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≡ TRUMP EXEC. ORDER BACKED ≡
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls issued a statement on Wednesday, welcoming the 5 February Executive Order from the Trump Administration, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sport.”
Reem Alsalem (JOR) has been the Special Rapporteur in this area since August 2021, explained her support:
“This decision reaffirms the importance of maintaining sex-based categories in sports, thereby safeguarding equal opportunities for women and girls.
“Most notably, it mandates the preservation of all-female athletic opportunities and locker rooms, ensuring privacy and dignity for women and girls.
“This executive order sends a clear message that the rights of women and girls to female-only spaces, including in sports, matter.”
The key elements of the Executive Order include:
“Therefore, it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy. It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”
The Executive Order also requires the administration’s domestic policy staff to “convene representatives of major athletic organizations and governing bodies” within 60 days to promote policies compliant with the Order, and ask State attorneys general “to identify best practices in defining and enforcing equal opportunities for women to participate in sports.”
Alsalem weighed in on structural changes to sport that are needed to protect the women’s category:
“To ensure that no one is left behind, I urge the US Government to ensure that open sports categories are created, or that the male category in sport is converted into an open category, for those not wishing to play in the category of their biological sex.
“I welcome the emphasis on promoting international rules and norms to protect women and girl athletes at all levels, including at the United Nations and look forward to cooperating with all states on this critical human rights issue.”
In an 8 October 2024 news conference, Alsalem explained her 24 August 2024 report and campaigned for changes, including along the lines of the Executive Order, and more:
“In order to ensure, fairness, dignity and safety for all, including females – women and girls, females – we would need to maintain a female-only category in sports, while at the same time also having more ‘open’ categories for those wishing to play sports in categories that do not respond to the sex they were born into.
“That is one thing. The other thing is, as requested by many women and girls in sports, is to bring back – or actually not bring back – is to introduce sex screening, which as you know was discontinued in 1999.
“So that should be sex screening have become a lot more reliable now, cheap, can be administered in a confidential, dignified manner, should be introduced … as an element of – what was that called – eligibility, in female sports.”
That concept may get support from the Trump Administration as well, as the Executive Order also tasked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to
“use all appropriate and available measures to see that the International Olympic Committee amends the standards governing Olympic sporting events to promote fairness, safety, and the best interests of female athletes by ensuring that eligibility for participation in women’s sporting events is determined according to sex and not gender identity or testosterone reduction.”
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