What the Left Refused to Understand About Women’s Sports

Sia Liilii comes from a big family in Hawaii, the ninth of 11 children. Without her volleyball scholarship at the University of Nevada at Reno, she told me recently, she would never have been able to go to college. So when she got wind this past summer that one of Nevada’s opponents in the Mountain West Conference, San Jose State University, was fielding a transgender player, she rebelled. “It’s not right that this person is taking not only a starting spot but a roster spot, from a female who has, just like us, played volleyball her whole life and dreamt of playing at the collegiate level,” Liilii said.

The story of transgender women competing in female sports is frequently told as one of inclusion—creating opportunities for people to compete as their authentic selves. But for athletes such as Liilii, these rules were a matter of exclusion. Every spot taken by someone with a male athletic advantage is an opportunity closed to a female rival.

Other players in the conference, it turned out, had concerns similar to Liilii’s. In particular, some worried whether a ball spiked over the net by a stronger and more powerful player could injure them. Those concerns would ultimately lead Nevada and other teams to forfeit games to San Jose State, in the largest-scale protest yet by female athletes against the presence of a trans competitor.

More than 200,000 women compete in college sports in the United States, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and more than 3.4 million girls take part in high-school sports, according to the ​​National Federation of State High School Associations. Questions of fair competition tend to resonate intensely with both athletes and their supporters. Sports organizations set rules to minimize unwarranted advantages—witness the restrictions on high-tech sharkskin-inspired swimsuits and running shoes with carbon-fiber plates. But while Nike estimates that its VaporFly sneakers give a 4 percent boost to wearers, the performance gap between men and women is estimated to vary from 10 to 50 percent, depending on the sport. Yet progressives have downplayed that sex difference—which is obvious to many casual observers—because it challenges the idea that transgender women should be treated as women in all circumstances.

[Jonathan Chait: Moderation is not the same thing as surrender]

On Joe Biden’s first day in office as president, he issued an executive order opposing discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Its language did not explicitly address college athletics but declared that all “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” After the 2022 midterms, LGBTQ organizations assured Democrats that Republican attack ads about trans athletes in female sports were ineffective—the issue was too far down voters’ list of priorities, they argued.

Yet by this fall, Donald Trump’s campaign was pummeling the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, with a spot that showed, among other images, a 2012 picture of Gabrielle Ludwig, a 50-something basketball player who had returned to college after transitioning. At 6 feet 6 inches tall, Ludwig towered over her teammates. Harris’s campaign reportedly tested several rebuttals, and found that none of them worked. So how did Democrats move from proudly championing trans inclusion in Biden’s early days as president to finding the topic an unanswerable liability three years later? Why did the left refuse to acknowledge the trade-off between inclusion of some athletes and fairness to others? Why were concerns like Sia Liilii’s so easily ignored?

Many progressives have viewed trans rights as an uncomplicated sequel to the successful campaigns for voting rights for Black Americans and marriage equality for same-sex couples. But the volleyball players were pointing to an issue that affected two traditionally marginalized groups: gender-nonconforming people and women athletes. And the left, which had become attached to a simple, hierarchical ranking of oppression, could find no way to arbitrate between the two groups—or even acknowledge that any conflict existed.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, American women fought for the right to play sports at all. They were excluded by arbitrary rules, inadequate facilities and funding, and the belief that competition was unhealthy and unfeminine. The 1972 passage of the law known as Title IX, which prohibited discrimination “on the basis of sex” in educational settings, began to improve the situation for college athletes. But in recent years, lawyers have argued over what the law means—does sex cover only biological sex, or gender identity and sexual orientation? Almost everyone agrees that, in most sports, men and women should compete in different categories. The argument is over whether the lines should be drawn by athletes’ genes or their experience of gender.

Many articles in the popular press have portrayed the growing visibility of trans athletes as a sign of social progress. In 2021, the New Zealand weight lifter Laurel Hubbard was heralded as the first openly trans athlete to compete in the Olympics. In a lengthy 2022 profile, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas told Sports Illustrated, “I just want to show trans kids and younger trans athletes that they’re not alone. They don’t have to choose between who they are and the sport they love.” Some high-profile female athletes have championed this spirit of inclusion. The former U.S. women’s soccer captain Megan Rapinoe has described restrictions on trans players as “trying to legislate away people’s full humanity.”

Throughout the Biden administration, activist groups waved away tough questions, claiming that there was no evidence of “trans athletes” having advantages. But such generic phrasing is deceptive. No one is arguing that trans men have an advantage over biological males; when trans men compete in the male category, they tend to struggle. The actual question is whether natal males have an advantage over natal females. Liilii told me that when she raised the issue with her coaches at Nevada when the players were deciding whether to play against San Jose State, one of the college staff told her to educate herself on the topic, “really implying that we weren’t smart enough to know what is happening.”

