On Tuesday, the University of Pennsylvania reached an agreement with the Trump administration’s Department of Education regarding trans-identified male swimmer Lia Thomas’s participation on the women’s swim team. Following a federal investigation, the university has agreed to revise records set by Thomas and to restore titles and accolades to the female athletes he displaced. UPenn will also issue personal apologies to the affected swimmers, bar male athletes from competing in women’s sports, and adopt biology-based definitions of “male” and “female” under Title IX.
This correction was inevitable. Reality, in the end, reasserts itself. But the mainstream press hasn’t budged. Instead, they continue to misinform their readers, deploying headlines designed to obscure plain facts.
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Consider a representative sample of mainstream media headlines. The New York Times claimed that Penn had agreed “to Limit Participation of Transgender Athletes.” The Washington Post reported that the school would “bar transgender athletes from women’s sports teams.” NBC News, USA Today, and BBC all referred to “ban[s]” on “trans athletes.”
These headlines aren’t just misleading; they’re false. Lia Thomas wasn’t barred from female sports for being “transgender”; he was barred for being a male. Any other male, whether he identified as transgender or not, would be barred for the same reason. Trans-identifying males remain fully eligible to compete in UPenn athletics—on the men’s team.
Instead of focusing on the women who benefit from the university’s course correction, the media has centered its attention on Thomas. Headlines have emphasized that Thomas was “stripped of titles,” but have largely overlooked the women whose titles were restored: Anna Kalandadze, Virginia Burns, and Kayla Fu, whose records in the 500-meter, 200-meter, and 100-meter freestyle, respectively, have now been reinstated.
Predictably, proponents for allowing males to compete in women’s sports have wasted no time distorting scientific evidence to denounce UPenn’s decision. Two CNN reporters, for instance, claimed that the idea “transgender athletes have an unfair advantage in sports” is “not what the research shows.” They pointed to a 2017 review, which claimed that there was “no direct and consistent research to suggest that [trans-identifying males] . . . have an athletic advantage in sport.” But that conclusion flowed largely from the lack of studies on the question—an issue driven less by uncertainty than by the assumption that the answer was self-evident. Since then, hard data have emerged confirming what anyone with functioning eyes already knew: that trans-identifying males’ use of testosterone-suppressing drugs and cross-sex hormones only moderately reduces, but comes nowhere close to eliminating, the performance gap between male and female athletes.
Later in that article, the CNN reporters cited a 2023 review claiming that many sex differences after puberty are “reduced, if not erased, over time by gender-affirming hormone therapy.” But this argument cherry-picks a narrow set of metrics—such as performance in certain bodyweight exercises and maximum aerobic capacity—while ignoring the primary drivers of male athletic advantage: muscle and tendon size, height, speed, and strength. These traits are either minimally affected or not affected at all by testosterone suppression.
This kind of selective framing and omission won’t serve the Left in the long run. Writing in The Bulwark, Jill Lawrence recently urged Democrats not to “dodge” or “avoid confrontation” on transgender issues but to “dominate this debate.” Notably, she sidestepped the question of fairness entirely, arguing instead that trans-identified males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports to reduce their “depression, anxiety, suicide attempts, and suicide.”
But the Left cannot continue to name “mental health benefits” as justification for allowing trans-identifying males in women’s sports, while knowing that the public overwhelmingly opposes it and often reacts with intense, sometimes vitriolic, backlash. If activists are genuinely concerned about these athletes’ mental health, the sounder advice would be to discourage them from competing in female categories.
More importantly, allowing men to compete in women’s sports harms the mental and physical well-being of the women forced to compete with them, share locker rooms, and lose hard-won opportunities. Their interests must come first. Even for Thomas, the outcome was not affirmation but humiliation—stripped titles and a damaged reputation—not because of bigotry, but because reality eventually caught up with the falsehoods.
Democrats are free to champion whatever causes they like, but the Trump administration’s intervention in the trans sports debate offers them a quiet off-ramp from an issue that has become a major electoral liability, even among their own voters. Letting the administration’s policy stand may be their best chance to shore up support ahead of 2028.
UPenn’s reversal is a meaningful win for reality, but the fight is far from over. The Left still yearns for the moral high of historic civil rights victories. With most of those battles already won, some progressives have resorted to manufacturing new ones as a way to signal their supposed virtue. But that strategy is becoming harder to sustain as these invented causes drift further from reality—and drive moderates away in the process.
Top Photo by Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
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