The effects of the 2024 presidential election will be far-reaching and will extend into many areas, and encompass many issues. Presidential elections, of course, always have far-reaching implications, from the First Amendment to the Tenth, from economics to geopolitics to education. And, surprisingly, this year, the presidential election may affect American participation in the Olympics.
Why? Because the Olympics largely leaves the eligibility determination of competitors to the various sports' international governing bodies - and some of those are allowing "transgender women" - men - to compete in women's sports, the Olympics does not rule otherwise.
President-elect Trump made this a major campaign issue, and he almost certainly won a fair number of votes because of it. He's bound to butt heads with the Olympics over it:
Donald Trump is on a collision course with the International Olympic Committee over its gender eligibility criteria after regaining the US presidency.
Trump repeatedly vowed to ban transgender women from women’s sport if elected to serve a second four-year term, which would end shortly after the next Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
He also voiced his opposition to the IOC’s decision to allow Algerian boxer Imane Khelif to compete at Paris 2024 despite her being disqualified from her sport’s World Championships for failing a gender eligibility test.
The Republican nominee posted in response to Khelif winning her opening bout this summer: “I will keep men out of women’s sports!”
In the interest of fairness, Imane Khelif is not what we generally think of as transgender. Khelif has XY chromosomes but also some developmental ambiguities; that led to his/her - pick one - being classified as a woman despite the chromosomal presentation. But it doesn't take a biologist to see that Khelif appears to have the muscular development of a male. Admittedly that complicates the issue in this one case, but this case is an outlier and also a distraction. We should not make a policy based on outliers.
The vast majority of this issue has to do with men claiming to be women - men who went through puberty as boys, who have male skeletal and muscle development, who have the advantages of speed, strength, and endurance of men - but who, by claiming to be transgender, are allowed to compete against women.
This is hideously unfair. And the Olympics appears to be turning a blind eye to it.
In the case of gender eligibility, these do not include a blanket ban on transgender women or those like Khelif – who appears to have been born with differences of sexual development – competing in women’s events.
Such decisions on eligibility are currently delegated to international federations, many of which also do not prohibit entirely those born male from their female categories.
Trump’s stance appears to have proven a major vote winner among women and one of his final rallies before the election saw a swim team who ousted a transgender athlete appear on stage in Salem to endorse him.
The Olympics, of course, is an international organization. The president and the American government have little influence in this quarter, other than the final avenue of boycott. We can refuse to send American athletes to the Olympics, and we can refuse to host the Olympics or help fund the Olympics.
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But not so in American schools and universities. U.S. universities in particular accept a lot of federal money; that's a spigot that can and should be turned off. If President-elect Trump is serious about this issue - and I think he is - once he resumes office, the incoming President Trump should immediately undo Joe Biden's Title IX changes, to ensure that only women and girls compete in women's and girls' sports. In our schools and universities, this is an issue we can and should address, and fixing Title IX would be a good start.
This needs to happen. Allowing "transgender women" in women's sports remains a hideously unfair practice. There are differences between boys and girls, between men and women, that are undeniable. Men are, on balance, larger, heavier, stronger, faster, and have more endurance than women. These differences exist even before puberty.
These are facts.
President Trump campaigned on this issue. He almost certainly gained some votes from women because of his stance. Now, it's time for him to act on it - and all indications are that he will do everything he can to ensure that only women compete in women's sports. It will be roundly interesting to see what happens next.
