Media Construct Their Own Reality for Trans Athletes

Last week, I wrote about how the legacy media — including an outlet where I previously worked as a fact-checker on the opinion team, USA Today — published unfounded claims in defense of boxer Imane Khelif under the guise of “fact-checking” during the Paris Olympics in 2024. One example of the supposed “fact check” articles comes from the LGBTQ+ organization GLAAD, which claimed that “Imane Khelif is a cisgender woman” and that “it is not verified that Imane Khelif has a variation in sex traits or DSDs,” even though verifying the former disproves the latter. And this week, I wrote about Simone Biles stunning us with an ideological backflip; she defended males competing in women’s athletic divisions, and despite her previous commitment to promoting bodily self-acceptance among young girls, she attacked Riley Gaines’s appearance. (Biles has since publicly issued a lackluster apology, written in PR-speak, to Riley Gaines, but she further expressed support for “competitive equity” in sports, which I assume means she will soon distribute her gold medals.) I’m afraid a third installment is necessary: a fact check of a USA Today article celebrating Simone Biles’s comments on “inclusive” sports.

In a flippant USA Today opinion piece titled “Simone Biles shows her greatness again in standing up for transgender community,” sports writer Nancy Armour claims that “Gaines has used her tie for fifth place with Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, in the 200-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA championships to become a MAGA media darling.” It is unfair to reduce all of Gaines’s activism to a single grievance, since she’s brought attention to many cases of injustice where male athletes dominated female competitors. In fact, Gaines doesn’t speak solely of her own loss in sports, nor does she speak solely about sports; for example, she’s used her platform to criticize the harmful practice of child mutilation that is absurdly branded as “gender-affirming care.” Armour then vaguely suggests that Gaines is killing people, writing that “her grifting has done real harm to the transgender community, which is already at an elevated risk for suicide and self-harm.” Gaines puts transgender-identifying athletes "in harm’s way" with each critical tweet, Armour claims.

While Armour says that Gaines’s speech causes “real harm,” she fails to mention the actual physical harms that female athletes have suffered from competing against males. One case that Armour would have encountered if she had bothered to conduct a Google search is that of Peyton McNabb, who was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury, a brain bleed, partial paralysis, and vision loss after a male opponent in volleyball spiked a ball that hit her. Additional harms experienced by female athletes under “inclusive policies” are the lasting psychological trauma of being forced to undress in front of a man, and the loss of opportunity in the form of denied scholarships, both of which are alleged to have occurred in a lawsuit against San Jose State University. But to Armour, these apparently don’t matter if a male complains about his feelings being upset. Rather shockingly, Armour previously described the lawsuit against San Jose State University as filled with “misinformation” and condemned a portion of the lawsuit that, in her words, is “demanding the right to declare open season on anyone suspected of being transgender.”

Despite the growing opposition to “inclusive” policies that prioritize self-declared gender over sex, Armour suggests that Gaines’s recent comments are “just further proof that Gaines needs to get out of her right-wing bubble a bit more.” I have to ask: What right-wing bubble? A recent Gallup poll found that almost 70 percent of Americans think that transgender-identifying athletes should be allowed to play only on teams that match their sex, so I guess the ideological bubble is . . . most of the country. In truth, it’s Armour along with Biles who are the ones in ideological isolation, trapped on a progressive planet that orbits around promoting the LGBTQ+ agenda.

But Armour’s disparaging remarks about Riley Gaines are not what make her article ludicrous. She actually wrote — and USA Today actually published — the following: “There is no scientific evidence that transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over cisgender women athletes, but that hasn’t stopped Gaines from claiming they do.” Men certainly do have a range of physical advantages (especially in terms of strength) over women. Those may be diminished by undergoing cross-sex hormones or other gender-related medical interventions, but they hardly disappear. For example, various athletic organizations (including the Olympics) have allowed males to compete in women’s divisions if they maintain testosterone levels at or below 10 nmol/L for one year. But that threshold is far above the average female levels, and testosterone plays a big role in muscle mass and strength. To say that men drugged with estrogen have been athletically compromised does not mean they have been weakened to levels of aptitude equivalent to women’s. Armour must know as much but is probably claiming the contrary to protect her preferred narrative at all costs. And this prompts us to reach a damning conclusion about the mainstream media: It is not that editorial teams suffer from ignorance and have failed to conduct the proper research, it’s that they are deliberately lying to you.

Armour concludes her article by writing, “In a world of Riley Gaineses, be a Simone Biles.” In a world where journalists like Armour publish destructive falsehoods unsupported by logical reasoning or data, I aim to be something else entirely -- a reporter who seeks and shares the truth.