What happened to us at a Portland Thorns game, and what it reveals about the asymmetric warfare of ideas
On September 6, I went to Providence Park to watch women play soccer. I brought the fan rules of conduct with me. I knew what they said, and I intended to follow them.
Instead, my group and I were ejected from the Portland Thorns game under threat of arrest.
A stadium employee told us he had received a report of something “transphobic.” I asked what we had done. We had not threatened anyone. We had not shouted abuse. We had not interfered with the match. The accusation was about beliefs that we hold in our head: that women’s sports should be organized by sex. A thought now considered “transphobic.”
We were ejected for being “thought criminals.”
This is 1984 level state control of not just the rights of women as a sex class, but our ability to have access to public life while holding private thoughts in our head. This is what I mean when I talk about the asymmetric warfare of ideas. Trans ideologists have all the power and women who quietly say NO are subject to state reinforcement.
The threat of arrest made the imbalance unmistakable. The club made the decision to remove us; we were told arrest could follow if we did not leave. That distinction matters. So does the experience of being ordered out of a women’s sporting event while trying to ask why.
We are often told that transgender people make up a small and vulnerable minority. But for some reason this “small minority” is almost universally institutionally backed. Stadium management, corporations, advocacy organizations, and governments can enforce rules that ordinary women have little power to challenge in the moment.
Those institutions can decide which words count as respectful, which questions count as hateful, and whether women who advocate for sex based sports may sit in the stands. A woman’s disagreement can be described as a threat; an institution’s power to eject her can be described as inclusion.
That imbalance reaches beyond one match. Women are asked to accept “cis” as the qualifier for our sex, as though women are a subset of our own sex. Our rights to female sporting categories, privacy, and single sex spaces has been removed without the consent of the majority of women.
Consider Payton McNabb. She has testified that a volleyball struck her head during a match against a male athlete on the opposing team, leaving her with a concussion and neck injury and lasting symptoms. Her experience deserves to be heard in discussions of safety in female sports.
Consider Sall Grover in Australia. In May, a federal appeals court upheld a discrimination finding against her and her women’s networking app for excluding a man. This law has ultimately determined that women can’t have private spaces. Men are allowed to enter whenever they choose.
These are different events in different places, with different legal facts. Together, they raise a question I will not stop asking: When will women’s boundaries be considered to matter?
At Providence Park, we were the ones told to leave.
I want the Thorns to answer for that decision with specifics, rather than an accusation that leaves the public to imagine the worst. And I want women to recognize the larger pattern: if we surrender the right to name our interests, defend our spaces, and question the rules governing us, we will be told that our silence is agreement.
I will not be silent. Women can stand together, speak plainly, demand evidence, and insist that our boundaries be taken seriously. No means NO. It’s really that simple.
