Donald Trump has a weird obsession with transgender people that needs to end. 

Last February, he signed an executive order barring trans women from competing in women’s sports, claiming protection of biological women in these spaces. This executive order rescinded funding to educational programs — K-12 schools, colleges, and universities — that allowed trans women on women’s sports teams. 

And yet, a new study published in the British Journal of Sports and Medicine earlier this week found “no evidence that trans athletes are ‘a threat’ to women’s sports.” The meta-analysis, which included about 50 studies and 6,485 people — about 2,900 trans women, 2,300 trans men, 560 cisgender women, and 660 cisgender men — found no evidence of a physical athletic advantage for trans women compared to cis women. 

“We will not allow men to beat up, injure and cheat our women and girls,” Trump said as he signed the order. “From now on, women’s sports will be only for women.” 

Seems like an interesting stance for a man who was named in more than 5,300 of the released Epstein files. But I guess none of the dozens of women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct over the years were athletes, so he didn’t care then.

Besides the blatant transphobia Trump spews when he refers to trans women as “men,” his push to exclude trans people from sports is also… not needed. There is not an epidemic of trans women wanting to compete in women’s sports.

The 2026 Winter Olympic Games start this weekend with around 2,900 athletes competing. Of those, only one identifies as transgender — Elis Lundholm, a Swedish freestyle skier. While between 0.1 and 1.1%of the world’s population is transgender, less than 0.001% of recent Olympians are transgender or nonbinary, making them “significantly underrepresented” in the Games. 

But Trump’s executive order — while affecting U.S. trans athletes competing in the Olympics — was primarily focused on high school and college sports. That must be where the problem is, right? There must be thousands of trans women in collegiate sports who are absolutely dominating the field because of their “biological advantage,” right?

Wrong. The New York Times reported there are fewer than 10 collegiate athletes — out of 510,000 in the U.S. — who identify as transgender. 

So why does he care so much? 

It all goes back to day one of his second term in office, the dismal day that was Jan. 20, 2025. Trump made a lot of promises on the campaign trail his second time around since his followers failed to overturn the election on Jan. 6, 2021. He knew he had to win, and one of the ways he did so was by appealing to peoples’ hatred and weaponizing the bigotry of the God-loving, hate-filled conservatives of this country.

After being inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, Trump sat down to sign 26 executive orders into law — the most of any president on their first day in office since 1937. Of those first orders, Trump signed the “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” order, declaring only two recognized sexes, male and female. 

The effects of this on our country are detrimental. At a school like Emerson College, we may not see or feel it everyday. You still have the power to update your preferred name to the school, and to get a new ID printed for free when you do so. But this is not the case outside of the Boylston bubble. 

Trans people all over the U.S. are being forced to change their passports to reflect their assigned sex at birth, meaning someone who has been living as a man for all of their life will now have their passport declare them a biological female. This is, at best, a challenge and, at worst, life-threatening. 

And the biggest problem with all of this is that no one can stop it. A case was brought to the Supreme Court against the ban on transgender athletes, but the conservative-majority court is likely to uphold this.

None of this was ever about the perceived biological advantage of trans women in sports. It was about erasing trans people from America. 

Human lives are more than a game.