President Donald Trump warmed the hearts of University of Alabama graduates when he reaffirmed his promise to “keep men out of women’s sports.”
During a commencement speech at the university’s graduation ceremony on Thursday night, Trump shut out the school’s SEC champion women’s track and field team before eliciting raucous applause by “vowing to defend women’s sports.”
“As long as I am president, we will protect women’s sports. Men will not participate in women’s sports,” Trump stated before the crowd erupted in applause, the loudest and longest of the night.
“No way.” They say it’s an 80/20 split. “No, I believe it’s a 97-3 issue,” Trump said. “No, men will not participate in women’s sports. I stated that, and as you are aware, I classified it as a very powerful executive order. It’s finished.
Later in his speech, Trump returned to the subject, mocking Democrats for allowing trans athletes in women’s sports and trans athletes themselves in a lengthy rant.
During this section of his speech, Trump also mentioned the Paris Olympics women’s boxing competitions, which featured two gold medalists who had previously been disqualified from international competitions for failing gender eligibility tests. However, neither boxer, Algeria’s Imane Khelif nor Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, identify as transgender.
“They had a great champion, a female boxer, and after one punch she walked back to the corner and said, ‘I can’t get hit like that, I’ve never been hit like that before,” said Donald Trump.
At one point, Trump performed a physical impersonation of a female weight lifter and a trans weight lifter, reenacting a scenario in which the female loses to a trans competitor.
Then Trump attacked transgender swimmers, recounting the story of a swimmer who was “windburned” by a trans opponent.
“One young lady, she was going to set the record, she fought all her life to set the record,” said Donald Trump. “She looks to the right and sees the same thing, but next to her is a giant…” That was a person who changed, and he had the wingspan of Wilt ‘the Stilt’ Chamberlain.”
In June 2023, Trump made similar references to the weightlifting and swimming scenarios while speaking at the North Carolina Republican Party Convention in Greensboro.
On Thursday, Trump mentioned female volleyball players who have been impacted by transgender inclusion.
“You look at all the volleyball players who have been hurt so badly, that are hit at levels that they’ve never seen before,” said Donald Trump.
Brooke Slusser, a former University of Alabama women’s volleyball player, had to share a locker room and a bedroom with a trans athlete when she transferred to San Jose State University in 2023.
In a lawsuit, Slusser claims she was forced to share those spaces with trans teammate Blaire Fleming despite being unaware Fleming was a biological male.
Slusser has since left San Jose State University and returned home to Texas, citing alleged backlash and harassment following the filing of her lawsuit.
On February 5, Trump signed the executive order to keep men out of women’s sports. One day later, the NCAA changed its gender eligibility policy to limit participation in the women’s category to biological females only. However, some women’s sports activists have criticised the new policy for not going far enough.
Since 2021, Alabama has had a state law that prohibits transgender athletes from participating in girls’ sports. In 2023, it was expanded to include college students. Unlike other laws addressing the issue, Alabama’s law prohibits athletes born as females from competing in the boys’ category unless there is no comparable girls’ opportunity (such as football).
Transgender inclusion in women’s and girls’ sports became a hot topic in Trump’s 2024 election victory, with the majority of Americans siding with the Republican on the issue.
According to a national exit poll conducted by the Concerned Women for America legislative action committee, 70% of moderate voters viewed “Donald Trump’s opposition to transgender boys and men playing girls’ and women’s sports and transgender boys and men using girls’ and women’s bathrooms” as important.
Six percent said it was the most important issue of all, and 44% said it was “very important.”
The issue sparked a national counterculture movement against Democratic policies that keep trans athletes in women’s sports, which was heavily influenced by young college-educated females.
According to an NBC News exit poll, Biden’s 35-point lead over Trump among young women in the 2020 presidential election cycle has been reduced to a 24-point margin for Trump’s 2024 opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
A New York Times/Ipsos poll found that the vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, believe transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports.
Of the 2,128 people who took part, 79% said biological males who identify as women should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Of the 1,025 people who identified as Democrats or leaning Democratic, 67% believed transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete against women.
According to a Gallup poll conducted last year, nearly 70% of Americans believe that biological men should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports.
In June 2024, NORC at the University of Chicago conducted a survey asking respondents whether transgender athletes of both sexes should be allowed to compete in sports leagues based on their preferred gender identity rather than their biological sex.
In the survey, 65% said it should never or rarely be allowed. When polled specifically about adult transgender female athletes competing in women’s sports, 69% opposed it.
