women’s national soccer team, among the best in the world, and the FC Dallas under-15 boys’ team. Some advocates for transgender athletes insist they have no inherent physical advantages over girls and women, a claim hotly disputed by former elite competitors such as Riley Gaines, Martina Navratilova and Nancy Hogshead-Makar.įoes of male-born players in female sports often invoke the 2017 scrimmage between the U.S. That contest in Houston was hailed as a milestone in women’s sports, but this time, there’s considerably more at stake.Ī loss by the best women’s pro basketball team in the nation - and likely the world - to a group of adolescent boys would deal a public-relations blow to the transgender movement’s push for male-born athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports based on gender identity.
