Why did it fall to Trump to get men out of women’s sports?

‘The war on women’s sports is over.’ So declared US president Donald Trump yesterday, as he signed an executive order titled ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’. It bans biological males from competing against women and girls in all US public schools, universities and sporting organisations associated with them. Fittingly, the order was signed on National Girls and Women in Sports Day. In a video of the event, Trump can be seen surrounded by beaming girls in their sporting kits.

The most immediate impact of the executive order will be felt in schools and universities. Any school that lets ‘men take over women’s sports teams or invade your locker rooms’, in Trump’s own words, will risk losing federal funding. They could also open themselves up to expensive and time-consuming lawsuits at the hands of female students for violating Title IX sex-discrimination laws.

The order also stipulates that sporting bodies, which handle professional and amateur adult sports, should meet at the White House in the coming months, with the expectation that they too will amend their policies to prohibit men from playing in women’s events.

The 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games is also in Trump’s crosshairs. ‘From now on’, Trump declared, ‘women’s sports will be only for women’. The Trump administration ‘will not stand by and watch men beat and batter female athletes’. No doubt Trump had those appalling scenes from Paris 2024 in mind here, when the world watched in horror as Algerian boxer Imane Khelif – who had failed multiple sex tests – broke the nose of a female opponent.

Trump’s State Department has been ordered to urge the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to change its own eligibility criteria to be in line with the US’s. Sporting participation, Trump stipulated, should be ‘determined according to sex and not gender identity or testosterone reduction’. Even if the IOC refuses to comply, Trump has a back-up plan. He has promised to keep men’s athletes out of women’s events in LA 2028, by denying ‘any and all visa applications made by men attempting to fraudulently enter the United States while identifying as women athletes’.

We are just three weeks into Trump’s second presidency, and he is already on track to fulfil one of his most popular campaign promises – to kick ‘transgender lunacy’ out of the US. Last week, Trump signed another executive order that would pull federal funding from institutions that provide puberty blockers, hormones and gender-reassignment surgeries to under-19s. And on day one, he ordered the removal of gender ideology from the federal government.

In a way, it is depressing how unusual and novel it is to see a national leader decry trans ideology in such strong and clear terms – to refer to men as men, and to insist that no man has a right to enter women’s spaces and sports, no matter how they identify. It is a sign of how mad the world had become that it has fallen to someone like Donald Trump to restore a modicum of sanity.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.