Unsportsmanlike conduct

Future historians will write about the history of the movement to normalize transgenderism in America. Interestingly, two males who eventually identified as women turn out to be pivotal to the story. The first of these athletes helped make transgenderism a national phenomenon. Because of the second athlete, transgenderism is now losing much of the cultural territory it captured in the 2010s.

Bruce Jenner has been famous for his entire adult life. He became a household name when he won the gold medal in the decathlon at the 1976 Summer Olympics. Like many elite athletes, Jenner became a celebrity endorser of various products, most notably the breakfast cereal Wheaties. He also appeared in various films and television programs. For over a decade in the 2000s and 2010s, Jenner starred on the reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians, where he became a celebrity among a new generation who never knew him as one of the best-known athletes in America.

In the summer of 2015, Jenner identified publicly as a woman, first in a television interview with Diane Sawyer, then in a cover story for Vanity Fair. Jenner said he had struggled with gender dysphoria since he was young and claimed he felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body. He changed his name to Caitlyn Jenner, adopted feminine pronouns, and eventually underwent sex reassignment surgery to create the appearance that he was a woman.

For about a decade, it seemed like Bruce Jenner represented a tipping point. Transgenderism became one of the agendas represented in the increasingly ubiquitous acronym LGBTQ. The Obama Administration mandated that public schools allow students to use the bathroom or locker room that corresponds with their gender identity rather than their biological sex.

Progressive communities adopted Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) laws to enforce the normalization of transgenderism, while left-wing politicians tried to codify SOGI into federal civil rights legislation.

Transgender characters also began to appear in numerous novels, films, and television shows. Drag Queen Story Hour and similar initiatives became increasingly common. While the legislative fortunes of transgenderism ebbed and flowed based upon congressional and presidential elections, transgender activists seemed to be gaining ground in the public imagination.

For a time, the second athlete, William Thomas, became a poster child for transgender advances in American society. Thomas wasn’t an elite athlete like Jenner, but he was good enough to swim for the University of Pennsylvania, a NCAA Division I program. During his junior year, Thomas began to identify as a woman and adopted the new name Lia Thomas. After undergoing hormone therapy, Thomas was allowed to swim for the women’s team. In 2022, Thomas won a national championship in the women's 500-yard freestyle.

While Jenner seemed like a tipping point, Thomas represented a reality check. Progressive activists celebrated Thomas’s win, but many Americans realized that allowing biological men to compete in women’s athletics is unjust. Riley Gaines, a University of Kentucky swimmer who competed against Thomas at the 2022 National Championship, became the face of the movement to preserve women’s athletics for women. Numerous states passed laws barring men from competing in women’s sports at the high school level. In the spring of 2024, the National Association for Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) banned men from women’s sports. Carl Trueman argued perceptively that the issue of women’s athletics was changing people’s minds about transgenderism. Donald Trump was elected to a second non-consecutive term in part because he was the candidate of gender sanity.

In February 2025, Trump issued an executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which states “it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.” The order updated NCAA eligibility requirements to align with biological sex. The Department of Education Office for Civil Rights began investigating the University of Pennsylvania for allowing Thomas to compete as a woman and froze over $175 million in federal funding.

On July 1, university president Larry Jameson wrote a letter announcing the investigation was resolved. Jameson acknowledged that female student-athletes were at a competitive disadvantage during the 2021-2022 season, apologized to those women, and updated school athletic records to reflect current NCAA eligibility standards.

We should welcome this turn of events. Secular higher education is too often out of touch with both biology and morality. Whether the issue is transgenderism or anti-Semitism, President Trump, conservative governors, and a growing number of state legislatures are compelling universities to take the concerns of ordinary Americans seriously. Conservatives should celebrate every wise use of political power to enforce just policies that promote human flourishing. It’s unjust for males to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. That so many educators don’t see that reflects a malformed view of justice informed more by progressive identity politics than God’s design, or even basic common sense.

Editor’s note: This column has been corrected to note that Lia Thomas underwent hormone therapy, not sex reassignment surgery, prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania women's swim team.