On September 6, I went to go to the Portland Thorns game with a small group of friends wearing t-shirts that showed our support and allegiance to single-sex sports for women and girls.

That was it.

That was the extent of our “action.”

Was this a stunt on our part? Yes.

Was this political theater? Also yes.

But ultimately, I exposed something far more sinister than I originally intended. I had hoped to show public support for women and girls at a time when the women’s sports conversation is at the forefront of public consciousness and has mainstream media attention. Instead, I revealed a soft authoritarianism at work within our own country and the extent to which transgenderism has full access to coercive institutional pressure to forcibly suppress the quiet NO of women who do not consent.

Rather than being left to watch the game in peace, we were targeted as we arrived and forcibly ejected from the stadium. We were treated as criminals, surrounded by security and police, and forced to leave under threat of arrest. All this because we had planned to reveal gender critical t-shirts that said: XX/XY Athletics, Woman, and XX≠XY. Other than wearing t-shirts, our plan was to watch and enjoy the game.

The extreme overreach and disproportionate use of institutional force to this simple action exposes the deeply anti-woman foundations of transgender ideology and the scope of its ideological power and hold on multiple public and private institutions.

Five women and two men wore pro-woman T-shirts. That was the act. Look at the response: state police, private security, stadium authorities, and a professional sports organization worked together to eject seven peaceful people under threat and duress. The important story isn’t simply what was written on seven shirts; it’s the extraordinary asymmetry between a peaceful act of expression and the institutional machinery that mobilized against it.

I have spoken before about the asymmetry of harm that exists between men and women that has to do with our physical attributes and the flow of sex-based violence. The disproportionate use of institutional force over our quiet action exposes an asymmetrical warfare of ideas between trans ideology and a pro-women and girls stance. The fact that such a cooperation of public and private authority was coordinated and mobilized to stop our action before we even took off our jackets and before the game even started should shock everyone who still believes in free speech and free expression as a constitutional right.

On September 6, I planned to go to the Portland Thorns game with a small group of friends and wear t-shirts that showed our support and allegiance to single-sex sports for women and girls.

That was it.

That was the extent of our “action.”

Rather than being left to watch the game in peace, we were targeted as we arrived and forcibly ejected from the stadium. We were treated as criminals, surrounded by security and police, and forced to leave under threat of arrest. All this because we had planned to reveal gender critical t-shirts that said: XX/XY Athletics, Woman, and XX≠XY. Other than wearing t-shirts, our plan was to watch and enjoy the game.

The extreme overreach and disproportionate use of institutional force to this simple action exposes the deeply anti-woman foundations of transgender ideology and the scope of its ideological power and hold on multiple public and private institutions.

Five women and two men wore pro-woman T-shirts. That was the act. Look at the response: state police, private security, stadium authorities, and a professional sports organization worked together to eject seven peaceful people under threat and duress. The important story isn't simply what was written on seven shirts; it’s the extraordinary asymmetry between a peaceful act of expression and the institutional machinery that mobilized against it.

I have spoken before about the asymmetry of harm that exists between men and women that has to do with our physical attributes and the flow of sex-based violence. The disproportionate use of institutional force over our quiet action exposes an asymmetrical warfare of ideas between trans ideology and a pro-women and girls stance. The fact that such a cooperation of public and private authority was coordinated and mobilized to stop our action before we even took off our jackets and before the game even started should shock everyone who still believes in free speech and free expression as a constitutional right.

Was this a stunt on our part? Yes. Was this political theater? Also yes. But ultimately, I exposed something far more sinister than I originally intended. I had hoped to show public support for women and girls at a time when the women’s sports conversation is at the forefront of public consciousness and has mainstream media attention. Instead, I revealed a soft authoritarianism at work within our own country and the extent to which transgenderism has full access to coercive institutional pressure to forcibly suppress the quiet NO of women who do not consent.

Four days after being kicked out of The Sports Bra and still NO REFUND!

We were unceremoniously ejected after having peaceably interacting with multiple staff, customers, and one another for 25 minutes. Our plan was to watch the game, eat, drink, and leave.

You chose to make a massive scene, call us out in front of everyone, take the food off our table, and threaten to call the cops on us.

After all this the least you can do is be in integrity with your words and give us our refund. Where is our refund??

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Today I want to talk about something so obvious that you may have missed it:

Women’s and girls’ sports are already mixed-identity sports.

They have been for years.

Female athletes competing in women’s sports do not all share the same gender identity. Some identify as women. Some identify as nonbinary. Some identify as transgender men. Some describe themselves as gender-fluid or gender-nonconforming.

And yet they have competed together.

So I have a very simple question:

If mixed-identity sports are good enough for women and girls, why aren’t they good enough for men and boys?

