On Wednesday, in his latest round of executive actions, President Donald Trump issued an order intended to block trans women from competing in women’s sports. The ban, officially titled the “No Men In Women’s Sports Executive Order,” reverses guidance from the Biden administration on enforcement of Title IX.
Title IX was designed to prevent sex-based discrimination in education programs that receive federal money. And under former President Joe Biden, those programs were explicitly directed to recognize the gender identity of trans athletes. Technically, that meant that a person assigned male gender at birth, who now identifies as female, could go out for a women’s sports team, and that her school couldn’t prevent her from doing so.
That scenario, however, is vanishingly rare. Late last year, during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker, was asked how many trans athletes were currently in competition at the collegiate level. “Less than 10,” Baker replied.
Which means that, at least when it comes to college sports, yesterday’s order from the White House will impact approximately 0.002% of athletes. If you agree with the president that trans women in sports are a problem, it seems fair to wonder why he’s so preoccupied with such a tiny problem.
The “No Men in Women’s Sports Executive Order” is actually Trump’s third order targeting trans people, who — according to a 2024 Gallup survey — comprise about 1% of the American adult population.
Nevertheless, Trump’s focus on gender is popular. When the AP polled voters last fall, more than half of them said support for trans people in society has “gone too far.” Trump, it would seem, has a legitimate claim that gender is on people’s minds. But why?
Part of the answer is podcasts.
"We sat down with two years of videos from nine different streamers and podcasters," said Leon Yin, a reporter from Bloomberg News.
Back in January, Yin and some fellow reporters published an in-depth analysis of what’s often called “The Manosphere” — a wide range of online talk shows, hosted by men, with audiences in the tens of millions.
Leon and his team picked nine of the most popular shows — Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, a group that calls themselves “The Nelk Boys" — and they listened to every minute of every episode from November 2022 to November 2024. Many of these episodes are two or three hours long.
"We watched, you know, definitely hundreds of hours of these videos at least," Yin said.
And when they were done, they put together a pretty remarkable piece for Bloomberg that provides forensic evidence for a claim you’ve probably heard a few times over the last few months: 2024 was “the podcast election.”
One of my most enduring memories of the cycle is sitting here in the KJZZ newsroom after Kamala Harris appeared on the "Call Her Daddy" podcast. That morning, there were three separate live cable news feeds, MSNBC, Fox and CNN, showing graphics explaining what a podcast is.
And I remember thinking that "Call Her Daddy," which, by some accounts, gets 10 million listens per episode, probably had more people tuning in to that Harris interview than all three cable networks combined that day.
But the bigger narrative is the number of people who listened to Trump on podcasts. Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s show alone drew an audience of 50 million on YouTube. Trump appeared on all nine of the podcasts Bloomberg studied, generating more than 100 million listens. And what’s remarkable about Trump’s appearances on these shows is that they’re a very different version of Trump than we see at his rallies, or in his interviews with news organizations. He doesn’t talk as much. Instead, he spends a lot of time listening to what the hosts want to talk about.
"And much of what they discuss is not politics. They talk about sports, about pranks, about internet culture. Where the politics come in is when they kind of discuss the kind of social hierarchy in which American men are placed," Yin said. "And so it’s just more conducive to kind of, the like, challenger mindset. The underdog. The fallen man. And the person who embodies that the most is Trump. So, he shows up, everything’s on limits, he comes across as genuine, one of the guys. And someone who has answers and authority in the problems that are facing young men."
So how does all this rapping with the boys translate into a series of executive orders focusing on a tiny percentage of the population? Well, Leon and his team broke down every podcast episode they studied by subject. And they found that when the boys got political, they gave a roughly equal number of hours to six issues: immigration, medicine, the economy, war, voting and transgender identity.
So millions of men spent hundreds of hours listening to their heroes put gender anxiety on the same pedestal as election integrity, health care and war. Leon’s analysis helps explain why Trump is now doing the same thing.
"Watching all of this is very confusing. Likely many people, many of the listeners that they have, probably have never met a trans person. Or like, had a person that transitioned in their life," Yin said. "There are only a few transgender guests that occur. And some of them are basically there to be, kind of like, 'I de-transitioned, and it kind of ruined my life and it'll ruin your life, too.' So they’re kind of tokenized, in a way. They kind of use this person as a scarecrow."
