Swimmers including Penn's Lia Thomas, lane 4, dive into the water at the start of a qualifying heat at the 2022 Ivy League championships. (Mary Schwalm/AP)
How it started: On Oct. 10, 2024, San Jose State hosted San Diego State in women's volleyball. There were 66 kills recorded. But video of a would-be kill by a San Jose State player turned into all the rage after it was injected into the social media bloodstream.
Why? Because several teams refused earlier last season to play San Jose State upon rumor that one of the Spartans was transgender. Oh, the horror! The video showed the San Jose State player who was outed as trans smashing a ball that left a San Diego State player rolling to the hardwood floor. The video was circulated as evidence that the San Diego State player had been injured by a blast from an athlete with an unfair advantage.
Truth was, the defending player executed a fantastic dig that eventually won her team the point. She popped up, smiled heartily at her success and was rewarded with high-fives.
But the next week, then-candidate Donald Trump appeared on Fox News in a town hall moderated by Harris Faulkner, who asked Trump what his policy would be for trans athletes. The optics-obsessed Trump referenced the video.
"I never saw a ball hit so hard, hit the girl in the head," Trump said. "But other people, even in volleyball, they've been permanently, I mean, they've been really hurt badly. Women playing men. But you don't have to do the volleyball. We stop it. We stop it. We absolutely stop it. You can't have it.
"You just ban it. The president bans it. You just don't let it happen."
San Diego State, which won that match, 3-0, dissented: "It has been incorrectly reported that a San Diego State University student-athlete was hit in the face with a volleyball during match play with San Jose State University. The ball bounced off the shoulder of the student-athlete, and the athlete was uninjured and did not miss a play. We have called for corrections from multiple media outlets."
But this is how it's going: An ignorant or purposeful disfiguration of the truth as a campaign promise metastasized from the sports arena into more pretext for now-President Trump's ongoing conflicts with colleges and universities.
First and most foremost, his administration raised accusations of unchecked antisemitic behavior on campuses as rationale to cripple colleges and universities by withholding billions of dollars of government research funding. And now it is threatening to freeze hundreds of millions more to any campus judged to have discriminated against women athletes by allowing transgender women to compete in cis women's space.
The University of Pennsylvania learned last March that the Trump White House froze upward of $175 million in research funding to the school because it allowed transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to be on its women's team one season, during which she won a few Ivy League titles and advanced to the NCAA championships, where she captured a title.
It was the same coercive financial action the administration took against Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, my alma mater Northwestern, and several other such schools under the accusation they foment antisemitism because they didn't protect Jewish students during campus protests over Israel's attacks on Gaza.
So earlier this week, Penn erased Thomas's accomplishments, apologized to the women athletes her presence may have vexed, and, somewhat imitating new trans athletes' regulations in international competitions and the NCAA, barred trans athletes from participating in women's sports. The administration responded by releasing the funds it froze.
And the Supreme Court on Thursday decided to review the entire controversy over trans athletes' participation in women's sports, because, well, this is a pressing issue in sports that threatens to destroy its foundation.
I mean, you can't swing a hammer in a throwing circle without clocking a trans athlete, right? They're everywhere!
"How many athletes are there in the U.S. in NCAA schools?" Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) asked NCAA President Charlie Baker during a hearing last December on federal sports regulations.
"Five hundred and ten thousand," said Baker, a Republican who was Massachusetts's governor before assuming leadership of the NCAA in 2023.
"How many transgender athletes are you aware of?" Durbin asked.
"Less than 10," Baker said.
How many were at Penn? One. That'll be $175 million, or else.
It would be an understatement of historic proportions to say the Trump attack on trans athletes is overkill. Again, the paltry numbers: a UCLA Law School think tank in 2022 estimated about 1.64 million people over the age of 13 in the United States identify as transgender -- about 0.5 percent of all adults, or 1.3 million people, and about 1.4 percent of teens, or about 300,000.
How is disallowing those few trans athletes from playing sports protecting cis women athletes?
"Aside from subjecting girls to harassment and invasive testing, these bans do not actually protect women and girls," Shiwali Patel, senior director of safe and inclusive schools at the National Women's Law Center, said Thursday. "They also don't solve for resource or funding inequities in women and girls' sports, or the fact that college women athletes are shortchanged millions of dollars in athletic scholarships compared to college men, or address rampant sexual harassment against athletes by authority figures.
"Equal protection and access to education means that all students should be able to play sports and reap the well-documented socio-emotional and educational benefits of playing. Excluding a girl because she is trans is never fair -- it's unlawful and undermines the rights of all women and girls."
Lia Thomas was an outlier. She lost, too.
Which is why the Trump administration's fight isn't about fairness any more than those of lawmakers and organizations across the country that have introduced and passed state bills against trans athlete sports participation. It's about ideology; it's about politics.
And in the case of Trump, it is another weapon to punish those he sees as enemies.