Trump’s win is a referendum on men competing in women’s sports—even MSNBC admits it

This was barely an issue at the national level when Trump ran in 2016 on a promise to deal with border security, and while Democrats were planning to remake Title IX to allow men to compete in women's sports in 2020, and many women, who were clued in to what was really going on with the trans takeover of women's identities, were screaming out to be heard, it was not yet an issue for the GOP.

Now, after thousands of women have lost opportunities, awards, scholarships and victories to men who claim to be women in virtually every sport, Republican moms and dads have finally spoken out. Trump and Republicans ran ads opposing men in women's sports in nearly every state and have said outright that men, no matter what they claim to be, do not belong in women's locker rooms or in women's competition.

On MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski spoke about the issue as though it was the first they were hearing of it. They brought up an article from the Washington Post's Matt Bai, in which he said that he was "somewhat mystified" by Trump's win. He said that "Democrats dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics," and that "Trump’s vicious transgender ad in the closing weeks ('She’s for they/them, he’s for you') was probably the most effective of the cycle."

Scarborough leaned into that as well, making the claim that he'd been speaking out against the trend and legal requirements to allow men to play in women's sports all along. He spoke about the culture war issues, saying that Democrat parents of college-age kids have been telling him that those kids are afraid to speak up at school and in class for fear of saying the wrong thing and being canceled or ostracized. "It's having an impact," he said. The ad got so much play that some of the trans athletes who were featured it in spoke out, saying they feared for their lives.

"From the trans ad, to yeah, the athletics. By the way, by the way, as we've said on the show 1,000 times, Democrats should be smarter on the women's athletics thing. 85 percent of Americans oppose men transitioning after puberty and competing against women. And I'm not just saying this the day after the election. I've been saying this for years. This is not a hard call. You can show compassion and you can show grace. And as the Republican governor of Utah said, let's figure out a way to do this. But one way we don't do this is by allowing men who transition after puberty competing against young girls who have been working their entire lives to be as good as they can be, and then they get destroyed in the pool, on the track."

The Biden-Harris administration remade Title IX and the Civil Rights Act retroactively to conflate gender with biological sex. This extended protections that had been put legislatively in place to protect women from men. Those men have, in recent years, been using those protections to claim to be women and compete against women in athletic events from amateur and intramural levels all the way up to the Olympics. Men have used those protections to stake their claims to women's locker rooms and bathrooms, whether in elementary, middle, or high school settings up to university levels, gyms and spas. When women have spoken out against these things, saying that they felt their privacy was violated, authorities, lawmakers, businesses and officials have told the women they were transphobic, have shut them up, revoked their gym memberships, and made them watch as men walk off with their trophies.

The Trump mandate gives the administration free rein to overturn those changes Biden made and to strip the agencies that have penalized and punished women of the power to do so and of the power to implement and foist these lies on Americans.