Attacks on Transgender Women are Part of a Larger MAGA Agenda

Just days before, March 31, 2026, International Transgender Day of Visibility, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced a ban on transgender women participating in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The committee released a statement saying, “Eligibility for any female category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological females.”

Although the IOC didn’t explicitly say it was caving in to pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, the ban is consistent with Trump’s scapegoating of transgender people throughout his tenure. The White House lauded the decision, taking credit for the IOC’s decision.

In Trump’s worldview, even those who are biologically born as female are not woman enough if they don’t live up to Western conventions of femininity. Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting, who won gold medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics, found themselves at the center of MAGA’s gender policing when Trump falsely claimed they were men.

Given the hubbub over transgender athletes, one would be forgiven for concluding that they routinely compete at the Olympics. According to a 2026 Associated Press report, “It is unclear how many, if any, transgender women are competing at an Olympic level.” Moreover, no transgender women competed in the 2024 Olympics. The explicit ban by an institution against a community that has little to no representation in that organization is a clear indicator that it is not about a ban as much as about feeding the collective Trump-led pile-on against trans people, and the broader policing of gender that is at the heart of a patriarchal yearning for outdated gender-based societal roles.

In its recent announcement, the IOC didn’t just stop at banning transgender athletes. It also announced it would require one-time genetic testing for women who compete in the Olympics or any other IOC events to ensure they were born biologically female. Doctors have rejected such testing as notoriously unreliable.

In 2018, the World Health Organization called on nations to end the barbaric practice of “virginity” testing that is still conducted in some nations to “establish marriage eligibility or from employers for employment eligibility,” and “assess their virtue, honor or social value.” The IOC’s genetic testing of women is a modern-day version of such a misogynistic custom. It harkens back to a time when bodily autonomy was reserved for men, and women had to prove purity.

In today’s version of the medieval misogyny that is making a comeback under the guise of “Make America Great Again,” only straight white Christian men are trusted to define their own bodies. The MAGA-verse’s gender policing is a response to such men being forced to compete with diverse communities for jobs, relationships, and positions of power.

The MAGA movement dreams of straight white Christian couples to prolifically procreate to counteract the imagined (and laughable) fear of a “white genocide.” White women are therefore not looked upon kindly if they refuse to bear white children and convert to other religions, or are single, lesbians, and born biologically male.

Viewed through such a lens, the Trump and MAGA approach to gender and sexuality becomes clearer. Take reproductive care and gender affirming care. For women—especially white women—to terminate pregnancies is antithetical to MAGA’s desire to grow the white population. And white transgender women taking hormone replacement therapy or engaging in surgical transition also results in fewer white babies. To that end, Trump’s defunding of reproductive care and banning gender affirming care are consistent with his movement’s gender politics.

The MAGA approach to gender also intersects with economic policy. Child care is a good example. Across the nation, child care is in crisis. It is too expensive for parents, while those working in these facilities —mostly women—are underpaid. The state of New Mexico, meanwhile, shows that what is needed are government subsidies. New Mexico’s recently enacted universal free child care system is being paid for by oil and gas royalties and enables people to reenter the workforce after having babies. Paying for a largely female-based workforce so that other women can compete with men to get jobs is the opposite of MAGA’s gender politics, which is why Trump is intent on defunding state-supported child care.

Trump’s immigration policy is also central to his promotion of patriarchal white supremacy. He has reveled in the mass deportation of nonwhite immigrants, especially those from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and expressed a yearning for white European immigrants. A 2026 ProPublica report also finds that the Trump administration separated 11,000 children who are U.S. citizens from their immigrant parents and deported the parents. Authorities appear to be specifically targeting immigrant mothers, who are among the MAGA-undesirables alongside lesbians (like Renee Nicole Good, the U.S. citizen killed by ICE agents in Minnesota), transgender women, and working women.

The undercutting of social services is also part of the project of patriarchal white supremacy. Government benefits must be reserved for white Americans—until they start to benefit immigrants, people of color, LGBTQI+ people, and women seeking abortions. For example, a viral claim by a white supremacist account on X in 2025 falsely suggested immigrants were the largest beneficiaries of government food stamps, when in reality, white Americans are the ones consistently relying on such benefits. In order to justify cutting food stamps, Trump supporters need only believe that “undeserving” people are benefiting from them.

Even the MAGA approach to the Epstein files is consistent with the movement’s gender politics. For as long as the sex trafficker’s accomplices were largely unknown and possibly Democrats, Trump’s supporters were rabidly in favor of releasing the names in Jeffrey Epstein’s files. But, as soon as it became clear that wealthy white men, including Trump and other conservative men, were also involved, there was silence, and the MAGA demands for transparency and justice vanished.

The MAGA-verse is desperate for a world where white women are well-behaved stay-at-home moms, tradwives whose sole raison d’être is to care for white men and babies. In this world, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQI+ people, and liberal whites are undesirable. For the IOC to acquiesce to Trump’s gender policing is a deeply troubling sign.

The response to the authoritarian demand for conformity must be roundly rejected. Rather than try to appease patriarchal white supremacist forces, the rest of us need to double down on our right to proudly display our identities, insist on full bodily autonomy, and demand services, benefits, opportunities, and anything else the MAGA-verse believes is only reserved for straight white Christian men.