the urge to draw black-and-white conclusions.

Unfortunately, the debate about trans sports is a prime example of how people on either side of polarizing issues tend to assume the worst intent of differing opinions. For those who oppose measures like medical treatment for transgender minors or trans women’s participation in women’s sports, these beliefs are often framed as “common sense,” while the other side is pushing a subversive worldview. Conversely, supporters of these measures view them as a moral defense of a vulnerable group in our society, while the other side is motivated by bigotry. Trump’s order has brought this dynamic back to the fore.

Before I weigh in on the order itself, I want to describe what it does and the authority it’s based on.

The White House frames the order as a “ban” on trans women in women’s sports, but the action is narrower: making Title IX funding contingent on whether a school allows trans women to compete on its women’s sports teams. 

The Trump administration justifies this order based on its interpretation of Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity that receives federal funding. Recent presidential administrations have interpreted the law in different ways, with the Obama administration advising that Title IX protects LGBT students from sex discrimination, the first Trump Administration changing standards for sexual harassment and assault cases, and the Biden administration proposing rules to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity (rules that were later struck down). Now, the second Trump administration’s view holds that allowing trans women to participate in women’s sports violates the law’s requirement of “equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexes.”

Legal challenges to the order are certain to come, and we may see the Supreme Court weigh in on the issue this term. However, the popular interpretation is already pretty clear: This action could be the most popular thing Trump has ever done. Recent polls from The New York Times, Gallup, and NORC found that a sizable majority of Americans think athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that match their biological sex, including a majority of Democrats. 

Most people agree that inherent differences between the sexes create unavoidable issues with how trans women can compete fairly. Virtually all sports have some boundaries for participants — age groups, weight classes, equipment guidelines — that seek to promote competition on the basis of effort and skill. While natural advantages also come into play (see: Victor Wembanyama), we accept those individual differences within divisions.

However, we have little tolerance for “inter-category” differences — those between competitors across those divisions. For instance, sports leagues don’t allow 25-year-olds to play on middle school teams or for any athletes to take steroids. The average person who goes through puberty as a male will similarly have categorical advantages in athletic performance over a female who goes through puberty (even though hormone treatments can negate many of those differences, some traits — like bone structure, heart size, lung capacity , and even just having grown up competing against boys— remain). The idea of post-puberty males competing with post-puberty females feels improper — that viewpoint isn’t rooted in bigotry, it’s rooted in a sense of fairness.

In recent years, some trans women who went through male puberty have achieved notable success in high-level athletics. In 2019, CeCé Telfer became the first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA track and field title; in 2019, JayCee Cooper won the women’s national championship for bench press in the super heavyweight division; and in 2022, Lia Thomas won an NCAA championship in the 500-yard freestyle. In these cases (and others), inter-category physical traits almost certainly gave these athletes an advantage in high-stakes competitions.

However, I don’t think those individual cases justify the scope of Trump’s order, which calls for a blanket ban on all trans women and girls competing in women’s and girl’s sports. For one, the evidence that this is a pressing issue that requires a sweeping solution is scant. At the collegiate level, NCAA President Charlie Baker recently told Congress that there were "less than 10" transgender athletes in the NCAA (out of roughly 510,000). We don’t know how many trans girls compete in high school sports, but it’s fair to assume that it’s a small fraction of the total participants as well; a 2022 study from UCLA’s Williams Institute estimated that 300,000 U.S. teens aged 13-17 identify as transgender, while over eight million students participated in high school sports in the 2023-24 school year. Banning all these teenagers from competing in sports (with no consideration of factors like puberty blockers or hormone treatments) feels at odds with fair competition — that viewpoint isn’t rooted in extreme gender ideology, it’s rooted in a sense of fairness.

What about this situation necessitates federal action? The White House’s fact sheet on the order makes one attempt to establish the data on this issue, referencing a figure that “female athletes have lost nearly 900 medals to men competing against them in women’s sporting categories.” This stat appears to come from a 2024 United Nations report, which itself credits this finding to the Women’s Liberation Front, an activist group that opposes many transgender rights initiatives. Setting aside the bias of the source, this stat applies to all women’s sports worldwide within a non-specified time range. Even assuming this number is accurate, 900 medals across every sport, division, and country still wouldn’t constitute a strong case for federal action on this issue. 

