Last night, longtime ally John Oliver dedicated an entire episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight to calling out the right wing’s “absolute fixation” on transgender athletes.
He started the show noting that, “Even as the market crashed in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, Fox News spent a lot of time on this…” He then cut to a compilation of Fox News segments about a fencer who refused to fight a transgender opponent and was disqualified from the competition, hailing her a martyr for the anti-trans movement.
“Wait, that’s the story that everyone is going to be interested in?” Oliver asked. “Are you sure about that? The story about fencing? Not the one that caused the stock ticket in the corner of your screen to go bright red?”
Oliver continued, “The issue of trans athletes has become very important to conservatives in general and
Donald Trump in particular. He talked about it at length in his Address to Congress and signed an order titled
Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports which promised to rescind all funds from educational programs that allowed trans women and girls to compete.”
Oliver then explained the facts behind this crusade, saying that Trump is “trying to pull $175 million in funding from UPENN for allowing 1 trans athlete to compete… 3 years ago. And when Maine indicated it would resist his ban he threatened to cut off all its federal funding despite the whole state apparently having just 2 trans girls total competing in girls sports… 2!”
He explained the gravity of this situation, “Republicans last year spent over $116 million just on TV ads featuring trans athletes. The relentless focus on this over the years has had a meaningful impact, with one poll showing more than 6 in 10 adults saying trans girls and women should not be allowed to compete in girls and women’s sports” with “25 states have now imposing bans on them competing in schools.”
Oliver reminded the audience, “There are vanishingly few trans girls competing in high school sports anywhere and even if there were more trans kids, like all kids, they vary in athletic ability and there is no evidence that they pose any threat to safety or fairness.”
Sports Scientist Joanna Harper offers a professional perspective, explaining that, “Trans women don’t transition for sports. No one has ever said ‘Oh yeah, I think I’d like to be a woman so I can do well in women’s sports.'” She then said that, “When you go through a gender transition, you lose so many things in life. My own mother said she never wanted to speak to me again, I lost friends, family, got divorced… You’d go through all of that just to win a medal in sports? No. Trans people transition because it’s the only way that we can live happily.”
Oliver reminds viewers that there is still little research on how medical transition impacts athletic ability, but notes that “Bigger and stronger bodies are not automatically advantaged in every scenario,” and even more importantly, “When you’re talking about 7-year-olds as a practical matter, that’s a point where lots of school sports are co-ed anyway, and a key difference between competitors on a field can come down to whether a kid was born in October or April.”
He continued, “The bulk of the damage here is being done to trans kids. Because one thing we know for sure is that, for all kids, the benefits—physiological, social, and emotional—of participating in school sports teams and athletics are wide-ranging. And to hear trans kids themselves tell it, participation can be especially important to their feeling of community and sense of self.”
Additional research by
CAP found that while “transgender youth and young adults are consistently found to participate in sports at significantly lower rates than their cisgender peers… their exclusion from such activities can potentially put their lives at risk.” The study also noted that more girls participate in sports where trans-inclusive policies exist. Learn more
here.
Sports bans endanger all female players by encouraging baseless, false allegations and discriminatory, invasive screening. Bans on trans athletes have led to invasive screening that violate the privacy and safety of all women and girls, and discourages more who might want to play. Athletes of all ages and abilities who are not trans have been bullied and harassed when accused of being trans. Read more here.
He then included a collection of clips where trans kids talked about the joy playing on sports teams has brought them, including a young boy who shared, “Without football, I don’t quite know if I would still be here because it it’s given me a sense of belonging. It’s taken away the spotlight on the fact that I am transgender and it’s just allowed me to be a boy and it’s allowed me to be a kid.”
Oliver adds, “It’s not even necessarily about being good at sports because for all the focus on a handful of high performing athletes, it is helpful to remember lots of trans kids, like any kids are terrible at sports!”
To close, he reminds viewers that, “You’ve seen how much sports means to the kids who play them. Taking that away is not a harmless act, not for these kids, or the multiple others you haven’t heard from tonight.” Adding, “I do acknowledge we’re going to disagree about some things, but the one thing I’d ask of you is that you recognize the ugliness of how this issue gets discussed and how it’s being cynically used by some to advance the eradication of trans people.”
Watch the full episode
here and learn more on GLAAD’s research
here.
