Many women now find ourselves needing to assert our very existence as a sex-based class with legitimate rights and boundaries.
I stopped submitting opinion pieces to major news outlets in 2022 after it became clear from editors’ weird responses (such as acceptances that were inexplicably retracted, which never normally happens) that my feminist views were being censored.
As a result, I launched Stronger Women. No submissions, no rejections, no censors. Direct communication with you! Tra-la. I love writing for you, my readers and subscribers. So glad we found each other here.
Thanks to all for your support — with a special shout-out to my original April 2024 paid subscribers who just renewed for the third year. I see you and appreciate you!
This week, I wrote another unsolicited essay for the New York Times. It’s been four years since my last submission, and their reporting is bugging me. They consistently cast trans-identified males in the role of victim, ignoring women’s needs and protests. My goal was to craft a compelling case for why they should change their coverage and their terminology. To maximize the essay’s chance of publication, I practiced extreme self-restraint: No accusations, no anger, no sarcasm.
But no acceptance. Oh well. Maybe I’ll try again in 2030.
Fortunately, I can share my thoughts with you. And vice versa. I love your comments. Here’s the essay. And what a deal: No NYT subscription required. :-)
Do women deserve sex-based sports categories and female-only spaces?
This should be a central question in the so-called transgender athlete debates.
Yet the liberal media has erected linguistic barriers that conceal that question and thereby silence women’s voices.
To convey my opinion – one shared by many women and men – I need to use a commonplace vocabulary that, unfortunately, may run afoul of the New York Times’ style guide. But here goes.
By female, I mean the female sex. I don’t use “biological” to modify “women,” as the Times does, because I do not believe there is more than one kind of female. I avoid “assigned male at birth,” a term the Times uses, because sex is almost always easy to discern at birth (when in doubt, physicians test) and never changes from male to female or vice versa in any mammals.
If people claim a transgender identity, I respect that – as I respect all beliefs – but for purposes of sports and intimate spaces, males must, in my view, be designated as male.
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four,” wrote George Orwell. The same principle should apply to sex-based language in reporting.
Asking women how male-inclusive policies affect them is not bias. It’s reporting.
“Transgender athletes” appeared in at least 19 recent Times headlines on this subject. The phrase gives no indication that this gender-neutral term always refers to male athletes who want to compete against women, and the phrase thereby implies that this is a “trans” problem, rather than a male problem.
Headlines with the phrase “bars transgender athletes” mischaracterize law and policies. They do not bar anyone from sport. They only address whether male athletes will be allowed to compete in female categories. Males can always compete against males.
“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people,” the writer Marie Shear wrote in 1986.
“And that we are real,” I would add.
Many of us now find ourselves needing to assert our very existence as a sex-based class with legitimate rights and boundaries.
I understand that style guidance, institutional commitments, and modern trends in gender-related language shape newsroom decisions. But if approved terminology cannot accurately describe the conflict as many women understand it, the coverage misguidedly centers males and trans activists.
Sixty-nine percent of trans-identified people have taken no gender-related medication. Eighty-four percent have had no transition-related surgery. This, too, becomes obscured when journalists limit their descriptions of certain males to “trans girls,” “transgender women,” and “she/her.” The implication is that these males have somehow – usually by self-proclamation alone – escaped their male bodies and should be granted female rights and privileges.
We never let athletes outside a particular age range opt-in to easier categories. Why should we let men opt in to the women’s category?
For the safety and privacy of women, we don’t allow the general male public to enter women’s locker rooms and restrooms. Why allow certain men? Even after genital surgery, male-to-female transsexuals (as they were called in this longitudinal study) “retain the same risk of male-pattern criminality.”
The Times’ claims that “the science is still evolving” about sports hides a simpler truth: Males possess a performance advantage. The male advantage — demonstrated via one hundred years of sports records — is the only reason the female category exists. Like age, weight, and disability categories, it simply expands opportunity.
Males who do lower their testosterone do not erase their strength and size advantages, nor do they acquire the women’s disadvantages due to women’s monthly periods, pregnancies, miscarriages, babies, and menopause.
Readers also need to understand that female sports are designed around female physiology: smaller balls, lower nets, and other adjusted equipment and dimensions. A male athlete in the female category is not simply playing on a women’s team but competing within a system calibrated for female bodies. When media coverage omits this context, that silence obscures the very difference the categories were created to address.
It would also be worth reporting on why female athletes who identify as trans – such as Layshia Clarendon, Nikki Hiltz, and Quinn – continue competing in female categories rather than seeking entry into men’s competitions – while men are literally making a federal case out of their desire to compete against women.
Across the country, a new generation of feminists are forfeiting games, staging demonstrations, addressing school leaders, and filing lawsuits over safety, fairness, privacy, sexual harassment, and even rape. Few people know about this trend because it’s vastly under-reported.
“We were told that it will be our fault if this transgender athlete takes their life,” fourteen-year-old Annaleigh Wilson explained in a speech after she lost a Junior Olympics race to a boy.
“Sharing locker rooms between males and females can lead to discomfort, embarrassment, and a loss of dignity, especially for minors,” middle schooler Elena Resto told a California school board. “I say no more!”
The 2025 Times/Ipsos poll found broad support—including among Democrats—for female-only sports categories. Yet my search of the Times archive from January 1, 2025 to April 25, 2026, found 25 stories centered on trans-identified male athletes, and not one centering female objections to lost roster spots, podium places, scholarships, privacy, or sexual abuse.
What used to be a united women’s sports community is now divided, with some legacy institutions1 redefining the word women to include certain men, while other groups and individuals2 are raising their voices and submitting complaints. At the same time, conservative and liberal women are teaming up, in agreement about who should count as female. These chasms and connections among feminists are also newsworthy.
Asking women how male-inclusive policies affect them is not bias. It’s reporting.
I hope the Times and other liberal outlets will broaden their sourcing, examine their language assumptions, and cover this topic with fuller attention to the female perspective. I’d be happy to recommend sources and writers.
Mariah Burton Nelson is a former professional basketball player and author of seven nonfiction books, including The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football. She writes the Substack Stronger Women and works with the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group.
As always, I welcome your thoughts.
Such as the Women’s Sports Foundation, Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport, and National Women’s Law Center.
Such as Independent Council on Women’s Sport, International Consortium for Female Sport, Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, XX-XY Athletics, HeCheated.org, Women Are Real, Genspect, Women’s Liberation Front, Independent Women’s Forum, Martina Navratilova, Nancy Hogshead, JD, Oly, Donna Lopiano, Donna de Varona, Tracy Sundlun, Linda Blade, Kara Dansky, Sarah Barker, Tish Hyman, Lisa Simeone, Lisa Selin Davis, Amanda Kovattana, Jennifer Sey, and many more.
“We were told that it will be our fault if this transgender athlete takes their life,” fourteen-year-old Annaleigh Wilson explained in a speech after she lost a Junior Olympics race to a boy.”
Let that sink in.
Who told teenage girls and a junior Olympian teenage girl that they are responsible if a boy takes his life if they don’t let me do whatever the fuck he wants? Can we get a receipt as to who told her this?
Beautifully written. Your reasoning is unassailable and puts them to shame. No wonder they won’t print it, though, of course, they should.