Additionally, the order assumes that every case involving trans women in women’s sports is essentially the same, and should be treated as such. A middle schooler who identifies as a transgender girl and wants to run on the girl’s cross country team is different from a trans college basketball player who went through male puberty and wants to compete on the women’s team, and a trans high schooler on the girl's junior varsity soccer team is not the same as a fifth-year college senior who comes out as a trans woman and wants to compete in women’s shot put. Just as we acknowledge the physical differences between males and females, we should factor in age, sexual maturity, and sport-specific demands when determining who gets to participate.  

The executive order is ill-equipped to navigate nuances like these, and it would be a harsh punishment to pull federal funding in cases that involve trans students participating in sports at any level. When 70–80% of Americans say they support bans on trans women in women’s sports, I’m confident that many are thinking of high-performing competitive athletes like CeCé Telfer, JayCee Cooper, and Lia Thomas. But those examples can take on outsized importance in our minds when, in reality, there are countless more instances of trans girls who can compete fairly in girls’ sports. 

As I said at the beginning, this is an issue that defies black-and-white assessments. Personally, I land here: We should have restrictions on trans women’s participation in high-level women’s sports (high school, college, and professional), where scholarships, records, and careers are on the line. Whether those restrictions can be achieved via hormone treatments — like the NCAA required until its policy change last week — is still an open question and requires more research. In the meantime, individual sporting bodies are in the best position to make that determination, though no decision will be perfect.

At the elementary and middle-school level (as well as high school and collegiate teams that are not engaged in high-stakes competition, like junior varsity or club teams), I do not see a need for federal rules restricting participation. That’s not to say there should be no regulations (shared locker room spaces, in particular, should be handled with care) but once more, those are best handled at the community level. If a trans girl wants to play JV girl’s lacrosse, that’s a decision tailor-made for the athletic conference her school is part of. Ditto for other sports at a similar level. Again, some decisions will still result in discontent on one side or the other — and I don’t mean to imply that high-level athletics are the only competitions that matter — but allowing local sports leagues and schools to make the call is a better solution than the federal government doing it via executive action. 

As with his executive actions on immigration, the president is acting on a campaign promise that resonated with a large swath of the electorate, not just Republicans. But it’s disappointing to see a broad-reaching order couched in language about how trans women’s participation in sports is “dangerous” to other women and justified by a few extreme examples (including some outright falsehoods). I still believe we can value fairness in competition while keeping avenues open to participate in sports (and all the benefits they bring) in many cases, drawing on the input of families, schools, and communities to make decisions rather than top-down decrees. 

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Under the radar.

On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to revise its enforcement guidelines for the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), a 1977 law that prohibits United States companies from bribing foreign officials to advance their business interests. The White House said the law hurt American companies’ ability to compete for business abroad due to overzealous enforcement. Violators of the law can face up to 15 years in prison and a fine of $250,000, and the Justice Department logged 24 enforcement actions related to alleged violations of the FCPA in 2024. A White House official said Trump’s order will pause the law to determine “how to streamline the FCPA to make sure it’s in line with economic interests and national security.” CNBC has the story.

Numbers.

• 25. The number of U.S. states with laws banning transgender students from participating in sports in line with their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project. 
• 37%. The estimated percentage of transgender youth (aged 13–17) who live in states with laws banning transgender students from participating in sports in line with their gender identity.
• 510,000. The approximate number of athletes competing at the collegiate level, according to NCAA President Charlie Baker. 
• <10. The estimated number of athletes competing at the collegiate level who publicly identify as transgender. 
• 17%. The percentage of transgender and nonbinary Americans aged 13–18 who said they participated in a sport between December 2019 and March 2020, according to The Trevor Project.
• 62%. The percentage of Americans who said that transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender in a 2021 Gallup poll. 
• 69%. The percentage of Americans who said that transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender in a 2023 Gallup poll. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just published Isaac’s interview with Bill O’Reilly.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the DOGE staffer who resigned over racist posts.
• Nothing to do with politics: Where the Philadelphia Eagles’ defeat of the Kansas City Chiefs ranks among all-time Super Bowl blowouts.
• Yesterday’s survey: 3,738 readers answered our survey on the Department of Government Efficiency with 82% saying their actions have been mostly or entirely illegal. “Eliminating agencies and departments is the job of Congress. Step up republican members!” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

Studies examining the social aspects of disasters have shown that help from community members outside of official channels is a crucial, and effective, aspect to disaster recovery. The California wildfires produced countless stories of civilian heroism — from helping vulnerable community members evacuate to neighbors sharing trailers for horses to local businesses opening their facilities for support services, the rising local support has spotlighted the significance and necessity of these — sometimes seemingly small — actions. Nice News has the story.

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