Megan Rapinoe claims Olympics’ ban on men in women’s sports is ‘hateful’

Rapinoe and Bird noted that they were recording on one of the many LGBTQIA+ days of the year, Transgender Day of Visibility, and they wished their "trans family the happiest of days." A poll in 2025 revealed that 80 percent of Americans oppose men playing in women's sports.

"We love you, we see you," Rapinoe said. "We know how trying these times are for you right now." Then she jumped into the recent ruling by the IOC which said that men are not permitted to play women's sports at the Olympic level and that athletes would be tested to determine if their chromosomes designate them male or female.

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"I just wanted to take a moment to say that, and unfortunately we have to say that all in the same breath as a really horrible rule that came out from the International Olympic Committee. They've announced a new policy that they're calling... 'the protection of the female bracketed women's category,'" Rapinoe said.

"They're limited people eligible to compete in the women's category to those who quality as what they're calling 'biological females.'" The rule, as Rapinoe went on to describe it, will require female athletes and those who wish to compete as females to undergo testing to make sure that they actually are female. In the recent summer games, there were two male wrestlers who competed in the women's category. They both claimed to be women but their chromosomes told a different story.

"We already know that biology, as much as we want it to be just nice and clean and tight and perfectly in one category or another—it's not, we know that," Rapinoe went on. "So now what we're doing is subjecting everybody, all women and all people who are identifying as women, to this really invasive testing that only to me just says like 'oh, so we're just trying to whittle it down to a certain type of women."

She claimed that "they sort of like, lost the battle on gay marriage and lost the battle on all these things. So it's just like, 'we're gonna have this whole campaign for all these years just to hate trans people, which is such a small percentage of the population. It's actually like, on a single hand, when we're talking about sports and just like thread, the absolute tightest needle thread that you possibly could this committee is framing it as based in science, which it's not, and this will ultimately just prevent people from competing within the women's category that they feel like have an unfair advantage. It's just really hateful."

The two male wrestlers who claimed to be women to compete in the last Olympics in the women's category won their events. Previous trans athletes have taken spots in competition from women, preventing them from qualifying to be in the games at all.

Rapinoe and her 2017 US Women's National Team in 2017 were famously beaten in a match against the FC Dallas under-15 boys squad. In 2021, she wrote in the Washington Post to say that keeping women and girls safe is among the many "political assaults on LGBTQ people" she'd seen in recent years.

"The value of participating in sports is well-documented. Transgender kids deserve the same chances to enjoy sports; to gain confidence, self-respect and leadership skills; and to learn what it means to be part of a team. When we tell transgender girls that they can’t play girls’ sports — or transgender boys that they can’t play boys’ sports — they miss out on these important experiences and opportunities. And we lose the right to say we care about children," she wrote.