Two weeks in the past, American President Donald Trump signed his “Preserving Males Out of Girls’s Sports activities” government order into legislation, aiming to bar people assigned male at start from taking part in girls’s sports activities.
These in favour of this mandate, like former Olympic bicycle owner Inga Thompson, praised the President for ‘saving girls’s sports activities.’
“We’re on the beginning of bringing equity again to girls athletes,” Thompson informed Biking Weekly. “It is all good for ladies athletes. Every little thing that [the White House] is pushing ahead.”
However what precisely has Trump carried out to assist girls’s sports activities? ‘Nothing in any respect,’ says American bicycle owner Austin Killips.
A transgender girl, Killips’ achievements in biking have lengthy been the topic of debate. In 2023, she turned the primary overtly trans girl to win a UCI stage race—the Tour of the Gila. She’s additionally gained a Belgian Waffle gravel race and positioned on the rostrum on the 2022 U.S. Nationwide Cyclocross Championships.
After her success sparked coverage modifications from the UCI and USA Biking, banning trans girls from elite competitors, Killips turned to ultra-endurance racing, the place racers compete in mixed-gender fields. In 2024, she set a brand new girls’s file on the 800-mile Arizona Path—a feat Trump singled out when signing his government order.
“…a male bicycle owner posing as a lady competed within the 800-mile Arizona Path Race – a really huge deal in biking – and obliterated the ladies’s course file by practically 5 and a half hours,” he commented.
The most recent race content material, interviews, options, opinions and knowledgeable shopping for guides, direct to your inbox!
Now, in a scathing Op-Ed for the Guardian, Killips fires again on the President, accusing him of utilizing trans athletes as a political scapegoat whereas doing nothing to meaningfully assist girls in sports activities.
“Trump’s government order is an ideal rip-off: he and his acolytes get to speak endlessly concerning the pretend spectre of trans athletes “invading” girls’s sports activities, whereas by no means placing any of their consideration, immense political cache and funding entry in direction of issues that may meaningfully elevate the state of girls’s sports activities,” she writes.
“Their undertaking accommodates no measures that assist feminine athletes on the skilled degree as labourers, and definitely nothing that even gestures in direction of new funding alternatives for women pursuing their dream.”
Killips factors to the ‘unhappy state of affairs’ in girls’s biking with establishments just like the Joe Martin Stage Race falling off the calendar and the long-running DNA Professional Biking workforce calling it quits in 2024.
“For girls on the lookout for a workforce or a race that might doubtlessly catapult their profession ahead, issues are the worst they’ve been within the final decade,” Killips laments.
As a substitute of making alternatives for feminine athletes, Killips argues that the anti-trans rhetoric focuses solely on exclusion.
“The one motion objects referencing funding merely establishes a precedent for rescinding cash from organizations investing in girls and ladies who’ve given their lives and our bodies to sport. On this new actuality, all girls lose,” she states.
“They discovered a scapegoat, and all they’ve carried out is enrich themselves with five-figure talking price excursions, whereas taking the oxygen out of the room…They’re, for lack of a greater phrase, cowards who don’t wish to do the precise work of empowering and supporting athletes.”
In the end, Killips warns that the present political push to ban transgender athletes is a part of a broader sample of neglecting girls’s sports activities. She urges those that declare to care about equity in girls’s sports activities to think about the place political power and funding are literally being directed.
“…You must ask your self why, on the top of a historic second of sweeping and unchecked austerity measures, the loudest and wealthiest individuals within the room have constructed a motion that culminated on this: an government order that establishes a precedent to strip funding away from girls in sport.”
Learn the full Op-Ed, right here.