Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, has written something in The Hill that I have been wanting to read for a long time, and she says it plainly: transgender sports bans are not, and never have been, about protecting women. She has spent her career in women's rights, and she is certain. So am I.
The argument she makes is one rooted in history, and it is worth following carefully. The promise of protecting women has, throughout American history, been the go-to justification for controlling women. It was deployed to keep women out of the legal profession. It was used to deny them the vote, credit cards, property rights, reproductive healthcare. "Man is, or should be, woman's protector" is a line from a United States Supreme Court ruling from the 1870s. The court is about to rule again, this time on Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ, the cases from Idaho and West Virginia that will determine whether transgender girls can compete on school sports teams. The same language is being deployed. The same logic. The same promise of protection that history has shown, again and again, to be a mechanism of exclusion.
From a medical standpoint, the physiology argument has been used selectively and inconsistently for years. The same legislators who claim to be worried about competitive fairness show no comparable concern about the enormous natural variation in testosterone, height, lung capacity, and muscle fibre type among cisgender women. Elite sport is full of people with unusual bodies. That is rather the point of elite sport. The scrutiny lands, almost exclusively, on trans women, which tells you something about the argument's actual foundations.
Graves makes a point that deserves to be heard loudly: the Idaho law at the heart of the Hecox case requires women and girl athletes whose sex is "disputed" to undergo invasive physical examinations to prove their gender. Male athletes are not subject to anything comparable. So a law presented as protecting female athletes has created a mechanism for physically scrutinising female athletes' bodies on the say-so of a complaint. If your concern is protecting women from degradation, that is a very strange way to express it.
This is not new, either. Women athletes who do not perform femininity to someone's satisfaction have faced harassment and testing for as long as women have been allowed to compete. Athletes who are too muscular, too fast, too dark-skinned, too short-haired. The question "is she really a woman?" has always been aimed at the bodies that make some people uncomfortable. Trans women are the current target, but the mechanism is old.
What strikes me most about Graves's piece is the clarity she brings to the company these bans keep. Project 2025 and its architects are simultaneously pushing anti-transgender legislation and rolling back women's protections against sexual harassment and assault, their access to reproductive healthcare, and their voting rights. These are not coincidental policy positions. They share a common architecture, one that treats women's bodies as objects to be regulated and women's autonomy as a concession to be rationed. If the goal were genuinely women's empowerment, the legislative agenda would look very different.
A genuinely fair, evidence-based approach to inclusion in sport would look at the specific circumstances of specific sports, at actual performance data, at the research that exists on trans athletes' physiology after hormone therapy, and at the question of what sport is actually for. It would distinguish between recreational sport, school sport, and elite competition. It would be proportionate. It would not result in blanket bans on children competing in school teams. And it would not require any girl to submit to a genital examination to settle a dispute about whether she belongs on the team.
Graves ends her piece by saying that women, including transgender women, must be in the fight for liberation together. She is right, and I am glad she said it. The people legislating against trans girls competing in school sports are the same people stripping abortion rights, weakening harassment protections, and working to shrink the space women are allowed to occupy in public life. That is not a coincidence. It is a pattern, and the sooner more women's organisations say so plainly, the better.
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Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate for trans people and their families.