Two weeks ago, American President Donald Trump signed his "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" executive order into law, aiming to bar individuals assigned male at birth from participating in women's sports.
Those in favour of this mandate, like former Olympic cyclist Inga Thompson, praised the President for ‘saving women’s sports.’
“We’re on the start of bringing fairness back to women athletes," Thompson told Cycling Weekly. "It's all good for women athletes. Everything that [the White House] is pushing forward.”
But what exactly has Trump done to support women’s sports? ‘Nothing at all,’ says American cyclist Austin Killips.
A transgender woman, Killips’ achievements in cycling have long been the subject of debate. In 2023, she became the first openly trans woman to win a UCI stage race—the Tour of the Gila. She’s also won a Belgian Waffle gravel race and placed on the podium at the 2022 U.S. National Cyclocross Championships.
After her success sparked policy changes from the UCI and USA Cycling, banning trans women from elite competition, Killips turned to ultra-endurance racing, where racers compete in mixed-gender fields. In 2024, she set a new women’s record on the 800-mile Arizona Trail—a feat Trump singled out when signing his executive order.
“...a male cyclist posing as a woman competed in the 800-mile Arizona Trail Race – a very big deal in cycling – and obliterated the women’s course record by nearly five and a half hours,” he commented.
Now, in a scathing Op-Ed for the Guardian, Killips fires back at the President, accusing him of using trans athletes as a political scapegoat while doing nothing to meaningfully support women in sports.
“Trump’s executive order is a perfect scam: he and his acolytes get to talk endlessly about the fake spectre of trans athletes “invading” women’s sports, while never putting any of their attention, immense political cache and funding access towards things that would meaningfully elevate the state of women’s sports,” she writes.
“Their project contains no measures that help female athletes at the professional level as labourers, and certainly nothing that even gestures towards new investment opportunities for girls pursuing their dream.”
Killips points to the ‘sad state of affairs’ in women’s cycling with institutions like the Joe Martin Stage Race falling off the calendar and the long-running DNA Pro Cycling team calling it quits in 2024.
“For women looking for a team or a race that could potentially catapult their career forward, things are the worst they have been in the last decade,” Killips laments.
Instead of creating opportunities for female athletes, Killips argues that the anti-trans rhetoric focuses only on exclusion.
“The only action items referencing funding simply establishes a precedent for rescinding money from organizations investing in women and girls who have given their lives and bodies to sport. In this new reality, all women lose,” she states.
“They found a scapegoat, and all they have done is enrich themselves with five-figure speaking fee tours, while taking the oxygen out of the room…They are, for lack of a better word, cowards who don’t want to do the actual work of empowering and supporting athletes.”
Ultimately, Killips warns that the current political push to ban transgender athletes is part of a broader pattern of neglecting women’s sports. She urges those who claim to care about fairness in women’s sports to consider where political energy and funding are actually being directed.
“…You need to ask yourself why, at the height of a historic moment of sweeping and unchecked austerity measures, the loudest and wealthiest people in the room have built a movement that culminated in this: an executive order that establishes a precedent to strip funding away from women in sport.”
Read the full Op-Ed, here.