For all the plaudits that Lia Thomas received from some quarters, she also came to symbolize others’ concerns. Thomas was a higher-ranked swimmer in the female category than she had been in the male one a few seasons earlier. She had ranked 65th among men in the 500-yard freestyle, for example; she won an NCAA championship in the women’s event. Greater awareness of Thomas and other trans athletes in women’s sports did not translate into greater approval. If anything, the opposite occurred: In 2021, 55 percent of Democrats supported transgender athletes competing in the team of their chosen gender, according to Gallup. Two years later, however, that number had fallen to 47 percent. Overall, nearly seven out of 10 Americans now think athletes should compete in the category of their birth sex.

[Read: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

By 2023, the Biden White House seemed to be backing away from the sweeping language in its earlier executive order. The administration proposed to give schools and universities more leeway to limit trans athletes’ participation while prohibiting states from enacting blanket bans. The situation remained in flux when the college volleyball season began this year. Under USA Volleyball rules, trans athletes who take “the necessary steps to transition to their adopted gender,” including lowering their testosterone levels, are allowed to compete in the women’s category.

The extent to which hormone suppression negates male athletic advantage is a matter of scientific debate. But when Liilii saw videos of the disputed player during the preseason, she remembers thinking, “The way this person is jumping and hitting the ball—I’ve never seen a woman do that.” (The player has not publicly confirmed her transgender status, so I’m choosing not to name her. She did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In legal filings, San Jose State has neither disputed that it was fielding a transgender player nor identified the athlete in question. “Our student athletes are in full compliance with NCAA rules and regulations,” a university spokesperson told me by email.)

In September, the San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser and the associate coach Melissa Batie-Smoose went public with their concerns about their own team’s trans player. “Safety is being taken away from women,” Batie-Smoose later told Fox News. “Fair play is taken away from women.” Both women told Quillette that they believed players and coaches were being pressured not to make a fuss. The next month, Liilii told me, she and her Nevada teammates voted, 16–1, to boycott their next match against San Jose State. The Nevada players were not alone: Teams from Boise State, the University of Wyoming, Southern Utah, and Utah State also forfeited games rather than face the trans player.

San Jose State kept competing despite all that—and despite a lawsuit aimed at barring the school from the Mountain West Conference postseason tournament in Las Vegas in November. (The lawsuit failed, and the team finished second in the finals.) The season ended in acrimony. “I will not sugarcoat our reality for the last two months,” San Jose State’s head coach, Todd Kress, said in a statement after the tournament. “Each forfeiture announcement unleashed appalling, hateful messages individuals chose to send directly to our student-athletes, our coaching staff, and many associated with our program.” Afterward, seven of the team’s athletes requested to enter the transfer portal. The disputed player, who is a senior, will not compete again.

By the time of the tournament, San Jose State’s roster had become a national political issue. Sia Liilii told me that after her team put out its statement refusing to play the California school, one of their next matches was attended by Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic member of Congress whom Trump has nominated to be director of national intelligence; Sam Brown, the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada; and Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. “That was really reassuring,” Liilii said, “just seeing that there’s a lot of support.” Clearly, many on the right felt that a revolt in women’s volleyball had the potential to connect with voters. Meanwhile, on the left, people who questioned the activist line—including the tennis legend Martina Navratilova, a longtime progressive—were being excoriated for their supposed bigotry.

“People like to say that it’s a complicated issue, and I don’t actually think it is … It all boils down to: Do you actually think that trans women and intersex women are real women—and are really female or not?” the transgender cyclist Veronica Ivy told The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah in 2022. “It’s an extreme indignity to say, ‘I believe you’re a woman, except for sport.’” She added that the enforcement of traditional categories was about “protecting the fragile, weak cis white woman from the rest of us.” Noah’s studio audience in New York heartily applauded Ivy’s words. Sports was only one part of a seamless whole: If you believed, as good liberals did, that trans women were women, no carve-outs were justifiable.

In red America, however, a different narrative was developing. The same year that Ivy was soaking up the Daily Show applause, Riley Gaines, a University of Kentucky swimmer who had competed against Lia Thomas, went public with her objection to trans inclusion in her league. She recalls feeling slighted after a race in which she tied with Thomas for fifth place but the Penn swimmer got to hold the relevant trophy. “It took that personal experience,” Gaines told me. “I hate that it took that. I wish I was more bold.” In March 2024, her profile exploded when she was interviewed by Joe Rogan. Here was an everyday Christian girl talking to a sports-mad superstar podcaster about how the left was trying to deny that men are stronger than women. If thousands of YouTube comments are any indication, Rogan’s audience loved it.

Gaines has joined a lawsuit against the NCAA, calling for a nationwide ban on transgender women in female categories. The ACLU and other advocacy groups on the left have intervened to oppose Gaines’s suit, suggesting that conservative slogans about “protecting women’s sports” are a cover for racism, transphobia, and misogyny. The National Women’s Law Center believes that “the work of gender justice is at odds with overbroad generalizations about sex-related traits or abilities” and suggests that the “over-policing” of athletes’ bodies particularly harms minority women.

