Transgender-Identifying Athletes Are Breaking Records in Women’s Sports

Today, it’s almost impossible to avoid the issue of men who identify as transgender competing in female athletics.

Gender ideology activists would have you believe that the issue is infinitesimally small or even nonexistent. They often treat it as a bogeyman conjured up by skeptics of the movement. But the rest of us know better: Men don’t belong in women’s sports. It’s just common sense.

But more and more male athletes have begun competing in women’s sports around the world at both amateur and professional levels. And many of them are not just competing; they’re winning.

The documented cases of this speak for themselves.

Female athletes are losing opportunities

The following cases represent just a fraction of the sports in which male athletes have competed in female sports. It is far from complete. But it is more than enough to make the point.

1. Women’s swimming: Lia (Will) Thomas competed on the men’s team for three years, began competing on the women’s team, and won a 2022 NCAA Championship in the 500-yard freestyle event (the school has since reversed these). Another male swimmer competed on the men’s team for three years before competing on the women’s team and recording the fastest women’s times in three events at the 2019 Missouri Valley Conference Championships as an exhibition swimmer.
2. Women’s track and field: Two male athletes dominated girls’ high school competitions in Connecticut. (Alliance Defending Freedom is representing four displaced female athletes in a lawsuit against the school athletic association.) A male athlete won first place in the women’s mile race at an NCAA Division I conference championship. And another male college athlete won the 400-meter hurdles at the NCAA Division II women’s national championships.
3. Women’s powerlifting: A male athlete broke multiple female records at the 2023 Canadian Powerlifting Union Nationals.
4. Women’s mixed martial arts: A male MMA fighter who competed as a woman broke a female opponent’s eye socket and gave her a concussion. Years later, another male fighter competed as a woman and choked a female competitor into submission in the second round.
5. Women’s cycling: In April 2023, a male cyclist won the overall general classification at the Tour of the Gila, a sanctioned professional women’s stage race in New Mexico, beating his female competitors across five stages of competition.
6. Women’s fencing: At the 2023 FIE Veteran Fencing World Championships in Daytona Beach, Florida, a male athlete won the gold medal in the women’s Vet-70 epee category—defeating a 14-time world champion in the process and claiming the world title for himself.

7. Women’s surfing: A male athlete who previously won a Western Australia state surfing championship in the men’s division competed in the women’s division in 2022 and won two women’s state championships.
8. Women’s mountain biking: A male athlete who previously competed in the men’s open division won back-to-back national championships in the women’s elite division in 2018 and 2019.
9. Women’s disc golf: This male athlete has won two professional disc golf events in 2022, both in the Disc Golf Pro Tour’s Elite Series events. In another instance, this same male competitor who had previously been banned in a California competition competed and won in a Virginia competition.
10. Women’s volleyball: One girl suffered a concussion and traumatic brain injury after a male competitor spiked the ball into her face during a North Carolina high school match. Even at higher levels of competition, we’ve seen professional female players lose championships to teams with male athletes, like in Brazil.
11. Women’s basketball: A 50-year-old, 6-foot-6-inch man, who played on a college men’s team 30 years prior, played on a women’s junior college basketball team.
12. Women’s running: In 2023, a male runner won the Canadian Masters Athletics women’s 1500-meter indoor championship.
13. Women’s skateboarding: A 29-year-old male athlete competed in a women’s street skateboarding competition in New York City and beat out a 13-year-old girl for first place.
14. Women’s cross country: A male runner competed on an NCAA Division I women’s cross country team and was named the conference’s “Women’s Athlete of the Week.”
15. Women’s golf: A male golfer—who had received a men’s golf scholarship in college to play on the men’s team—would eventually go on to win a tournament and was runner-up three times on the NXXT Golf tour, a women’s pro circuit.

This is far from a comprehensive list. There are countless other examples of men displacing women in sports.

It’s bad enough that men have taken medals and accolades from women. But displacement means more than just taking a spot on the podium of a deserving girl. It means taking a spot on the court, field, or track itself, robbing girls of important opportunities. Sports are a meritocracy, and the mere act of stealing opportunities—as these men all did—is destructive and disruptive. Even worse than displacement, men playing in women’s sports can lead to females getting badly injured.

Neither the scoreboard nor the science lies

The science of male athletic advantage is unambiguous.

Dr. Gregory Brown, a professor of exercise science at the University of Nebraska with more than 40 peer-reviewed publications, has documented that male athletic advantages exist before puberty—measurable as early as age 3—meaning they cannot be attributed to testosterone alone.

So testosterone suppression, the policy solution most athletic associations had reached for, does little to close the gap: Men retained 91 percent of their hand grip strength after two years of suppression, knee strength remained at baseline after 12 months, and male runners still outpaced the female average by 12 percent after two full years of treatment. A government-commissioned study by the UK Sports Councils confirmed the same finding independently: differences in strength, stamina, and physique persist in biological males regardless of hormone therapy. The activists’ preferred “solution” doesn’t work.