Women’s Sports Already Include Multiple Gender Identities

Consider just some of the female athletes who have competed in women’s sports while publicly identifying as something other than simply “woman.”

• Layshia Clarendon played professional basketball in the WNBA and publicly identified as transgender and nonbinary.

• AD Durr, another WNBA player, identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.

• Quinn identifies as transgender and nonbinary and has played for Canada’s women’s national soccer team, including winning Olympic gold.

• Kumi Yokoyama came out as a transgender man after representing Japan in women’s international soccer and playing professionally in the NWSL.

• Isaac Ranson, a transgender man, played goalkeeper for Cal State Fullerton women’s soccer and later Minnesota Aurora FC.

• Nikki Hiltz identifies as transgender and nonbinary and competes in women’s track and field for Team USA.

• Raven Saunders identifies as nonbinary and won an Olympic silver medal in women’s shot put.

• Keelin Godsey came out as a transgender man while competing on the Bates College women’s track-and-field team and later competed in women’s hammer throw at the U.S. Olympic Trials.

• Elis Lundholm, a transgender man, has competed internationally in women’s freestyle skiing for Sweden.

• Hergie Bacyadan, a transgender man, represented the Philippines in women’s boxing at the 2024 Olympics.

• Harrison Browne publicly came out as a transgender man while playing professional women’s hockey in the NWHL.

• Kye Allums came out as a transgender man while playing NCAA Division I women’s basketball at George Washington University.

• Mack Beggs, a transgender boy, competed in girls’ high-school wrestling in Texas—famously while wanting to compete against boys but being required under the rules then in force to compete according to sex.

• Alana Smith identifies as nonbinary and competed in women’s skateboarding at the Tokyo Olympics.

• And Leo Baker, who identifies as transgender and nonbinary, spent years competing professionally in women’s skateboarding before withdrawing from the Olympic qualification process.

These athletes have different identities.

But they have something relevant to the structure of female sport in common: they are female.

So What Exactly Is the Women’s Category?

This gets us to the question underneath all of this.

What is a women’s sports category actually categorizing?

Is it an identity category?

Or is it a sex category?

Because those are not the same thing.

If “women’s sports” literally means sports for everyone whose gender identity is woman, then a transgender man should seemingly cease belonging to the category upon identifying as a man. A nonbinary athlete shouldn’t belong to a category supposedly defined by the identity “woman” either.

And yet female nonbinary athletes and transgender men have competed in women’s sports.

That tells us something important.

The women’s category (for some reason) does not require a single gender identity (unlike the men’s.)

Women’s sports include females with diverse identities. But women’s sports ALSO INCLUDE males with diverse identities. Thus, as it currently stands, the female sports category is NEITHER a sex-designated category (since it includes males) NOR is it an identity-designated category (because it includes females of diverse identities).

So what is female sports? Currently, it is a DOUBLE STANDARD DUMPING GROUND for anyone of any identity. Women’s sports are both mixed-sex and mixed-identity. While men’s sports remain single-sex and single-identity. How is this fair???

Why Can’t Men’s Sports Be Identity-Diverse Too?

Imagine applying precisely the same principle to male athletes.

• A male athlete identifies as a man? Welcome to the male category.

• A male athlete identifies as nonbinary? Welcome to the male category.

• A male athlete identifies as gender-fluid? Welcome to the male category.

• A male athlete identifies as a transgender woman? Welcome to the male category.

Why can’t male athletes participate in the male category while having diverse identities just as female sports already does???

Men and boys can have diverse identities and be INCLUDED on male teams. Nobody has to tell a feminine boy that he must become masculine. Nobody has to tell a nonbinary male that he must identify as a man. And nobody has to tell a transgender-identifying male what clothes to wear, what name to use, what personality to have, or how to understand himself.

The sporting category simply isn’t being determined by those things.

And this is what is ALREADY HAPPENING in female sports. So I repeat, if this is good enough for the girls, why isn’t it good enough for the boys?

So why shouldn’t males receive the same identity diversity?

Sex Determines the Category. Identity Belongs to the Athlete.

I think we have become accustomed to treating two completely different questions as though they were one:

Who are you?

and

Which sporting category are you eligible to compete in?

But they don’t have to have the same answer. The first question concerns identity. The second question concerns the organizing principle of competitive sport.

Seperating those questions offers a remarkably simple solution:

Sex determines the sporting category. Identity belongs to the athlete.

Under that principle, transgender and nonbinary people aren’t excluded from sports. They play sports. They compete. They join teams. They pursue championships. They form friendships. They get coaching. They experience everything that participation in sport provides. But participation does not require moving from one sex category into the other.

