The executive order President Donald Trump signed on Wednesday barring transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports mirrors efforts by Arizona Republicans to restrict transgender students.
The Arizona law, which is currently in litigation, passed in 2022 under Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and bans transgender girls from playing girls’ sports. Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen (R-Gilbert) is defending that law in court and joined Trump on Wednesday to support his new order.
“The war against women and girls is now taking a dramatic turn for the better, and today sanity is being reinstated,” Petersen said in a video statement. “Thanks to President Trump, American girls can once again pursue their dreams. I’m proud to join President Trump in Washington, D.C., for this historic moment. I know he will never stop fighting for us,” he said.
Petersen was also the sponsor of the Arizona bill signed into law three years ago.
Under Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, Republicans haven’t been able to pass any bills targeted at transgender people, but they’ve tried.
Failed attempts include bills to do things like banning teachers from using students’ preferred pronouns without explicit parental consent and keeping transgender students out of their peers’ bathrooms.
Those bills have come back this year, along with a new bill which would ban changes to birth certificates.
Last year, when Republicans only had one-seat majorities in the Arizona House and Senate, Republican Sen. Ken Bennett voted “no” to block those bills from going to the voters as ballot measures to bypass Hobbs’ veto stamp. But Bennett lost his re-election bid, and now GOP lawmakers have larger majorities in the House and Senate.
Transgender athletes competing in women and girls’ sports is something the majority of voters consistently say they don’t support in polls. Trump cited transgender athletes frequently on the campaign trail and said Wednesday that it’s part of the reason Republicans did so well in the 2024 election.
It’s not clear how many athletes the order will affect.
In a speech Trump made before signing the order, Trump said the left is trying to impose “militant transgender ideology” and has invaded women’s sports.
He specifically described a male cyclist winning an Arizona race last year, illustrating it as a need for the order.
“Last year, a male cyclist posing as a woman competed in the Arizona trail race — a very big deal in cycling — and obliterated the women’s course record by nearly 5.5 hours. Sounds like a lot doesn’t it,” Trump said to a laughing crowd.
But, the female winner of last year’s Arizona Trail Race was Alexandera Houchin, and she is not transgender.
Earlier in 2024, there was a transgender athlete called Austin Killips who set a record on the Arizona trail, but she did it solo, as an “individual time trail” — not as part of the Arizona Trail Race where a group starts out at the same time and the riders compete against one another.
Houchin won the “group start” for women in October of 2024 on a single speed bike without gears.
That’s different from Killips’ accomplishment. Killips was in a different category of bikes with gears and won the fastest record overall — for men and women. Since then, it’s been beaten by at least two men.
Arizona Trail Race Director John Schilling clarified that they are no longer keeping track of “fastest time” attempts because the route changes every year due to things like wildfire detours or trail construction. So, if anyone has broken Killip’s record for women, they won’t know.
He also clarified that the route has only existed four four years and only four women have done it, so the record Killips beat had only been established months prior.
Schilling further noted that because the race is more than 80 miles and takes several days, beating the record by hours is not as shocking as he thinks people may find it out of context. The men’s winner this year beat the record by more than a day.
“He is right, five hours does seem like a lot ... when you don't know what you're talking about. Oh well. It's exactly why I love Backcountry mountain biking and riding for multiple days with everything I need. It's a great escape and refresh from the nonsense,” Schilling said in an email.
ASU professor Victoria Jackson is a sports historian. She said Trump’s comment is part of a strategy of finding a moment to underline his point and make it seem to the general public that transgender sports is an ever-present problem.
“It fits a pattern of finding an obscure stat or moment to generalize and kind of fearmonger folks,” she said.
Trump also said that any schools who violate the order will jeopardize their federal funding.
Trump signed the order on National Girls and Women in Sports Day.
Trump said that his order will stop any transgender athletes from competing in female sporting events in the United States, even for international events like the Olympics, which is run by the International Olympic Committee — not Trump. Still, his order could have an effect.
“We haven’t seen leaders in other countries hold press conferences or sign executive orders demanding that international sports follow the laws of their particular nation — that feels novel and new to me,” Jackson said.
She said that it could be a negotiation between the leadership of the IOC and the Trump administration.
The order on women’s sports follows a January order Trump signed which defines sex as only male and female.
