On Wednesday, Feb. 5, President Donald Trump signed an executive order preventing transgender athletes from competing in sports that align with their gender identity. The following day, the NCAA barred transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
“With this executive order, the war on women’s sports is over,” President Trump stated during the signing ceremony.
This reiterates the logic used to justify the banning of transgender athletes from women’s sports—to “protect women.”
The argument for banning transgender athletes, who were assigned male at birth, is often based on the notion that they have a biological advantage over those assigned female at birth.
This notion varies based on what sport you are discussing, which was better understood under the NCAA’s previous policy on transgender athletes’ participation in sports, where decisions were made on a sport-by-sport basis.
General policies like this most often have ulterior motives and it is clear through President Trump’s recent flurry of executive orders that he wants to limit and repress transgender people. His policies have included preventing transgender people from joining the military, as well as requiring federal agencies to only recognize people by the sex they were assigned at birth—purely a binary according to his policies.
But aside from ulterior motives, the topic of transgender people in sports is a controversial one that has been debated in classrooms, bars, and even courtrooms for many years.
This discussion is nuanced by questions concerning how intersex people come into this equation and whether it is a relevant question considering how few transgender athletes compete in high school and collegiate-level sports.
Another question is how these policies can be upheld and whether sex-assigned at birth can be determined without privacy concerns. There are also questions about the possibility of incitement of further discrimination of minority communities through accusations of lying about their assigned sex at birth.
The question I present is what it says about our society’s valuation of women’s sports. The idea that those assigned male at birth are biologically “better” at sports oversimplifies the differences between “men’s” and “women’s” sports. This oversimplification reduces women’s sports to an “easier” version of men’s sports when in reality they are fundamentally different games with different rules and dynamics. Similar to the differences between college football vs the NFL.
In recent years there have been a growing number of fans who insist that college football is better or “more entertaining” than the NFL, but the NFL is supposed to be the elite, top-tier level of football. Yet many fans prefer college football because, ultimately, sports are a form of entertainment and they find college football more entertaining.
Viewership and statistics have often been used to justify men’s sports being “better” than women's, but this is also a changing tide. In 2024, the NCAA’s Women’s Basketball championship game between Iowa and South Carolina drew nearly 4 million more viewers on average than the Men’s Basketball equivalent.
The hierarchy of sports is much more complex than we make it out to be largely because we fail to recognize how the same game can look and be played completely differently with slightly different rules and different players. If we recognize the way that women and men play sports differently, because they play in different leagues, we would put more value on women’s sports.
This also leaves no reason to prevent transgender people from participating in women’s sports in blanket policy as it is not simply “men’s” and “women’s” sports, but fundamentally different games.
Another important thing to address is the lack of focus on more pressing issues for women in sports, such as the continued lack of coverage in comparison to men’s sports of the same level and the lack of quality of coverage—an issue that is rarely discussed and has seen little improvement in decades.
This recent act of limiting transgender athletes has nothing to do with protecting women and everything to do with policing transgender individuals, but it does highlight the fundamental issues we have relating to the value we place on women and their ability in sports.
Ace Crawford is a writer for The Setonian’s Sports section. Ace can be reached at grace.crawford@student.shu.edu.
