Recent headlines and GOP-aligned spokespeople like Riley Gaines would have you believe women and girls in sports are under no greater threat than the one posed to them by transgender people.

Indiana Fever guard and latest right-wing media darling Sophie Cunningham poured gasoline on the fight against trans athletes last month in an interview with ESPN where she tried to explain that she’s not a “MAGA Barbie” as she had been crowned, but rather is simply passionate about “protect[ing] women’s sports” from trans players. Since then, the rhetoric around the WNBA — and arguably women’s sports as a whole — has been supercharged by conservative media, flooding the zone with coverage of bad-faith publicity stunts around women’s basketball.

Yet while the moral panic around trans athletes continues without substantive proof that this is even an issue Americans even prioritize, the legislation that made sports more equal and accessible to young girls in the first place is under attack by the Trump administration and his allies. What a convenient misdirection that while the Republican party is pointing their daggers at Title IX protections, the only conversation happening around the issue of women in sports is one targeted at the trans community.

Title IX was enacted as part of the Education Amendments of 1972 on the heels of other historic civil rights legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law prohibits sex-based discrimination in public schools, meaning female students cannot be excluded from opportunities that are offered to male students and schools that receive government funding can’t deny admission on the basis of sex. A 1980 court ruling expanded the breadth of Title IX, crucially deeming sexual assault as sex discrimination under the law. This pushed schools to establish grievance procedures for survivors of sexual assault and harassment, and to create avenues for relief they didn’t have before. In short, Title IX changed the game for female students — including opening the door for more women and girls in school sports.

Title IX effectively told schools that if girls wanted to play the same sports their male counterparts were playing, the schools had to provide that opportunity equally. As a result, schools built out coaching, facilities, and scholarships for their female students — strides that contributed to an immense increase in women collegiate athletes especially. When Title IX was originally enacted in 1972, fewer than 16% of college athletes were women; by 2020, women represented 44% of all NCAA athletes, according to the National Women’s Law Center. It’s not Title IX alone that drove this increase, but this increase would not have been possible without the mandate of equality dictated by the law.

As instrumental as this legislation has been in bolstering equality in sports, President Donald Trump has been on a mission to undermine its strength for a while now. As soon as Trump was back in office, he signed an executive order requiring government agencies not to apply civil rights laws like Title IX to gender identity, meaning the law would exclude trans people from protection against discrimination.

In January 2025, before Trump was back in office, a district court vacated the Biden administration’s Title IX rule that explicitly protected students from harassment based on gender identity and sexual orientation. After Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Education officially reverted back to following Trump’s 2020 interpretation of Title IX, which excluded transgender people from protection, and schools were threatened to have their federal funding terminated if they didn’t comply with these new marching orders.

In 2025, the president slashed the staffing for the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) within the Department of Education, the division that enforces Title IX claims as well as racial discrimination claims and other violations of students’ civil liberties. The Trump administration laid off hundreds of OCR employees and closed seven of the agency’s 12 offices. These actions were later reversed after legal challenges, but the chaos and backlog of cases this caused meant the damage was already done: In all of 2025, the division failed to reach a single resolution for K-12 sexual assault and harassment claims. It likely goes without saying, but the vast majority of these claims are brought by cisgender women and girls.

Trump is also working to undo progress made before he retook office. This April, the Department of Education rescinded certain resolution agreements in Title IX cases brought by transgender students. This means kids who had gone through the long process of seeking justice for discrimination they faced were told they would be heard and their schools would have to make a change, and then essentially told “never mind” by the government. Schools who were mandated to take corrective action to protect students were relieved from that duty.

These actions show a pattern that’s long been employed by the GOP: Chip away at the bedrock of foundational civil rights law until finally the law is gutted altogether. We saw it with Roe v. Wade, and we’re currently seeing it play out with the Voting Rights Act. We’re certainly not at the point that Title IX serves no purpose, but it’s clear Trump and his allies have no problem making Title IX a casualty in their crusade against transgender rights. They aren’t being subtle, either: a policy paper from the Heritage Foundation recently called for Title IX to be rewritten to effectively undermine its core premise of equal access to school sports.

At a time when the WNBA’s audience and cultural footprint has never been larger, it’s troubling, though unsurprising, that the conversation around the league has been co-opted by transphobes being weird and annoying. This circus of hate is doing nothing but serving as an effective distraction to the real threats to women’s sports which is brought not by transgender players, but by the state itself.

Hanna Stolzer is the social media manager at the American Civil Liberties Union, but is writing in her personal capacity.

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