Column: Trump Should Focus on Women’s Sports Equity

Column: Sports editor Andi Revesz reflects on President Trump’s recent executive order banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.

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Trum's executive order — signed on Feb. 5. — will have potential impacts on  schools that refuse to comply with the order, such as withdrawing federal funding.
Trum's executive order — signed on Feb. 5. — will have potential impacts on schools that refuse to comply with the order, such as withdrawing federal funding.

On National Girls and Women in Sports Day Feb. 5, President Donald Trump signed an executive order officially banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.

This ban extends to educational and athletic programs at the high school and collegiate levels in line with new interpretations of Title IX law put in place by the Trump administration. 

The administration declared sex as the “immutable biological classification as either male or female,” and it isn’t a synonym for gender identity, according to NBC News. The declaration reverses an executive order signed by President Joe Biden in April, which interpreted “sex” in Title IX to mean “gender identity.”

Originally signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1972 as a part of the Education Amendments, Title IX prohibits sex-based discrimination in education and education-related activities.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said she believes the order “upholds the promise of Title IX” and requires immediate enforcement from schools and athletic associations. 

The executive order authorizes the U.S. Department of Education — if it still exists when you’re reading this — to penalize schools allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports programs, The Associated Press reported, citing it as a Title IX violation with the potential of removing their federal funding. 

The National Collegiate Athletic Association President Charlie Booker said the NCAA’s Board of Governors is reviewing the order and will “take necessary steps to align NCAA policy in the coming days, subject to further guidance from the administration,” The AP reported.

Booker said there are fewer than 10 known transgender athletes currently playing at the collegiate level, The AP reported. Out of 544,000 athletes competing across 19,000 schools, only 0.000018% of collegiate athletes are transgender. 

Why is the administration so focused on these individuals, when they should instead be looking at and addressing the inequalities within women’s sports? 

The executive order states entities who “deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities” should be penalized. That declaration ignores the fact that women and girls have been fighting since the original development of Title IX for fair opportunities within all levels of athletics. 

When signing the executive order, Trump said, “the war on women’s sports is over.” This is far from the truth. 

The concern the Trump administration should be focusing on is making men’s and women’s sports equal and holding athletic associations accountable for a lack of equal opportunity — instead of taking away the right of sport for someone based on their identity. 

At the conclusion of the college basketball season last year, I wrote a column about how the NCAA doesn’t treat men’s and women’s basketball equally. It was based on discrepancies which surfaced during the March Madness tournament, but inequality can be found across all sports. 

A 2022 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office found 93% of colleges and universities don’t give women a proportional opportunity to play sports as they do men. This is a clear and direct violation of Title IX, and it’s something the Department of Education should be enforcing instead of stigmatizing transgender athletes. 

An in-depth analysis conducted by Champion Women — using data from the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act —  indicated colleges and universities would need to create an additional 225,568 opportunities for women athletes to officially make men and women equal. 

The analysis also revealed women receive $1.1 billion less in athletic scholarships than men. These two statistical findings reveal blatant discrepancies happening right now that are being ignored by the Department of Education.

If the U.S. government — particularly the Trump administration — wants to focus on creating equality within women’s sports, they should focus on the inequalities that exist between men’s and women’s sports and less on taking away opportunities to play from transgender individuals.

  • Andi Revesz is a third-year student studying Multimedia Journalism, Sport Management and Visual Communications and is originally from Trenton, Michigan. This is her second year on staff and first year as Sports Editor. In her free time, Andi enjoys listening to music, watching sports and spending time with her dad and brother.

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