Women's Sports Are Not a Punchline

The state of the union was last night, and the United States, gold-winning, Men’s hockey team showed up. The U.S. men's hockey team won the gold medal on Sunday, February 22nd at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics on, defeating Canada 2-1. After the game, Kash Patel, director of the FBI, is seen on video with the hockey team in the locker room with President Donald Trump on speaker phone. President Trump is heard congratulating the men on their accomplishment and invites them to the State of the Union.

He includes a comment after the invitation stating that he “has to” invite the women’s national hockey team as well, otherwise he "may be impeached". The locker room erupts with laughter.

Now, you may think, well that was just a good ole joke from the President and didn’t mean anything, and the hockey players were just joking alongside the President. Well, I see another side to this.

Jokes do not exist in isolation. They live inside histories and echo patterns. And this administration has a pattern when it comes to women.  I see an administration that has mocked women’s appearances, questioned women’s credibility, and publicly diminished female journalists. This does not get the benefit of the doubt when it “jokes” about women being invited too. I see a society that refused to elect an over-qualified woman for the job of the presidency. I see a culture that continues to mistreat and undervalue women in politics, sports, business, law, academia, medicine, healthcare, and beyond.

Keep in mind, the women’s team won gold too. The U.S. women's hockey team won the gold medal at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy, on Thursday evening, February 19, 2026 (CET). They also defeated Canada 2-1. So, where was their call from the President? Shouldn’t it have been first? If the men’s team didn’t win, would neither team have been invited?

The women’s team was, in fact, also invited to the White House and the State of the Union, but unequivocally declined.

Since then, social media has erupted in blaming the Men’s team for their behavior and questioning their acceptance to the White House and State of the Union. It has been reported that five male players did not attend, but as far as the other 20, they have defended their reasoning by not calling it political. They claim it is an honor, no matter the politics, to meet the President.

Women’s sports have been ignored for decades. They are underfunded, under-televised, and underpaid. Female athletes have fought for equal pay, equal facilities, equal sponsorships, equal recognition. They have had to prove, over and over again, that their competition is worthy of national attention.

And yet now, suddenly, women’s sports are invoked passionately by this administration. Not to fund them. Not to expand them. But to police them.

You may have noticed the rise in conversation about women’s sports and policing them to remain biological women’s sports. We are watching feminism be selectively invoked.

The language sounds protective, right? Defend women. Protect female athletes. Preserve fairness. When the loudest energy surrounding women’s sports centers almost exclusively on restricting transgender participation, rather than increasing funding, enforcing Title IX, and expanding media contracts, it becomes difficult to ignore the imbalance.

The administration has positioned itself as the guardian of “biological reality” in athletics and has framed itself as the defender of women and girls. Public figures like Riley Gaines have been elevated as symbols of this cause. And brands such as XX-XY lean into slogans about protecting the integrity of women’s sports.

Defending from whom? Protecting from whom?

That is what co-optation looks like. Feminism stripped of its roots in equality and repurposed for political leverage.

It is possible to care about fairness in competition. And it is possible to wrestle honestly with the complexities of sex, gender, and sport. Those are real conversations and they are conversations I struggle with, too.

As an athlete, as a woman who has played sports her entire life, who has trained alongside men, who has competed at a collegiate level, this issue does not feel abstract to me. I know the physical realities of sport. I know the difference in speed, strength, recovery, and endurance. I have experienced it firsthand.

And yet, I also consider myself liberal. Inclusive. Rooted in community. My practice of yoga, in advocacy, in the spaces I build, completely centers accessibility and belonging. It is not easy for someone who holds those values to say: I believe women’s sports should remain as women’s spaces.

But, that sentence feels incomplete.

Because what does “women” mean?

Does it mean biological sex? Gender identity? A combination of both? How do we account for transgender athletes? Intersex athletes? These questions do not have easy answers. They never have.

I do not approach this conversation from fear. I approach it from lived experience from years of training in a female body, from knowing how hard women have fought for a space.

I have written about this before in a post about Caster Semenya, an intersex athlete whose body did not fit neatly into the regulatory definitions imposed on her. Her case exposed something many people would rather ignore: the category of “woman” in sport has never been as simple as we pretend it is.

The entire construct of biological regulation in athletics, testosterone thresholds, hormone suppression policies, eligibility testing, reveals just how fragile our definitions can be. If womanhood in sport is determined by testosterone levels, what do we do with women who naturally produce more? If it is determined by chromosomes, what do we do with variations that most people never even know they carry? If it is determined by muscle mass or bone density, do we test for those too?

The more we try to reduce womanhood to a single measurable trait, the more the logic begins to fracture.

That is why this conversation cannot be reduced to chants about “biological reality.” Reality is more nuanced than that. Bodies are more nuanced than that and women are more nuanced than that.

And when politicians use the language of biology as if it is clean, obvious, and uncontested, they ignore the very real scientific and ethical complexity that athletes like Semenya have been forced to endure.

Women’s sports are not a punchline. They are not an afterthought. If this administration truly cared about women’s sports, the invitation to the women’s team would not have been an afterthought. The laughter would not have landed so easily.

With gratitude,

Olivia