When men and women face off

But sometimes, a scoreboard says it better than any study ever could. One of the clearest examples of male athletic advantage is when professional adult women’s teams have lost to much younger teenage boys. Take these examples from soccer:

• In April 2017, the U.S. Women’s National Team, fresh off a Women’s World Cup title two years prior, played a scrimmage against FC Dallas’s under-15 boys academy team in preparation for an upcoming friendly against Russia. The result? The USWNT lost 5-2 to a group of boys who weren’t old enough to legally drive a car.
• It wasn’t an isolated incident. In June 2025, Switzerland’s national women’s soccer team—preparing to host the 2025 UEFA Women’s European Championship on home soil—played a warm-up match against FC Luzern’s under-15 boys’ team. The result was an even more lopsided 7-1 victory for the boys.
• More recently, in May 2026, the University of Washington women’s soccer team, fresh off a Big Ten Tournament win and an Elite Eight appearance the prior season, played a scrimmage against an under-14 boys club team. Again, the boys won.

Three different women’s teams. Three different groups of boys. Same result.

This clearly isn’t a fluke. It’s biology.

Comparing men’s and women’s performance

The soccer results above are vivid and telling. And what the science shows is that this was entirely predictable. The gap between male and female athletic performance is far wider than most people realize.

Duke University School of Law professors Doriane Lambelet Coleman and Wickliffe Shreve put it into terms that are impossible to dismiss. Drawing directly from the International Association of Athletics Federations database, they analyzed how often the greatest performances ever produced by elite women were surpassed by men and boys in a single calendar year. The findings are staggering. In 2017, Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Tori Bowie’s lifetime best in the 100 meters was beaten by men and boys over 15,000 times in that single year alone. The story was the same for Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Allyson Felix’s lifetime best in the 400 meters. The greatest performances any woman has ever produced in two of the most iconic events in athletics are, for the male athlete population, entirely routine.

A landmark peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Sports Science & Medicine confirms why. Analyzing 82 quantifiable Olympic events across swimming, athletics, track cycling, weightlifting, and speed skating over the entire modern Olympic era, researchers found that the gender gap in athletic performance stabilized around 1983 at a mean difference of approximately 10 percent across all events, and has not meaningfully closed since, despite a massive increase in women’s participation in elite sport over the same period. The gap ranges from roughly 5.5 percent in distance swimming to 36.8 percent in weightlifting. In running events, it is 10.7 percent. In jumping events, 17.5 percent. The study’s conclusion was direct: Women will not run, jump, or swim as fast as men.

This is the finding that most directly dismantles the activist claim that endurance and skill-based sports are different—that while men may dominate in raw strength, stamina and technique level the playing field. The data says otherwise across nearly every measurable category. The gap is not a product of cultural underinvestment in women’s athletics. It is a product of biology, plain and simple.

ADF has stepped into the arena for over a decade

The cases documented throughout this piece are not historical footnotes. They are part of an ongoing pattern, and ADF has been fighting to stop it at every level of the legal system.

That fight has already produced at least one major victory. Adaleia Cross is a West Virginia high schooler   who experienced firsthand what happens when ideology overrides biology when competing on her middle school track and field team. A male student a grade behind her joined the girls’ team and knocked Adaleia from her competition spot in a big meet. Over the last few years, he has displaced 423 female athletes over 1,100 times in competition. Rather than stay silent, Adaleia stepped forward. With ADF’s help, she intervened in a lawsuit challenging the Biden administration’s attempted Title IX rewrite, a rule that would have forced schools nationwide to allow males to compete in girls’ sports. A federal district court blocked the rule entirely, invalidating it nationwide. The Trump administration’s February 2025 executive order protecting women’s sports cited that victory directly.

But the matter isn’t resolved. The male student Adaleia competed against—B.P.J.—is now at the center of one of the most consequential cases in the history of women’s sports. The ACLU challenged West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act on B.P.J.’s behalf, and a similar challenge was brought against Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, the first state to pass such a law and the spark that led to 27 states in total passing women’s sports laws—many of which ADF helped to craft.

In January 2026, the offices of West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey and Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in State of West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, respectively. ADF is serving as co-counsel in both cases. Rulings are pending. The coalition behind these cases is strong: 27 states, the U.S. government, women’s rights groups, doctors, and more than 50 friend-of-the-court briefs.

Ironically, though the ACLU has argued in the West Virginia case that B.P.J. has competed on girls’ teams “without incident” and “routinely placed near the back of the pack,” B.P.J. has just won the girls’ state title in shot put—as a 15-year-old sophomore. This continues to add to the list of hundreds of girls displaced and dozens of medals lost to B.P.J. that should have gone to a deserving girl.

We must protect Title IX

Title IX was written for women. It was written because lawmakers recognized that female athletes deserved equal opportunities and that, without legal protection, those opportunities would be taken from them. The law was a promise. That promise is now under threat from the very ideology that insists biological sex is irrelevant.

It isn’t. The science, the scoreboards, and the ever-growing list of women and girls displaced by men and boys in their own sports leave no question. Men are not women. Male athletes are not female athletes. And no amount of ideological pressure, activist litigation, or bureaucratic rule-making changes those facts.

What is at stake in the Supreme Court’s pending rulings is not simply whether two state laws survive. What is at stake is whether the word “women” in Title IX means anything at all. Female athletes deserve better than what the past decade has given them. And ADF will not stop until they get it.