Athletes blast Nike over trans sports study

Women’s sports advocates pleaded with Nike to stand up for female athletes and oppose men’s participation in women-only athletic competitions following a report that the brand funded a study involving trans-identifying athletes. 

XX-XY Athletics, a clothing brand raising awareness about fairness in women’s sports, released an advertisement earlier this month that asked several female athletes what message they would send to Nike if they had the chance. 

“If I had a chance to talk to Nike, I would tell them to ‘just do it,'” Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer and advocate for female athletes, said in the video. “That’s your slogan, isn’t it, Nike? Just do it. When I say it, I mean the right thing. And that’s defending women and biological reality.”

Get Our Latest News for FREE

Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.

Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer, has become a prominent voice in the movement to prevent trans-identifying male athletes from competing against women. In 2022, she was forced to race against University of Pennsylvania male swimmer Lia (Will) Thomas in the women’s 200-meter NCAA championships. 

While Gaines and Thomas tied for fifth place, an NCAA official told her that she couldn’t hold the fifth-place trophy during the ceremony because it had to be held by the male swimmer who identifies as a woman. The official explained that the NCAA wanted photos of Thomas with the trophy, and that Gaines would receive hers in the mail. 

Another women’s sports advocate featured in the XX-XY Athletics advertisement is former North Carolina high school volleyball player Payton McNabb, who told Nike that she had “dreams of playing” the sport in college. 

“But those were all taken away from me by a man,” McNabb says in the video. 

During a volleyball game against a rival high school in 2022, McNabb was violently struck in the head by a ball slammed over the net by a trans-identifying athlete on the opposing team. According to the Independent Women’s Forum, a medical evaluation later revealed that the injury had resulted in neurological impairments, including partial paralysis and memory impairment.

Lauren Miller, a professional golfer who also addresses Nike in the ad, called on the athletic brand to “think about your daughters.”

“If we let men and boys continue to invade, women’s sports will be erased,” Miller declares. 

Nike did not respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment. This article will be updated if a response is received. 

The advertisement follows an article in The New York Times about San Jose State University volleyball player Blaire Fleming, a male who identifies as a woman. Women’s volleyball teams at multiple schools, including the University of Wyoming, opted to forfeit their games against the California university instead of facing an opponent that had a male athlete on its side. 

In the article, the NY Times quoted Joanna Harper, whom it described as “a leading researcher of trans athletes at Oregon Health & Science University.” The researcher told the publication that she is working on a study that assesses the fitness results of trans-identifying youth before they start taking opposite-sex hormones. 

The study, which Nike funded according to the Times, will analyze trans-identifying youth every six months for five years to include after youth have undergone body mutilating surgeries in an attempt to look more like the opposite sex. 

Joanna Harper did not respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.

Nike, however, responded to the controversy over the allegations, according to OutKick. An executive with the brand told the outlet that the study “was never initialized” and “is not moving forward.” 

In response to a question about whether it was incorrect to say that Nike had funded the study, the executive replied that “no one was wrong,” but there might have been some “gaps in the information chain.”