By contrast, conservatives have welcomed female athletes who feel abandoned by American feminist and civil-rights groups. Today, Gaines, Liilii, and other female athletes who have spoken out on this issue have signed up to be ambassadors for the Independent Women’s Forum, a nonprofit that previously criticized what it saw as overzealous enforcement of Title IX. In 2012, the group’s then executive director wrote that “what is very clear is that legislation in the name of ‘gender equality’ does not actually make men and women the same.” However, the group now fights to “take back Title IX” by separating participation in sports on the basis of biological sex.

People “love to receive information through stories,” May Mailman, the IWF’s director and a former White House adviser to Donald Trump, told me. “The left knows this—George Floyd is one story that sparked immense societal unrest.” During the presidential campaign, the IWF sent its ambassadors on a cross-country bus tour that started in Scranton, Pennsylvania, under the slogan “Our bodies, our sports.” The group’s ambassadors have also testified before Congress and in states considering restrictions on transgender women participating in female sports. The IWF’s ideological opponents may dismiss these athletes as political partisans. But even if some are, so what? Conservatives have a right to speak up, and the institutional left certainly didn’t listen to the players’ concerns. Progressives can’t expect to triumph by silencing dissenters through administrative pressure.

[Helen Lewis: The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research]

One of the most influential IWF ambassadors is Payton McNabb, who says she received a brain injury in 2022, at the age of 17, when playing volleyball against a transgender opponent. A widely circulated video of the incident shows the spike that hit her, but not what happened subsequently. She told me that she was briefly unconscious. “The neurologist told me that I had a brain bleed, partial paralysis on my right side, and a concussion,” she added. (She declined to provide her medical records for me to verify her account.) Her story is the kind that is invisible to a certain type of American media consumer but achieves the status of lore with another. She has been interviewed by Fox News, Megyn Kelly and the New York Post, and on the podcast of Allie Beth Stuckey, a rising star on the religious right who was described in The Atlantic as the “new Phyllis Schlafly.”

In August 2023, McNabb testified in front of the North Carolina legislature after Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed a law that banned athletes “of the male sex” from competing on women’s teams. All of the state’s Republicans, along with two Democrats, later voted to override the veto. During the hearings, it emerged that in the four years that the North Carolina High School Athletic Association had permitted transgender players to choose their teams, only two natal male students had successfully applied to play as girls. That can be read two ways. One is this: Why were Republicans making such a big deal out of an issue that affects so few students? The other is this: Why did Democrats, a few years ago, make such a big deal out of an issue that affected so few students?

After the 2024 election, a handful of Democrats broke ranks. “I have two little girls,” Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The New York Times. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” His campaign manager subsequently resigned, protesters gathered outside one of his offices, and he was rebuked by the state’s Democratic governor. But many of Moulton’s fellow Democrats were notably silent. “Asked for comment on Mr. Moulton’s remarks, each of the 10 other members of the state’s congressional delegation, all Democrats, declined to comment or did not immediately respond,” the Times reported. Further evidence that a taboo had been broken came on the Friday before Christmas. The White House abandoned its proposed rule change forbidding blanket bans on trans athletes after 150,000 public responses, acknowledging that the incoming Trump administration will set its own rules.

Meanwhile, many international sports organizations have opted to define their women’s division in biological terms. This past summer, Lia Thomas lost her legal case against World Aquatics, which had barred her from the female competition. A leading contender to be the next head of the International Olympic Committee, Britain’s Sebastian Coe, has said that “the protection of the female category, for me, is absolutely non-negotiable.” Those who favor defining women’s sports according to biology feel confident that their side will prevail. “I have nieces, and I have little sisters,” Sia Liilii told me. She said she was happy “knowing that I did the right thing, and knowing that when they are in my position, they won’t have to deal with this.”

[Read: I detransitioned. But not because I wasn’t trans.]

In my view, the way forward lies in an empathetic compromise, one that broadly respects transgender Americans’ sense of their own identity—for example, in the use of chosen names and pronouns—while acknowledging that in some areas, biology really matters. Many sports organizations have established a protected female category, reserved for those who have not experienced the advantages conferred by male puberty, alongside an open one available to men, trans women, trans men taking testosterone supplements, and nonbinary athletes of either sex. Unlike Veronica Ivy, many voters who support laws protecting trans people from housing and employment discrimination don’t see trans rights as an all-or-nothing deal; in fact, a few limited carve-outs on the basis of biological sex might increase acceptance of gender-nonconforming people overall.

Not everything has to be an entrenched battle of red versus blue: As more and more Democrats realize that they shouldn’t have built their defense of trans people on the sand of sex denialism, Republicans should have the grace to take the win on sports and disown the inflammatory rhetoric of agitators such as Representative Nancy Mace, who responded to the election of the first trans member of Congress by deploying anti-trans slurs. As the second Trump administration begins, the lesson from the college-volleyball rebellion is that institutions cannot impose progressive values by fiat. Attempts at social change will not survive without the underlying work of persuasion.

Sia Liilii and other women athletes said no. Universities and sports organizations needed a better response.