There Is Another Advantage to This

It eliminates the need for sporting organizations to become gender-identity investigators. Think about the strange questions an identity-based system eventually creates. How do we know someone is really nonbinary? How long must someone identify as transgender? What makes an identity sufficiently sincere? Does clothing matter? Pronouns? Legal documents? Hormones? Surgery?

None of these questions is necessary if gender identity simply isn’t the criterion determining the competitive category.

A male athlete can have any identity available to any other male athlete.

A female athlete can have any identity available to any other female athlete.

The category of sex designated sports remains stable while the people inside it remain psychologically, socially, and culturally diverse.

That seems considerably more inclusive to me than requiring a sporting organization to determine which identities qualify someone to cross a sex boundary.

And This Is Where the Double Standard Becomes Interesting

Women and girls have already demonstrated that a sex category can accommodate enormous identity diversity. A female athlete can identify as a woman. Or nonbinary. Or a transgender man. Or gender-nonconforming. Female athletes do not need to share a gender identity in order to compete with one another. This has already been demonstrated for over a decade!!!

So why are we behaving as though male athletes cannot tolerate the same arrangement???

Why couldn’t men’s and boys’ sports include masculine men, feminine men, transgender-identifying males, nonbinary males, gender-fluid males and males who don’t care about gender identity at all?

Why must identity diversity be solved by changing the boundaries ONLY of the female category?

That’s the part I want people to sit with.

Because if we really believe identity is expansive—if we really believe people should be free from restrictive gender stereotypes—then surely the male category should be expansive enough to contain every kind of male human being.

You don’t have to be masculine to compete with males.

You don’t have to identify as a man to compete with males.

You don’t have to conform to anybody’s expectations about what a boy or man is supposed to look like, wear, enjoy, believe or call himself.

You can simply be yourself.

Riddle Me This

For more than a decade, female sports have included athletes who describe themselves using dramatically different gender identities.

Women.

Transgender men.

Nonbinary people.

Gender-nonconforming people.

They have competed alongside one another.

So tell me again:

Why do male athletes need access to the female category in order for sport to accommodate their identities?

Why can’t boys’ teams contain boys with many identities?

Why can’t men’s teams contain men, nonbinary males, transgender-identifying males and gender-nonconforming males?

Why is identity diversity treated as perfectly compatible with the female sporting category, but somehow impossible to accommodate within the male one?

If mixed-identity sports are good enough for the girls—

why aren’t they good enough for the boys?

The problem we are having is not with “trans people.” As I have repeated MANY MANY times, Layshia Clarendon was the first trans player on the WNBA and she played for 11 yea…

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In Compliance With the Law

Women have heard this argument before. Legality and morality are not synonyms.

Yesterday I made a video about a man who defended his presence in women’s spaces with an argument that justifies his boundary violation of women’s spaces.

His defense was essentially this:

“There’s never a time where...any women’s space that I’ve entered, that I’m breaking any laws. So as far as I’m concerned, I’m in compliance.”

I’m in compliance with the law.

Notice what he actually said.

Not: Women are comfortable with my presence.

Not: Women have consented to sharing these spaces with me.

Not: I recognize why women have historically established boundaries around intimate spaces.

Not even: I believe what I’m doing is morally right.

Just:

I’m in compliance.

And if there is one lesson women’s history should have permanently taught us, it is this:

Legality and morality are not synonyms.

For enormous stretches of human history, men have been “in compliance with the law” while doing things to women that we now recognize as profoundly unjust.

Women had to fight to change those laws.

Again and again, women have had to stand before governments, husbands, employers, churches, courts, medical institutions and entire cultures and say:

The fact that you are legally permitted to do this to us does not make it morally acceptable!!!! Sing it with me!!!

Women Have Heard “It’s Legal” Before

Please consider how much of women’s history consists of women fighting things that were once explicitly authorized by law, embedded within legal institutions, or permitted because women lacked meaningful legal protection.

Under coverture, a married woman’s independent legal identity was largely absorbed into her husband’s. Her husband could control property and earnings that she herself had produced.

Further…

• Women fought to own property.

• Women fought to control their own wages.

• Women fought to enter professions.

• Women fought to attend universities.

• Women fought to vote.

• Women fought to serve on juries.

• Women fought against employment discrimination.

• Women fought against being fired simply because they became pregnant.

• Women fought against sexual harassment being treated as an unavoidable condition of employment.

• Women fought against husbands being granted sexual privileges over their wives that would be criminal if exercised against another woman.

• Women fought against domestic violence being dismissed as a private marital matter.

• Women fought against forced institutionalization.

• Women fought against forced and coerced sterilization.

• Women fought against child marriage.

