Megan Rapinoe, one of the most decorated and outspoken figures in American soccer history, is not staying quiet about the International Olympic Committee’s sweeping decision to ban transgender athletes from all women’s sports.
According to sources, the two-time World Cup champion called the ruling a politically driven capitulation to the Trump administration rather than a policy grounded in any meaningful science.
Speaking on the A Touch More podcast alongside her partner, WNBA legend Sue Bird, Rapinoe did not hold back.
“This committee is framing it as based in science, which it’s not,” she said. “This will ultimately just prevent people from competing within the women’s category that they feel like they have an unfair advantage. It’s just really ha teful. There’s been so few athletes that are trans or competing as trans and it’s so blatant on its face.”
The IOC made the announcement earlier this year, introducing a mandatory testing protocol centered on a one-time SRY gene test. Olympic officials described the measure as a way to “protect fairness, safety and integrity in the female category.”
The decision came in the wake of intense public scrutiny surrounding boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting at the Paris 2024 Olympics, where both athletes faced questions about their gender eligibility following claims they had not passed tests administered by the International Boxing Association.
For Rapinoe, the timing and the framing of the IOC’s ruling tells its own story. She described it as “a total acquiescence to the Trump administration and to really right-wing conservative politics.” She argued that the decision has far less to do with athletic fairness than with a broader cultural and political agenda targeting a vulnerable minority.
“It is just bringing down so much hate against such a small percentage of people who are just trying to live their life,” she said. “It’s just horrible and I’m just sickened by it, really.”
The former United States Women’s National Team captain was particularly pointed in dismissing the idea that the policy serves as any form of protection for female athletes. She noted that both she and Bird, two women who competed at the absolute pinnacle of their respective sports for decades, never perceived transgender participation as a threat or a problem during their careers.
“I feel like two people, who played at the very highest level for every competition that you possibly could, don’t agree with this and never felt like this was an issue at all,” she said, referring to what the IOC has labeled the “Protection of the Female Category.”
Rapinoe also challenged the underlying premise that biology is a clean, binary variable that can be neatly measured and enforced. “We already know that biology, as much as we want it to be just nice and clean and tight and perfectly in one category and another, it’s not. We know that,” she said.
She continued: “So, now what we’re doing is subjecting everybody, all women and all people who are identifying as women to this really invasive testing that only to me says like, ‘Oh, we’re just trying to whittle it down to a certain type of woman.’ Is that what we’re doing? That’s really the whole game here.”
In her view, the campaign against transgender athletes is the latest front in a long-running conservative effort to roll back social progress.
“They sort of lost the battle on gay marriage and lost the battle on all these things so it’s just like, ‘We’re gonna have this whole campaign for all these years to just hate trans people,’ which is such a small percentage of the population,” she said. “It’s actually on a single hand when we’re talking about sports.”
The IOC has not publicly responded to Rapinoe’s remarks. The new testing rules are expected to be in effect for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
