One week ago, President Donald Trump, surrounded by young girls and women of all ages, signed an executive order banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, called No Men in Women’s Sports. At the signing, the president said that “the radical left has waged an all-out campaign to erase the very concept of biological sex and replace it with a militant transgender ideology.”
“With this executive order, the war on women’s sports is over,” he said.
NJ Spotlight News discussed the ban and its implications with Meghan Cortez, a transgender swimmer who competed at Ramapo College, first for three years as a male before transitioning to female and joining the women’s team. She drew national attention when she broke a pair of women’s swimming records in 2024.
“I find them truly disheartening, not only is it affecting trans women, but kind of the idea that people are going to have to choose as young kids, going into young adult life or have to choose whether to be who they are or do something that they love,” she said. “That’s very disheartening and sad, but this is not unexpected of the Trump administration and of Republican policies.
“If you just look at the issue as it is, it doesn’t affect many people,” she said. “It’s a very small group of people. But I would say the regulations that have been in place, they work. They’ve been working for the past 20 years and no one has really cared until recently.”
The day after Trump’s order, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which oversees college sports, changed its policies to align with the executive order. And on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education asked the NCAA to strip the titles, records and awards from transgender athletes that it says “have been misappropriated to biological males in female sports.”
