Fear strikes again: the manufactured panic over transgender athletes

Please turn off the alarms. Chicken Little is crowing like a crazy rooster that transgender athletes will take over the women’s sports world.

The latest fearmongering and spreading of misinformation from the White House through sports media, social media vultures and others high and low lately is at a fever pitch. 

“Transgender” is an umbrella term popularized over the past three decades that encompasses people who, for one reason or another, don’t identify with the gender they were born with or the one they were assigned at birth.  It doesn’t necessarily mean the person has had surgery or taken hormones.

Debunking the Myth with Actual Science

An IOC 2024 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that transgender women athletes may actually have several physical disadvantages when competing. Some of the study’s key findings include: 

1. Transgender women performed worse than cisgender women in tests measuring lower-body strength.
2. Transgender women performed worse than cisgender women in tests measuring lung function.

Trans people make up 1-2% of the U.S. population, and less than 0.002% of U.S. college athletes, and even fewer in the Olympics (0.001) who identify as trans

Trans people make up less than a percent of mass shooters but are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.

 Sadly, trans people are convenient scapegoats for politicians and others. 

State Laws vs. Minnesota’s Inclusive High School Policy

“No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order was signed on Feb. 5, 2025, at the White House, and 27 states have passed laws that restrict transgender girls from playing in school and college sports.

But the Minnesota State High School League allows transgender students to participate in high school sports that match their gender identity, a policy that the federal government claims Minnesota violates Title IX.

However, transphobia still runs rampant, creating an environment of fear, false allegations and discrimination, let alone subject to abuse.

WNBA Arena Protests and the Attention Economy

Then WNBA player Sophie Cunningham, the self-appointed Joan of Arc of saving women’s sports, said last month that biological men do not belong in women’s sports.  The player later told ESPN, “I never once said that. I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sports who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

There have been staged rallies wherever the Fever are playing, both pro-Cunningham and anti-Cunningham outside arenas ever since, including here before the Aug. 2 game against the Lynx.  And Cunningham has acted like Fred Astaire in dancing away from her comments.

Journalist and author Howard Bryant wrote in The Guardian Aug. 2, “Sophie Cunningham is not a rebel.  She’s a sentry.  In an attention economy, where being noticed is the currency, Cunningham is using the attention not to further a cause, but to further herself.”

Where the WNBA and Players Union Actually Stand

Yet there never has been a transgender player in the league’s 30-year history, and the new seven-year CBA prohibits it as well:

Article XIII of the WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement says, “Only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA” but does not define “women” or have any policy on transgender eligibility.

However, Golden State Valkyries’ Gabby Williams said last week, “I would welcome a trans athlete on my team or against my team.”

The Women’s National Basketball Players Association last week released a statement, emphasizing diversity and inclusion, stressing that the organization “will not be used as political pawns.” After that, the WNBA, which hadn’t made any public comments on the issue, sent a memo by Commissioner Cathy Engelbert to teams that the transgender issue will be discussed at a previously scheduled meeting with team presidents and GMs this week.

Retired Ithaca College professor Ellen Staurowsky, a longtime advocate for race and equity in college sports, told me last week, “Why is one of the most vulnerable groups in the United States that clearly is being targeted; why is that American citizens as a whole are not only comfortable with this but jumping on the bandwagon?”

For many, they’ve never met a trans person but I have known many trans people for years, even some during their transition from one gender to another.  To a person, they’re only human.

Living History: From Kye Allums to Political Stunts

I was in Williams Arena on Nov.13, 2010, when Kye Allums made his public debut as the first openly transgender NCAA Division I athlete when George Washington played the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in the Gophers’ then-annual WBB non-conference tournament. 

Allums, now a transgender advocate and mentor to LGBT youth, graduated from Centennial High School as a female and played three seasons as a guard on GW’s women’s basketball team.  In the weeks before the 2010 game in Minneapolis, Allums announced that he changed his name to Kye and was taking hormones to transition to being a male.

Finally, Minnesota GOP U.S. Senate candidate Royce White last week told Fox News that he intends to declare for the 2027 WNBA Draft.  “I’m transgender … I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purposes of … professional basketball,” stated White, who briefly played in the NBA. 

This is nothing but a distraction, surmised Staurowsky. 

“Any discussion about transgender athletes was logically going to extend into an undermining of women’s rights in general, and that’s exactly and precisely what is happening,” she reaffirmed.

Our discussion with Prof. Ellen Staurowsky continues next week.

Charles Hallman welcomes reader responses at challman@spokesma-recorder.com.

Copyright © Charles Hallman