• Women fought against laws and customs that gave fathers and husbands extraordinary control over women’s lives and children.

• And women fought against systems in which their bodies, labor, sexuality and reproductive capacities could be controlled by other people.

The law did not descend from heaven already recognizing women’s full humanity.

Women forced the law to change.

Sometimes the Law Itself Is the Injustice

We don’t even have to look backward to understand this.

Look at Afghanistan today.

Under Taliban rule, women and girls have been barred from secondary and higher education. Their ability to work has been drastically restricted. Their freedom of movement has been curtailed. Their clothing is regulated. Access to parks, gyms, sports and many areas of public life has been restricted. Women have effectively been pushed out of political decision-making.

The men enforcing those rules can claim that they are enforcing the governing authorities’ rules.

They can claim compliance.

Does that settle the moral question?

Somehow it is obvious to everyone when we look at the Taliban, but not when it’s happening in our changing rooms, locker rooms, prisons, shelters, and women-only spas right here.

This is precisely why human beings developed concepts such as civil rights, human rights and civil disobedience. We understand that governments can be wrong. We understand that laws can be unjust. And we understand that sometimes the people challenging the law are the people history ultimately vindicates.

Women’s Rights Exist Because Women Refused to Accept “Compliance”

Imagine telling the suffragists:

• “I’m in compliance with the law. Women aren’t allowed to vote.”

Imagine telling a married woman in the nineteenth century:

• “I’m in compliance with the law. Your earnings belong to your husband.”

Imagine telling a woman denied entry into a profession:

• “I’m in compliance with the law. Women aren’t admitted here.”

Imagine telling a wife seeking protection from violence:

• “I’m in compliance with the law. This is a private marital matter.”

Every generation has people who mistake the rules governing the present moment for the final word on morality. And every generation eventually discovers that they were not. Women’s rights exist precisely because women refused to accept “that’s the law” as the end of the conversation.

A Boundary Does Not Become Meaningless Because the Law Fails to Recognize It

A boundary is not created by legislation. The law may recognize a boundary. It may protect a boundary. It may establish consequences for violating a boundary. But the underlying moral question exists before the statute does.

Women can say no before the government gives them permission to say no. Women can object before legislators recognize the legitimacy of their objection. Women can establish boundaries around their bodies and intimate spaces even while institutions are still arguing about whether those boundaries deserve legal protection.

That has been the story of women’s rights over and over again!

These men use “compliance” as justification when the law is on their side, but what about when there are specifically laws to protect women’s boundaries in single sex spaces like the new ruling in the UK?

So when men believe the law permits him to cross a women’s boundary, we’re told: The law permits it. You must accept it.

But when the law changes? When governments or courts recognize sex-based protections? Suddenly we hear a very different argument:

I refuse to comply.

In the United Kingdom, following major legal developments concerning the meaning of sex under the Equality Act, some activists have openly discussed refusing to comply with sex-based rules and guidance.

The contradiction is galling!!

When the law appears to permit access to women’s spaces:

You must accept it because it’s legal.

When the law protects women’s spaces:

I refuse to comply.

It becomes so obvious that compliance was never the principle. It was always something else. It was always just a justification of men’s entitled desires.

The Principle Is Whether Women Are Allowed to Say No

Seriously, are we allowed to say NO!!!

• No.

• No, you may not enter this intimate space.

• No, you may not redefine this boundary for us.

• No, you may not demand that our discomfort become irrelevant.

• No, you may not tell us that your intentions determine whether our boundary exists.

• And no, pointing to a statute does not magically transform our no into a yes.

The morality of a boundary cannot depend entirely upon whether the person crossing it currently possesses institutional permission. Otherwise every women’s-rights movement in history becomes unintelligible. Women would never have had grounds to protest anything until after the law had already changed. Do you see how backwards this is???

Women have historically protested because the law was wrong. The moral argument came first. The legal reform followed.

We’ve Been Here Before

That is why these men’s cry of “I’m in compliance with the law” doesn’t impress me.

Women have heard versions of that argument for centuries. We’ve heard it from institutions. We’ve heard it from governments. We’ve heard it from employers. We’ve heard it from husbands. We’ve heard it from men who possessed rights women did not yet possess.

And women have always answered:

Then the law needs to change.

That is how we got here. Every right women currently possess exists because somebody before us was willing to be called unreasonable for demanding something the existing order did not yet recognize.

So when women establish a boundary and someone responds by pointing to the law, I remember our history.

The law matters. But the law is not God. The law can protect human dignity. But the law can also violate it. And sometimes the first indication that a law needs changing is very simple:

The people being affected by it begin saying no.

WOMEN ARE SAYING NO!!!