President Donald Trump Wednesday issued an executive order threatening to defund schools that allowed transgender girls and women to play girls and women’s sports, under the auspices of Title IX. On Thursday, the NCAA announced that it would stand by the ban and prohibit transgender women from participating in women’s college sports.
Some women’s sports advocates such as tennis great Martina Navratilova applauded the executive order and disparaged its opponents — “I hate that the democrats totally failed women and girls on this very clear issue of women’s sports being for females only,” Navratilova posted on X — and transgender women and advocates decried it.
Karleigh Webb, a transgender woman from New Britain, is still preparing to play with her women’s tackle football team despite uncertainty surrounding the executive order. But Webb, who is an advocate for transgender youth, is more worried about the kids.
“From a standpoint from someone who loves sports, who does advocacy work, there’s a lot of young people in the state right now who are looking at their parents and saying, ‘My country’s declared war on me,’” Webb said Thursday.
“That’s what makes my heart cry the most, for kids who’ve had safer places to go to school, sports have been open, activities have been open and now you have a president of the United States calling it ‘lunacy.’”
Twenty-five states have banned transgender girls from participating in sports that correspond with their gender identity, but Connecticut’s laws support transgender rights, including those of transgender females who play high school girls sports, and those potentially affected by the executive order Wednesday are still trying to sort out how to respond and what to do.
“This is mean-spirited and unlawful, and deeply harmful to all Connecticut students,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “The U.S. Supreme Court made it clear in Bostock (vs. Clayton County) that discrimination against transgender individuals is illegal under federal law. We will not allow Title IX to be unlawfully misused to degrade women and girls and defund our schools, colleges, and universities. We will strongly oppose any attempt to strip Connecticut schools of funding merely because they are following a policy that aligns with the law.
“Trump is going to do this again and again. He’s going to try to tell us we have two choices, to inflict terrible harm on Connecticut families, or accept the consequences of his lawless draconian threats. We need to remember there is always a third option—to stand together and fight back. That’s what we are going to do.”
The ACLU of Connecticut, which has represented two transgender athletes from the state in an ongoing federal lawsuit, also stated its opposition to the most recent executive order.
“The ACLU of Connecticut works with the ACLU nationwide, and we’ve been fighting back against these terrible executive orders from Day One,” said Bethany Rae Perryman, director of communications for the ACLU of Connecticut. “The ACLU believes in the rights of trans people, to have full inclusion and participation in society.”
The Connecticut Republican Party was quick to respond.
“Why should our daughters and granddaughters be put in danger of injury from being forced compete against biological males who are bigger, stronger, and faster than they are?” Chairman Ben Proto said in a statement on Friday. ” … to lose the opportunity to stand on the winner’s podium, to receive the accolades they should be enjoying, to have the opportunity to receive scholarships that will help further their educations and futures, all to satisfy the woke progressive agenda that wants to fundamentally change our society and once again relegate women to second class citizens.
The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference is currently involved in the lawsuit filed in federal court in 2020 against the CIAC and local schools by cisgender girls seeking to halt transgender female athletes from participating in girls high school sports in Connecticut, citing violation of Title IX.
In 2019, after her daughter Selina Soule and two other runners filed a Title IX complaint regarding the participation of transgender female athletes Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood in track, Bianca Stanescu told The Courant: “The genders are segregated for a reason. They might as well just say women don’t exist as a category.”
The year before, Stanescu had circulated a petition at track meets, calling on the state legislature to require athletes to compete in sports based on their gender at birth, unless the athlete had undergone hormone therapy. The legislature did not act on the petition.
The lawsuit, brought by Soule, sought to reverse a CIAC policy that allows athletes to participate in sports corresponding with their gender identity and instead, require athletes to compete based on their birth sex. The suit also sought to change state track results and records set by two transgender female track athletes, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, who both graduated high school in 2020.
The case was dismissed in April 2021 on procedural grounds before the appeals process began. The case was initially dismissed by an appeals court but then was reinstated by the same court, which sent it back to U.S. District Court Judge Robert Chatigny, who heard arguments last year about the case. A ruling is pending.
CIAC taking it in
Thursday, CIAC executive director Glenn Lungarini said that the CIAC was working with its legal counsel to understand how the latest executive order would affect the organization and its policies.
“We have state law in Connecticut that protects gender identity and bans discrimination based on gender identity,” he said. “We need to confer with legal counsel and understand what they mean, and we will take it from there.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian law firm representing the cisgender girls who filed the lawsuit, said nothing had changed in its approach.
“The litigation continues until the CIAC changes the athletic records and admits that these harmful policies, which deprived our clients of equal opportunities, violated the law,” ADF spokesperson AnnMarie Pariseau said in an email. “While President Trump’s executive order is a necessary first step, it’s crucial that policy and lawmakers uphold Title IX to ensure women can compete on a level playing field.”
Last month, the U.S. House passed a bill banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports on the basis of biological sex, but it stated that they could still practice or train with girls or women’s sports teams.
Is there a middle ground?
Donna Lopiano, the CEO of Sports Management Resources and former CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation who lives in Shelton, would like to see a more middle of the road approach by both sides.
“Both sides have taken an all-or-nothing position,” Lopiano said. “The transgender community has said, ‘We want head-to-head competition’ and the other side, female athletes and icons and Republicans have said, ‘No, no, no, total exclusion’ … what people are struggling with because they don’t talk to each other … is there a middle?
“(The bill) acknowledges that transgender women and biological women can play in the same space. They can train together. There should be no head-to-head competition. There’s a conflict in protecting transgender or biological sex in the sports space. Whenever you have that conflict, you have to prioritize, based on common sense and reason and in this case, science. If there are physiological differences, forget about head-to-head.
“I’m waiting to see if it’s tested. If the administration will come after a school that starts adding transgender events to a track meet. Is that OK? Or is somebody going to say, ‘That’s competition, they can’t do it.’ I believe they could justify that. I want them equally rewarded. There should be two winners, this event and that event and they both get trophies.”
Earlier this week, the Office of Civil Rights stated in a Dear Colleague Letter that had guidance from 2024 under the Biden administration in which trans students were allowed to play on teams and access facilities that aligned with their gender identity has been rescinded. The letter also referenced Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order which declared that there are two sexes, biological male and biological female.
And on Thursday, the Department of Education said in a statement that it would be investigating Title IX violations at the University of Pennsylvania, where transgender female swimmer Lia Thomas competed; San Jose State, which had a transgender female player on its volleyball team and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association.
The release stated in the MIAA’s case “that a girls high school basketball team forfeited a game after a male playing for the opposing female team reportedly injured three female players.”
“President Trump’s Executive Order ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’ is a promise to women and girls: this administration will not tolerate the mistreatment of female athletes,” Craig Trainor, OCR’s acting assistant secretary said in the statement. “The previous administration trampled the rights of American women and girls – and ignored the indignities to which they were subjected in bathrooms and locker rooms – to promote a radical transgender ideology. That regime ended on Jan. 20, 2025.”
Erin Buzuvis, a law professor at Western New England College who specializes in gender and discrimination in education and athletics, said that the Department of Education has never withdrawn funding from a school in previous Title IX cases.
“Usually what happens is the Department of Education uses that threat as leverage and gets the school district or university to agree,” Buzuvis said. “It’s possible that maybe we would see the first time where an entity would not just voluntarily resolve a Title IX enforcement matter by doing whatever the government wants and litigate the right to retain their federal funding. The process for withdrawing federal funding allows that step to take place. Then it goes into the courts.
“That is the process, you can’t just summarily cut federal funds off. If they did, that’s another legal argument – you’ve denied us due process on top of it all.”