Reminder: There is no legitimate debate. These people are not interested in safety or science or womens sports, they’re interested in maintaining a simplistic gender binary against reality.
Right-wing media spent years demanding that President Donald Trump ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports. He complied. But rather than declare victory, conservative outlets immediately demanded even stricter measures, expanding their campaign to include intersex athletes and calling for invasive genetic testing. Their goal isn’t fairness; it’s perpetual outrage and ideological policing of women’s bodies.
After Trump signed an executive order to ban trans women from women’s sports, right-wing media figures quickly pivoted to a months-old controversy centered around Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, a cisgender Algerian athlete who was falsely accused of being transgender last summer. Khelif was disqualified from the 2023 Women’s World Boxing Championships, even though she was assigned female at birth. Despite this, conservative media have revisited Khelif’s case as justification for excluding intersex women, labelling the boxer as “male” in order to claim Trump’s ban isn’t strict enough, and once again moving the goalposts in their ongoing obsession over who counts as a woman in 2025.
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By March 6, City Journal began explicitly including intersex athletes in its push for expanded bans, advocating for chromosomal tests to exclude women with differences in sex development. Its writer asserted that “in rare cases, though more commonly in developing countries, doctors may misidentify a male newborn’s sex due to female-like or ambiguous genitalia caused by a developmental condition. … Just this summer, a loophole of this kind allowed two male athletes, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, to compete as women and win gold medals in boxing at the 2024 Paris Olympics.” If evidence exists for this claim about private and personal details of Khelif and Lin’s bodies, it is entirely absent from the article (seriously, go take a look). According to BBC, the International Olympic Committee has stated that “Lin and Khelif were ‘born and raised as women.’”
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his new phase targets intersex women — individuals with differences in sex development who’ve been recognized as female their entire lives — who it asserts are simply “male.” Under policies championed by conservative figures, women with conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome — who have XY chromosomes but develop female anatomy — could be excluded entirely from women’s sports. Many women with AIS only learn about their genetic makeup during puberty when menstruation doesn’t begin.
Similarly, women with 5-alpha reductase deficiency or Swyer syndrome — conditions resulting in the presence of XY chromosomes but female-typical sex characteristics — would also face disqualification under strict chromosomal definitions. These conditions occur in roughly 1 in 100 people. Although rare, women born with XY chromosomes have given birth in the past.
History demonstrates the harm of such restrictive policies. Olympic medalist Caster Semenya endured invasive scrutiny and discrimination over her naturally occurring testosterone levels, exemplifying the potential consequences of implementing genetic testing requirements. Conservative media continue to advocate for mandatory genetic testing, despite evidence that it could unfairly exclude cisgender and intersex women alike.
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Right-wing media’s escalating demands following Trump’s anti-trans executive orders represent an ongoing pattern. As Media Matters previously reported, conservative figures consistently deemed even Trump’s most extreme anti-trans policies insufficient. Their end goal isn’t fairness; it’s continuous outrage, exclusion, and control.