For many transgender athletes, the playing field isn’t always level, not necessarily because of skill level, but because of recent policies aimed at discriminating against transgender athletes. For senior Jasmine Pineda, a transgender woman and varsity cheer captain, the journey to feeling like “just a normal girl” took years to materialize into reality.
“Navigating my identity was a really interesting process,” Pineda said. “I knew I was different by the time I was five years old, and I knew I wanted to express female-like characteristics even though I didn’t know what that meant. The pandemic changed everything since I got the time to find who I was, but it wasn’t easy — it was a battle with myself for a while, and trying to accept myself.”
But this battle for self-acceptance is quickly evolving into a national debate over LGBTQ+ rights. Since President Donald Trump began his second term in office, he has signed a series of executive orders jeopardizing the safety of transgender individuals. Vowing to eliminate America’s “transgender insanity,” Trump has already pushed to remove federal funding for youth gender-affirming care, ban transgender people from enlisting in the military, and declared that the federal government would only recognize the male and woman sexes on official documents. His fourth anti-transgender executive order – “No Men in Women’s Sports Executive Order” – was signed on Wednesday, Feb. 25, ordering Title IX, the federal civil rights law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools, to ban transgender girls and women from competing in women’s sports.
“Coming from President Trump, these transphobic messages being perpetuated by the government aren’t necessarily surprising, but it’s definitely disappointing and just scary to be existing as a queer person right now,” senior and vice president of the Gender Sexuality Alliance (GSA) club Evie Scott said. “I think a lot of these policies are trying to put barriers in between queer people and trans people, and it’s just not true to what the community is.”
More recently, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a leading policymaker and long-considered ally of the LGBTQ+ community, stated on Thursday, March 6, in his debut podcast episode of “This is Gavin Newsom” that “it’s deeply unfair” for transgender girls and women to compete in women’s sports. Newsom was joined by conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, who encouraged him to “step out and say no” to transgender women athletes winning in sports. Newsom’s agreement with Kirk on this “issue of fairness” has fueled extreme backlash from both Democrats and the LGBTQ+ community.
“It’s shocking because I always thought that Gavin Newsom was fighting for equality and fighting for LGBTQ+ rights,” Pineda said. “But what people need to realize is that trans people make up such a tiny fraction of professional athletes. Yet even though we make up such a small amount, we’re still ridiculed and at the center of everything. It’s disorienting for sure to hear my governor of the state that I love so much say that — it’s dangerous because I think that kind of like that message shifts people’s minds when they see a leader say such dangerous things.”
As of December 2024, “less than 10” transgender athletes participate in the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), according to NCAA president Charlie Baker. Just a day after Trump signed the “No Men in Women’s Sports Executive Order,” the NCAA changed its policy to limit women’s competition to athletes assigned female at birth, an act that makes the future for transgender women athletes “even more scary,” according to an anonymous student of a gender minority.
“The number of trans athletes that actually exist in the NCAA is alarmingly low for the amount of time that these lawmakers are spending on this issue,” the anonymous student said. “There’s so much sensationalism over such a small group of people who, at the end of the day, isn’t hurting anybody and is a part of our community. I think this debate was meant to distract people from things occurring in our country – it gives them a reason to fight a common enemy.”
Art teacher Eislyn Wolf-Noyes, who identifies as a transgender woman, hopes for a safer future for the LGBTQ+ community.
“I hope that people understand that there’s a lot of gender diversity, and it’s just a part of the human experience,” Wolf-Noyes said. “Transgender people have been around for as long as we have recorded history — we’ve always been there, and now we’re not going away.”
