A Peek Behind the Scenes at Stronger Women on our First Anniversary

And a Gift for You in Celebration

Mar 31, 2025

Hi friends and welcome, newcomers. Happy anniversary!

Many big commitments begin not with a careful testing of the waters, but with a joyful leap.

Stronger Women launched on March 31, 2024. To celebrate our first anniversary and thank you for your support – subscriptions, financial contributions, comments, shares, likes, and messages – I’m giving everyone a downloadable gift, below.

Just Leap

As you’ll see on Page One of that gift — a graphic story — my mom, a lifelong swimmer, showed me how to get into a pool. Most people fiddle around by dipping toes and fingers, sitting on the side, splashing feet and arms, adjusting goggles or caps. Getting up their courage. Stalling. Because water is always cold, even shocking, to a warm-blooded body. Mom’s example and daily practice: Just leap.

I tend to live my life that way. Many big commitments begin not with a careful testing of the waters, but with a joyful leap.

I decided to create Stronger Women and launched it that same day. (The title comes from my book, The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football.) The opening essay, “Stronger Women: I’m Back,” offered no specific plans. I was simply announcing my return to my first love: writing about the empowerment of women through sports. Back in the pool. Back home.

After publishing fifty-two weekly essays, attracting nearly 1,000 subscribers, and reaching about 10,000 readers each month, I have warmed up and am happily swimming along. This week, I want to tell you the Stronger Women origin story and explain how I see this work now, including your role.

Three Goals

Stronger Women has three goals:

1) Write weekly women’s sports stories that you find entertaining, inspiring, and thought-provoking to read – because you’re an essential part of this project.

2) Create stories that I find challenging, meaningful, and enjoyable – because if the work doesn’t satisfy me, this won’t be sustainable.

3) Change how society values girls and women, and how we value ourselves – because otherwise, we’re all screwed.

Two Categories

Most stories now fit into two categories:

#Aging Up: Here, I share stories of older women athletes as we attempt to retain athletic engagement, grace, power, playfulness, and competence despite inevitable losses.

#Save Women’s Sports: Here, I make the case for all-female sports and locker rooms. For this series, I’m indebted to my team at the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group:

Donna de Varona

Martina

Navratilova,

Nancy Hogshead, JD, Oly

Donna Lopiano

, and

Tracy Sundlun

. I owe many of my best ideas to our weekly conversations, collaborations, and friendship.

One Process, One Point

Each week, I sift through oodles of ideas floating around in my brain and select the topic that seems most compelling to me. Then, I ask myself, What’s my point? I want each essay to offer readers a larger message, beyond the vignettes and facts. For example:

“Recovery” describes one of my annual swims with my friend Barb, who survived an abduction, rape, and shooting. The point: Enduring friendships and sports can help women recover from just about anything.
Cornhole Parts One, Two, Three, and Four: The point: Older female athletes with physical limitations can find ways to compete seriously – without taking ourselves too seriously.
“We Do Not Consent to Playing with Men”: The point: Young female athletes are starting to speak up, bravely and unapologetically.

Stronger Women’s Origin Story

Three years ago, when I joined the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, we began systematically submitting op-eds to major daily publishers. These essays offered champion female athletes’ point of view on trans-identified males competing “as women.” Almost all were rejected.

I’ve authored seven books and hundreds of articles featured in major publications including The New York Times and USA Today. I wrote a weekly column for The Washington Post. This track record does not guarantee acceptance when, out of the blue, I decide to return to this game and submit op-eds. Far from it.

But mainstream publishers also rejected stories by tennis legend Martina Navratilova, whose every tweet on this topic gains global attention. Some rejections followed a puzzling, yes-whoops-no pattern: “Upon further review, we have decided…”

Meanwhile, my teammates and I have been invited, then disinvited, to give countless speeches – to medical societies, nonprofits, universities, and TEDX audiences. We have been invited, then disinvited, to media appearances. Sometimes the rejections are explicit: “We received objections from our trans community.” Or, “We found out that you’re a transphobe.”

We are not the only victims of cancel culture, and count the most famous cancelee, author J.K Rowling, among our allies. A brief sample of countless others:

Last week, Vancouver nurse Amy Hamm was fired for stating that there are two sexes.
Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist and author of Testosterone (which I recommend), was forced out of Harvard for explaining that sex is binary.
Philosopher Kathleen Stock was forced out of the University of Sussex for related reasons. This week, the university was fined 585,000 pounds for failing to uphold free speech.
Dr. Michael Joyner is suing the Mayo Clinic after he was “silenced and punished” for defending women’s rights to female-only sports.
Oregon high school girls’ track coach John Parks; San Jose State University volleyball coach Melissa Batie-Smoose; and Oberlin lacrosse coach Kim Russell were forced out for saying aloud that male athletes do not belong in women’s sports.
I’ll tell you another time about the high school, college, and professional female athletes who have been punished for protesting boys on their teams; for “not accepting transgender women as women,” and for refusing to undress in front of boys.
Several reporters and media executives have told me off the record that their bosses are so captured by gender ideology that even suggesting stories from a feminist point of view would be “career suicide.”

Instead of welcoming our opinions, media powerhouses consistently celebrate male athletes as heroic “transgirls” and “transwomen” who daringly “live as their authentic selves.” They ignore the differences between male and female bodies; the differences between male- and female-sized equipment and rules; the fact that even before puberty, boys have physical advantages over girls. They act as if non-binary-identified people constitute an unprecedented third sex. They overstate the effects of testosterone suppression – and the fact that most males who identify as trans make no modifications to their bodies at all. They seem indifferent to girls’ and women’s rights to privacy and safety in locker rooms.

To believe these sources is to believe that playing women’s sports is vitally important to males’ sense of achievement and affirmation “as women” – yet playing women’s sports is not very important, or should not matter very much, to actual women. To believe these sources is to believe that girls and women should relinquish their own rights to accommodate fragile males.

I Can Take Publishing into My Own Hands

Finally, a year ago, after repeatedly getting rejected, blocked, and canceled by the media (while also losing friends), it dawned on me that I could take publishing into my own hands.

Now I write directly for you. I say whatever I want. Hooray for Substack.

And hooray for us. We have made great progress in a short time. Our message is getting through, thanks to a growing, worldwide movement of pro-female-sports advocates and organizations — and thanks to ordinary, one-on-one conversations you tell me you’re having with friends, family, colleagues.

Are We Winning Yet? was the rhetorical question and title of my first book, published by Random House in 1991. That’s still an open question. But we’re making progress on legal, legislative, and social fronts. According to a New York Times/Ipsos poll in January, 79 percent of Americans believe males should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports. That’s up from 62 percent in a Gallup poll in 2021.

Last week, World Athletics adopted a new policy to screen all female-category entrants with a cheek swab: a simple, non-invasive, once-in-a-lifetime genetic test. This earned World Athletics a gold rating, along with a growing list of 12 other U.S. and international organizations, from the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group.

Also last week, the International Olympic Committee elected a new president, Kirsty Coventry, who has vowed to “protect the female category” in Olympic sport.

Knowing that we’re winning — or starting to — energizes me.

So does Stronger Women. As we head toward Year Two, I’m grateful to be having these conversations with you.

And that previous sentence, by the way, is the point.

Here’s the gift: a 10-page graphic story called “The Lap Swimmer.” It tells the tale of an older female athlete (you’ll recognize her) who initially feels annoyed by a lane-hogging “thrasher” – but reconsiders when he helps her rediscover something important about herself. Here’s page one: