By Suzanne Bowdey

While nothing can replace the euphoria of standing on a podium to the crowd’s enthusiastic cheers — or undo the humiliation of watching a man take your place — Donald Trump is doing the next best thing. In a much-needed encore to the president’s order to end transgender sports, the administration is taking its action to the next level: restoring the titles, honors, and records to the girls who rightly earned them.

In a letter to NCAA President Charlie Baker — who’s been no friend to women during his two-year tenure — and the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFSH), the Department of Education is demanding an immediate atonement for the years lost to the Biden administration’s radical trans agenda in sports.

“We cannot undo the damage inflicted by years of policies and practices that have denied the material reality of sex and conflated that immutable characteristic with a subjective, fluid concept of ‘identity’ by prospectively returning to objective, factual sex classifications in athletics,” The Daily Caller quotes the agency’s Office of the General Counsel. But, the attorneys continue, “We can recognize the harms done and injustices committed by such misguided policies and reversing their effects will restore a genuine commitment to girls’ and women’s equality of opportunity in athletic competition across the United States.”

They can start, the Trump officials write, by “restor[ing] to female athletes the records, titles, awards, and recognitions misappropriated by biological males competing in female categories” and stripping those accolades from any biological male who “unfairly competed against girls and women in athletics.” Only that, the Department of Education emphasizes, will fully align these groups to the president’s executive order on Title IX.

For elite athletes like Riley Gaines, this next step is crucial to clawing back the ground lost under Biden’s obsession with transgender activism. When the NCAA finally agreed (after Trump’s EO) to roll back its policy on men in women’s sports, one of the swimmer’s first responses was on this very topic. “Now they can work on stripping all records, titles, and honors from men who stole from deserving women.”

For hundreds of women like her, one of the worst parts about the last four years has been watching, helplessly, as the NCAA and other sports leagues devalue their hard work. In Riley’s case, the humiliation runs even deeper, because she didn’t actually lose. When Gaines tied with male swimmer Lia Thomas for the title in 2022 — “we went the exact same time down to the 100th of a second” — she was literally pushed to the side by meet officials. They wanted Lia to hold the trophy because it would make for a better photo op, Riley said. It was devastating, she lamented later. “It really was. "I left the pool with no trophy,” she shook her head, and this was “the goal that I had set all year.” “It was that moment when I knew … I couldn’t lie anymore.”

That’s one of the reasons the DOE’s deputy general counsel, Candice Jackson, warned high schools and colleges to take their demands seriously. “The Trump Education Department will do everything in our power to right this wrong and champion the hard-earned accomplishments of past, current, and future female collegiate athletes.”

If the new White House can’t convince them, maybe a trip to the courthouse will. In another high-profile legal challenge, three former teammates of Thomas from the University of Pennsylvania are suing to wipe his records from school history. As they rightly argue, the decision to oust women in favor of a trans-identifying man was a clear violation of Title IX.

“I never expected my Ivy League education to teach me that women must silently accept losing their opportunities and privacy,” plaintiff Grace Estabrook said in a press release. “Women’s sports and the leaders who oversee them should not prioritize men’s feelings over fairness and integrity.”

Among other things, they hope “to create a class-action claim on behalf of the 206 female athletes who participated in the 2022 Ivy League Swimming and Diving Championships” at Harvard that year. “Women swimmers throughout the Ivy League were left shattered by the disregard of their rights and opportunities in order to create new rights and opportunities in women’s sports for a man with biological advantages they could not hope to match,” the complaint reads.

And that’s saying nothing of the emotional trauma these girls — and others — experienced when Thomas started using the women’s locker room. Initially, the swimmers were told that he wouldn’t be invading their personal space. But once he joined the team, girls were shocked to see Thomas in the locker room changing. “Through tears, Margot [Kaczorowski] told her coach that Thomas’ use of the locker room was not right,” the filing said. “In response, [Head Coach Mike] Schnur claimed that he knew it was wrong but there was nothing he could do.”

Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one. Like the other girls, Riley was also exposed to a naked Thomas at multi-school tournaments like the NCAA’s meet. “Privately, of course, we would have conversations with our coaches and the parents and different people even within the NCAA who knew this was wrong. And of course, they felt ashamed of themselves for going along with it, but they didn’t do anything about it.” Ultimately, she decided, if the adults in the room wouldn’t speak up, she would.

Now, finally, America has a president who’s willing to come alongside these girls and restore justice and common sense. To Doreen Denny, senior advisor for Concerned Women for America, this is only the beginning of righting a historic wrong. “Trans-identifying males hold women’s records in many sports and schools across the country,” she pointed out to The Washington Stand, adding that Thomas “has claim to three women’s records at the University of Pennsylvania and was nominated UPenn’s ‘woman athlete of the year.’”

In 2019, Denny continued, “Franklin Pierce University male sprinter CeCe Telfer won an NCAA national title in women’s track and broke school records in eight women’s events. Telfer remains the reigning record holder six years later. