President Trump and Republicans are pressuring blue states – and even a few red ones – to end the injustice of allowing male athletes who claim transgender status to steal athletic opportunities from women. And they now enjoy broad public support because Americans are finally seeing through the pseudo-argument deployed by gender ideologues for several decades: “How does this affect you personally?”
The contours of this favorite leftist deflection are no doubt familiar to readers. Whether it be abortion liberalization, redefinition of marriage, open borders, or any other left/liberal innovation, we are told that we must give an account of how such a change will impact our lives in some direct and immediate sense. Otherwise, it’s none of our business.
It’s been a successful rhetorical strategy for decades now. In part, that is because it is often hard to predict how one’s life will be directly affected by big policy changes, and in part because Americans are an easygoing people who generally do want to live and let live as much as possible.
But as the left has pushed harder and harder for more destructive policies, Americans have rightfully begun to push back on the demand that we must explain how a policy impacts us personally in order to have an opinion. Americans intuitively understand that even if a policy does not immediately and directly affect them right now, it will most likely do so down the line – and it is probably affecting someone else right now.
On no issue is this more true than men in women’s sports. A 2025 Pew Research poll showed that 66 percent of Americans believe that athletes should be required to compete against their own sex; only 15 percent oppose this, while 19 percent say they are uncertain. Recent polling showing Hispanic voters swinging to the right cites this issue as a catalyst.
Despite these numbers and despite President Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order, several states are actively resisting, Minnesota and California among them.
In Minnesota, Attorney General Keith Ellison sued the Trump administration in order to keep men in women’s sports. This month, three female softball players sued Ellison – and a look at the state’s recent high school championship in that sport explains why.
On May 29, Champlin Park High cruised to the women’s softball state title with a dominant victory. They were led by “Marissa” Rothenberger, a six-foot-tall male who claims to have been “transitioning” since age nine. Rothenberger pitched two straight shutouts, including one over the defending state champions. Rothenberger has won 14 straight games this year.
Anyone with any grasp on reality understands that a male in decent shape who towers over the females against whom he competes will dominate them because of advantages in strength. It is fundamentally unfair. Video of Rothenberger mowing down opposing batters with ease confirms this.
Meanwhile, in California, AB Hernandez, another male claiming to be female, qualified on May 24 at the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) Southern Section Masters meet for the long, high, and triple jump in the state’s track championship, which was held this weekend. California law allows students to compete according to “gender identity” rather than biological sex.
President Trump threatened to withhold federal funding for the state because of this situation. In response, Governor Gavin Newsom, who seems to be trying to pivot to a 2028 presidential run, and the CIF changed the rules, ensuring that any girl pushed out of qualifying for the state meet by a boy would be allowed to compete anyway.
The way the rule was interpreted for the championships was that any events Hernandez (or another male) medaled in would award a medal to the females pushed out. This weekend at the state finals, Hernandez won both the triple jump and the high jump, with co-winners declared in each event. He also placed second in the long jump.
California’s shift is a clever ploy designed to neutralize the claim that transgender athletes are denying girls the opportunity to compete and win at high levels. And it was accompanied by an allusion to the “affect you personally” argument, as the governor’s office reminded reporters that the number of such males competing in female sports is very low.
But how long will this “solution” last? From the left, trans activists insist that males identifying as females are in every way really, fully female. They won’t accept this for long. And from the side of reality, it’s simply unfair that females have to share the glory with a male who has entered their competition.
As one observer noted, Hernandez’s long jump, qualifying him for the girls’ state finals, though nearly a foot longer than the second-place female, was two feet shorter than the last-place male in the same section meet. President Trump was thus absolutely correct about Hernandez in his warning to California about their failure to obey the executive order: “As a Male, he was a less-than-average competitor.”
Again, these are only the two highest-profile recent stories about males invading and destroying women’s sports. Others this spring include athletes in Illinois, Maine, and Washington. A report last year from (of all places) the United Nations showed that 600 elite female athletes had already lost 890 medals to males competing in the women’s category. The UN report also touched on a subject this column has not even mentioned yet: the injuries sustained by girls playing sports against males.
When there is a fundamental injustice, nobody, least of all Americans, needs to show how bad policies – particularly policies which run afoul of basic biology and the common sense accumulated over all of human history – affects him or her personally.
If you ask, however, about males competing against females, I will tell you, “Yes, I am affected personally.” I have two daughters who both play softball. We moved from Minnesota to Texas three years ago. I am glad that Texas protects my daughters from this very personal attack on their safety and their ability to compete.
But, even if I didn’t have daughters, I would still want girls in my former state and all over this nation to have the very same protections. Liberals used to know this. They often quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
They should take that mantra to heart.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
Read full article here