Explainer: What “Transgender Athlete Bans” Really Mean
"Man on the Land!"
Hi friends and welcome newcomers!
Maybe I’ll write another essay called “How to Be Angry and Open-Hearted” but for now: My goal is to tell the truth and assert women’s boundaries without fanning the flames of fear.
“All of us are male or female. You can’t opt out of that,” says Corinna Cohn, an “ambivalent transsexual” colleague who was surgically castrated at age 19 in the name of gender dysphoria treatment.
“Man on the Land!”
As a young lesbian-feminist in the early eighties, I attended the annual West Coast Women’s Music Festival, a summer celebration of music, dancing, poetry, comedy, and feminism held in Yosemite National Park. We camped in little domed tents, swam naked in a lake, and attended open-air concerts by Sweet Honey in the Rock, Holly Near, Rhiannon.
As we arrived, we’d see strong women doing it all: building outdoor stages, installing sound systems, designing medical tents, stirring vats of food, and muscling port-a-potties into an upright position.1
Most of us were lesbians. Many of us strolled around topless or hand-in-hand.2
Then, one year, my friends and I watched as a dozen large men barged into the campground from a wooded area, breaking branches and undergrowth like a herd of startled bucks. Uh-oh. What were men doing here?
As they got closer, we noticed long hair. And makeup. Oh: Transsexuals and transvestites, as they were called then.3
Man in the pool! Man in the locker room! Man on our victory stand!
Denied access at the gate, they had forged a route through the forest. Their presence in this deliberately female space disrupted our peace, privacy, and sense of safety. Organizers of this festival and its more famous cousin, the Michigan Womyn’s Fest, responded with "womyn-born-womyn-only" policies4 – which, due to persistent male resistance, led to the festivals’ demise.5
This conflict was depicted in the “Man on the Land!” episode of Transparent, the Amazon drama featuring Jeffrey Tambor as a father who comes out as transgender. When women at a fictional festival spot an intruder, they do not use euphemisms or preferred pronouns. “Man on the land!” they warn each other.
If only our modern media would be so above board with sex-accurate terms.
The purpose of the eight-and-under category is to exclude older kids and adults. The purpose of the female category is to exclude males.
Who Are the “Transgender Athletes” Being Banned, Blocked, and Barred?
Most major news sources framed this week’s Executive Order, Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,6 in terms of blocking, banning, or barring “transgender athletes,” omitting the fact that the people in question are male.
“Donald Trump signs executive order to block transgender athletes from women’s sports” — New York Times
“… will ban transgender athletes from women's sports” — CBS News
“intended to bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports” — AP
Translation:
Trump signed an order to restrict the female sports category to females.
No one is being blocked or banned. Boys and men can still play in the male category.
“Transgender athletes” in these headlines only refers to males, not females.
“All of us are male or female. You can’t opt out of that,” says Corinna Cohn, an “ambivalent transsexual” colleague who was surgically castrated at age 19 in the name of gender dysphoria treatment. They “should not have told me the way to feel better about yourself is to have your body parts cut off,” he now says.
We need to refer to male athletes as male, as Martina Navratilova argues in this Stronger Women essay. We can still respect their beliefs and identities. It’s not unkind to tell the truth, especially when it affects women’s rights.
Women almost always play sports in the women’s category. Why? Because that’s where women experience fair competition, regardless of how they identify.
Is “Transgender Women” Any Better?
In other headlines, males are described as trans or transgender women. No wonder the public is confused:
Trump signs executive order banning trans women from women’s sports – NBC News
How About “Transgender Female”?
It gets worse. Here, the term morphs into “transgender female athletes”:
Caitlyn Jenner backs ban on transgender female athletes - Reuters
Trump signs executive order barring transgender female athletes from competing – Associated Press
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength,” wrote George Orwell in 1984.
And now, in 2025, male athletes are female athletes.
The New NCAA Policy Does Not Ban Anyone, Either
Similar language appears this week’s news about the NCAA policy, which also restricts the female sports category to females:
“NCAA officially bans trans athletes from women's sports” — Fox News
“NCAA bars transgender athletes from competing in women’s college sports” — Guardian
What “Exclusion” and “TERF” Really Mean
Exclusion is inherent to sports categories. The purpose of the eight-and-under category is to exclude older kids and adults. The purpose of the female category is to exclude males.
The purpose of the women’s locker room, which I wrote about last week and the week before, is to exclude men due to male aggression, sexual assault, harassment, voyeurism, indecent exposure – and female rights to privacy and safety. Otherwise, we’d all strip together.
The acronym TERF, intended as a slur but reclaimed by feminists, stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Like the headlines above, it’s misleading:
“Trans-exclusionary” makes us sound anti-trans, and we’re not. People should not be shamed or shunned because they don’t fit into sex stereotypes, which is how transgender is defined.7 I don’t fit into them myself.
We’re not anti-male, either. We’re just setting reasonable boundaries.
It’s not “trans” people who are being excluded from all-female spaces. Just males. (Man in the pool! Man in the locker room! Man on our victory stand!)
It’s not radical for women to say no to men.
More accurate would be MEF: Male-Exclusionary Feminists. (Not that we need a new acronym.)
Let’s Correct Those Headlines:
“Girls and Women Celebrate New Rules: Female Sports for Females Only.”
Selected Stronger Women stories about the need for female-only sports & spaces:
See Bonnie Morris, Eden Built By Eves and this article by Morris.
My straight friend Kimberly once lamented, “I was the only person I saw all weekend in a dress.” I laughed. Who goes camping in a dress?
The term transgender did not become popular until a decade later.
“Womyn” was an attempt to keep men out of our word itself.
See Carolyn Gage, The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture.
“Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” specifies that Title IX and other federal policy forbid sex discrimination based on sex, not gender identity. You can’t do both; to protect gender identity is to nullify sex-based protections.
Transgender is “an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth”— American Psychological Association. The American Psychiatric Association, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Endocrine Society define transgender in almost identical ways – including gender nonconforming behavior.
It boggles my mind that the media continues to mislead people and that you have to educate people, "males are described as trans or transgender women. No wonder the public is confused". I appreciate your "translation" so that I can share with all the confused people I know.
Another stirring article, thanks.
I can appreciate the Yosemite story, I like hearing about comparables to Mitchfest.
The divisiveness created by men within Feminist and Lesbian leadership is one of the saddest stories, unappreciated, that I know.
I loved gong to a gay male-only camp called Timberfell in TN, over several decades. There’s nothing like walking naked through the woods in a rainstorm or with your spouse at night. That magic is so elementary and fragile, it’s horrible to hear of it being torn away from women’s hands.
It goes back to another bullshit concept I head repeated by Joyce Carol Oates today. “It’s a minority of a minority.” To paraphrase, “so few people”. It only takes one to utterly disrupt a festival. Permanently.