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The day after a Democratic wave swept the midterm elections, Fox News hosted Elizabeth Eddy, the NWSL player who has courted controversy by writing an anti-trans op-ed for the New York Post. Eddy, who had just days left before her retirement, decided to use her last moments as an active professional soccer player to target the most vulnerable women in sports. And Fox News, who didn’t want to focus on how badly the GOP had been beaten at the polls, turned to right-wing media’s favorite distraction—trans people.
“I’m concerned that without clarity about who the league is for, it will lose its identity and its momentum,” Eddy wrote in her op-ed, which argued for sex testing athletes alongside a ban on trans and intersex players from the NWSL, ostensibly to protect “the integrity of women’s sports.” The article ran with a photo of Orlando Pride player Barbra Banda, a Zambian athlete who has faced waves of harassment and had her gender and womanhood questioned, including by the world’s most famous TERF, J.K. Rowling.
The NWSL has been inexcusably spineless on the matter. They quietly dropped their gender inclusion policy back in 2022 without telling anyone, which only became public when The Guardian reported it last week. League commissioner Jessica Berman failed to defend Banda from the transphobic attacks last year. This week, NWSL released a statement in defense of Banda that played up her talent, while calling the attacks on her “divisive.”
The NWSL Players’ Association released its own statement, which was supposedly intended to be supportive of Banda and other African players impacted by Eddy’s words, but which contained dog whistles of its own.
”We stand firmly with all our members - including, and especially, the African women who have been targeted by divisive and demeaning rhetoric,” the PA’s statement read. “Every NWSL Player was assigned female at birth. Every NWSL Player has earned her place in the women’s game, and those whose eligibility is being questioned have already competed on the world’s biggest stages: the Olympics and the Women’s World Cup. Our league is better because they play in it.”
The line about every NWSL player being assigned female at birth stood out to me for several reasons, the biggest of which is that it’s clear that even supposed allies are engaging with this issue on anti-trans terms and framing. How do you know that every NWSL player was assigned female at birth? Have you checked their genitals? And why are we even talking about the genitals of the athletes on the field? Would they not be worth defending if they weren’t AFAB? Would they not be eligible to play if they weren’t AFAB?
The framing of the entire conversation implies that these attacks would be ok if the players were trans, or if they weren’t cis. But there is also a high likelihood that there are intersex players in the NWSL. Many female athletes have discovered their intersex status due to sex testing policies. It would be perfectly okay if there were intersex players in the league; it would also be none of our business.
Nowhere in any of these statements is the word “transphobia” written, nor are these attacks tied to rising anti-trans sentiment in the sports world and our culture at-large. There is no context about how policing the womanhood of any woman is a threat to all women, including the players in the NWSL. And while the PA’s statement directly names African players as being targeted by these attacks, no one contextualizes the fact that anti-trans sentiment and the sex testing policies that Eddy advocates for in her op-ed overwhelmingly impact Black and brown women from the Global South. Erasing this context continues to endanger trans women and any woman who doesn’t conform to traditional, white, Eurocentric standards of femininity—and hinders the ability to fully fight these beliefs.
Eddy’s Angel City teammate and team captain Sarah Gorden is the only person to use the word “transphobia” in discussing the issue.
“That article does not speak for this team in this locker room,” Gorden said in a press conference last Thursday. “We don’t agree with the things written for a plethora of reasons, but mostly the undertones come across as transphobic and racist as well. The article calls for genetic testing on certain players, and it has a photo of an African player as a headline. And that’s very harmful… And there are players in this league and in this locker room that are directly harmed by what was written in the article.”
Maybe Eddy was upset that most people likely don’t even know who she is due to her career being so unremarkable; she has played in only three games over the last two seasons and is usually not even on the gameday roster. Eddy’s appearance on Fox and Friends this morning was perhaps a sign that she is setting herself for a post-soccer career that mirrors another underperforming athlete—Riley Gaines.
Gaines, noted fifth place swimmer and the world’s second most famous TERF, has become the spokesperson for the anti-trans sports movement (idk have the transphobes tried simply being better at sports??). She also recognizes that sports are the issue on which trans rights hinge as a whole—and she is intentionally using it to help lobby for increasing restrictions on trans people.
“The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” she told the New York Times earlier this year. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”
And this admission is where any arguments about fairness, or any attempt to say that banning trans women from women’s sports isn’t transphobic, completely fall apart. “Reasonable people can disagree” on how sports should be structured, Eddy writes in her op-ed. Former NWSL player Nicole Baxter posted on Instagram saying that people “can have [their] opinions on trans issues and who can/cannot participate in women's sports leagues based on gender standards” and that they should “respect people’s opinions.”
But if the goal, as Gaines says, is to use sports as a means to eventually legislate trans people out of existence, then setting this up as a debate between two opposing ideologies is deeply harmful. Trans people's ability to fully participate in public life is not an “opinion” for people to disagree on. It’s bigotry, plain and simple.
Not only that, it’s a deeply unpopular viewpoint. As much as the Democrats have tried to blame trans issues for Kamala Harris’ loss in the last presidential election, it just doesn’t hold water. A 2023 study found that over a third of the country—and 60% of Democrats—want politicians to focus on protecting the rights of trans people. Only 17% of those surveyed felt that politicians should focus on restricting those rights. A nationwide poll by CNN last month showed that people rank transgender policies last among issues surveyed.
And anti-trans politicians lost brutally during this week’s midterms. In Virginia, MAGA Republican Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears spent nearly $5 million on anti-trans attack ads during her campaign for governor. She lost to Democrat Abigail Spanberger by more than 10 points. Meanwhile, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani overwhelmingly won the NYC mayoral election by explicitly embracing and supporting trans people and trans issues. LGBTQ+ voters also turned out in droves and helped swing the election for Mamdani. LGBTQ+ voters were 14% of the electorate and broke for Mamdani 82-15.
Guess who else lost their anti-trans election this week? Professional losing loser Riley Gaines, who was recently elected to Sumner County Tennessee's Library Board in an attempt to help pass a ban on library books that discuss transgender identity. The ban failed for the fourth time.
All the Democratic politicians who have jumped on the anti-trans sports train thinking it will be the ticket to electoral success—Gavin Newsom, Seth Moulton, Pete Buttigieg—should take note. Anti-trans positions are not popular and Americans do not like them. But women’s sports leagues like the NWSL should also be paying attention. If they follow the wave of transphobic policy that has taken over women’s sports at all levels, they will be on the wrong side of history and it will be ugly.
Eddy believes that the “remarkable growth” that women’s sports leagues have seen recently is being threatened, and that women’s soccer will “lose its identity and its momentum” if it doesn’t implement exclusionary policies and sex testing that violates the human rights of her colleagues. But I’d argue that the real threat to women’s sports in this moment are people like Eddy who are unashamed to be loud and bigoted in public, and spineless league leadership like that of the NWSL that issues vague platitudes that mean nothing and do nothing to ensure the safety of the players.
If the ultimate goal in sports is to win, women’s leagues should very quickly unalign themselves with the losing side. It should be enough that anti-trans sentiment is ugly and harmful to women in the NWSL and beyond; but to put it in sports terms that may be more easily understood, anti-trans policies and politicians are fucking losers.