Rachel Maddow’s Hypocrisy On Transgender Athletes Ignores Reality Everyone Else Sees

Rachel Maddow says trying to keep men out of women’s sports is repulsive and pathetic and a made up issue. Blue state voters in Colorado and Washington, who voted to ban this, disagree. Why can’t Democrats let this issue go? https://t.co/1tTL2WNP1B

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) November 9, 2026

Maddow’s claim that “trans people” in sports is a “fake problem,” is no less disingenuous — or to use one of her favorite adjectives, repulsive — than Megan Rapinoe coming out in support of males in women’s sports after her playing career in women’s sports was over.

Name a sport — basketball, golf, rowing, running, swimming, volleyball — and biological boys can be found competing against girls at every level, novice to pro. The US government does not track gender identity in high school athletics, and most school districts don’t collect or publish such data because of privacy concerns, giving cover to the ideological camp occupied by Maddow and Torre. But a website, hecheated.org, is doing the legwork, and its numbers tell a story of stolen valor numbering in the thousands, with roughly 12,000 podium finishes (and counting) “won” by biological boys in all sports at all levels.

Another boy winning girls’ championship medals.

There are at least 5 boys on record running “girls'” cross country this year. Here are their best 5k times and their rankings compared to girls:

1. 18:39 – Top 1%
2. 18:47 – Top 1%
3. 18:36 – Top 1%
4. 22:59 – Top 33%
5. Did not run 5k

“Only 5” boys in the entire country participating against girls and three of them (60%) just so happen to be in the top 1% of all “female” cross country athletes.

What are the odds of that?

— HeCheated.org (@hecheateddotorg) November 8, 2026

A “B.S. issue”? Yeah, if BS stands for Boys Succeeding.

History Lesson For Maddow

Before Maddow became the first openly gay American to anchor a prime-time television program, she was a three-sport athlete on the girls’ teams at Castro Valley High School, east of San Francisco. One of the reasons the girls’ sports offerings were so bountiful at her school was the 1972 passage of Title IX, which, among other things, insured girls a safe, competitive, landing spot in sports, separate but equal to the space occupied by biological boys. Title IX is also one of the reasons the college athletic programs for women existed that were interested in recruiting her before a shoulder injury her senior year sidelined her from competitive sports for good.

Would Maddow still have won a “Most Inspirational Swimmer” award at Castro Valley if she had been forced to race over and over against a biological boy who switched from the boys’ team to the girls’ team mid-season, as a cross-country runner this fall did in Washington state?

Would her enthusiasm for sports have remained robust if she’d had to compete against several — not just one — biological boys who enjoyed a physiological advantage over her? If subjected to an unlevel playing field from grade school on, would she have stuck with sports long enough to collect all the intrinsic tools that are the biggest reward of athletics participation: self-discipline, resilience, coachability, perseverance, delayed gratification, sportsmanship?

There’s a reason that Marcia Morey, a 1976 Olympic swimmer whose world view otherwise is in near-perfect alignment with Maddow’s, draws the line at biological boys competing against biological girls starting in high school.

As a US Olympic swimmer, Marcia Morey experienced firsthand an unlevel playing field created by steroid-fueled East Germans.

So why did Morey, now a NC legislator, oppose a bill banning transgender girls in girls’ sports?

The short answer: it’s complicated, writes @Kayceeunplugged
https://t.co/PKaDAHZrY9

— Sport & State (@SportNState) November 3, 2026

Or does Maddow believe that Morey and her fellow Olympians in the women’s events should just get over being cheated out of Olympic medals since the East German women fed steroids by an authoritarian state represented such an infinitesimal percentage of the competitive swimming population?

I was an impressionable 13-year-old with my own Olympic dreams in 1976, and after watching my childhood idols get beaten over and over by swimmers from a country that hadn’t made much of a splash at the Olympics four years prior, I did pause to consider the wisdom of continuing in a sport where the cheaters appeared to prosper.

It’s an inconvenient truth to consider how steroid use at the elite level may have trickled down to the rank and file in the sport, thereby normalizing what once would have been considered a non-starter by anybody with integrity.

I believe the same holds true for girls having to compete against biological boys who identify as girls. Will the younger sisters, neighbors, and classmates of the biological girls take one look at the inequity being forced upon them and say, thanks, but no thanks, to sports participation?

Trickle-Down Effect

In that respect, “trans people” in sports has a trickle-down effect that can potentially impact far more athletes than simply those lining up alongside the “trans people.” Around the time of the 1976 Olympics, the head coach of the USA Swimming club I represented told my father I was a super hard worker, but too scrawny to compete with the best … but there was a pill I could take to remedy that.

At my father’s insistence, I changed teams immediately after that conversation, but how many other swimmers stayed and accepted the pill? And what impact did that have on how they viewed themselves, competition, and their accomplishments forevermore?

Something else for Maddow to consider. Like her, I grew up a self-described tomboy in northern California. If she or I were growing up there now, would we be encouraged to explore the possibility that our gender identity didn’t match our biological sex? Would Maddow, if she was coming of age today, be encouraged to see herself not as a gay woman but as a transgender man?

In March of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Mirabelli v. Bonta that California schools cannot conceal a child’s gender transition from parents, as a California policy enacted on Jan. 1, 2025, had allowed them to do.

The Court held that California “cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents” by permitting schools to facilitate social gender transitions without parental notification or consent.

In California, they passed a bill if your child thinks they’re another gender and asking people at school to call them by the opposite sex and they are having sessions with the school counselor . They don’t have to inform the parent. It gets worse, they could take your child to a planned parenthood and start them on hormones and you would never know about it.

This bill that got passed in California is pure insanity and coming to other states real soon.

— Dr. Dawn Michael (@DawnsMission) March 18, 2026

Maddow and Torre can talk until they’re blue in the face about how the anti-trans movement is a “years long political project to scapegoat and vilify and try to direct violence and hate towards a tiny, disfavored minority,” but the headlines suggest they are dead wrong.

Or simply projecting. I’ll let you decide.

Your Tribe, Not Mine

Those aligned with “trans people” are the ones spewing hatred and threatening violence against those who show up at women’s soccer matches or women’s basketball games wearing apparel that celebrates biological women in sport. It’s not the other way around.

If you’re looking to identify the authoritarian movement in this country that is hellbent on normalizing an unlevel playing field like the GDR once did in women’s swimming, it’s the left, not the right. Your tribe, Maddow, not mine. Nobody that I’m aware of had to be escorted from the arena for harassing the Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve for wearing a “Trans Kids Belong” T-shirt during a game.

The videos that went viral of women (and men) celebrating real women being bullied to the point of having to be escorted from a sporting event had such a profound, profound impact on some of our fellow Americans — to paraphrase Maddow — that in Washington and Colorado, two true blue states, the voters passed measures to prohibit “trans people” from girls’ sports.

As Democrats nationwide rode an enormous blue wave to victory Tuesday, voters in Washington & Colorado came together to protect girls’ sports.

They proved that protecting girls’ sports was never about right versus left; it’s about right versus wrong.

Me for @nypost

https://t.co/ZMwZmyHwOG

— Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) November 5, 2026

A political fantasy? The headlines in the days after last week’s midterm elections suggest otherwise. A fake problem? The statistics suggest otherwise.

So, I’m turning Maddow’s question back onto her: Why do you think you can get away with saying this crazy thing is not happening?