Last month, President Donald Trump issued an order to ban transgender athletes from sports that align with their gender identity countrywide. However, MSHSL (Minnesota State High School League), of which Columbia Heights Public Schools (CHPS) is a part, has made the big decision to do the opposite: all athletes are encouraged and allowed to participate in the sport that aligns with their gender identity.
The executive order that Trump signed states that having trans athletes in women’s sports is “demeaning, unfair and dangerous to women and girls.” Additionally, the order says that allowing trans women in sports “denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.” This is curious because, as far as we have heard, there have been no orders within any particular leagues to stop trans athletes of any gender from joining or participating in men’s sports.
The order, titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports”, may sound logical on its surface, but LGBTQ+ advocates fear that this is just a way of further removing transgender people from society and making them feel unaccepted by their representative federal government for who they are and identify as. Trump also says that he wants to eliminate “the left-wing ideology” and that he wants people to focus on the truth “that God created two genders,” further showing his disdain for people in the trans community.
Even though Trump has made national efforts to suppress transgender people, some states have refused to follow his orders. One of these states is Minnesota, where the MSHSL asserts that they are subject to anti-discriminatory laws and that they will allow students to participate in sports according to the gender with which they identify. This means that the executive order directly violates Minnesota’s state law and that it lacks congressional authority, meaning that it does not override it nor the Minnesota Human Rights Act.
“I work closely with our Activities and Athletics Department in Columbia Heights Public Schools,” CHPS Superintendent Zena Stenvik said. “We follow our mission of ‘Creating worlds of opportunity for each and every learner, all belong, all succeed.’ That applies to every sports team and club.” Additionally, the Office of Civil Rights in Washington, D.C. clarified that they will enforce Title IX under the 2020 Rule, and not the 2024 Final Rule, and that the interpretation of “sex” will be based on the objective, immutable characteristic of being born male or female, not “gender” as outlined in the 2020 Title IX Rule. This means that Trump’s new classification of being born male or female will likely not be followed by athletic governing bodies for fear of losing Title IX funding.
With the new order, there will be few, if any, changes in Minnesota sports, especially regarding gender in school-based athletics. The fact that President Trump is targeting minorities in these small ways may seem scary at first, but it appears less daunting when states like Minnesota (along with Maine, California, New York and many more) are making moves to defy or work around Trump’s orders.
“It’s really disheartening to see someone in power do something so detrimental to people who have been oppressed for so long knowing that this will only embolden the oppression,” Cathy Snow (11) said.
As of right now, there are fewer than 30 out of 530,000 professional or collegiate athletes who are publicly out as being transgender who participate in sports, so this executive order would have little to no effect at CHPS (Columbia Heights Public Schools) even if the MSHSL had chosen to follow it—though doing so would have violated the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which, again, supersedes federal executive orders.
In the end, it seems as though Trump’s executive order to ban transgender athletes and “keep men out of women’s sports” has been a futile attempt at targeting minorities around the U.S., including more progressive states like Minnesota. While the messaging may seem strong coming from the White House, knowing the truth about what will or will not be enforced where one participates in sports is important in today’s age of misinformation and disinformation.
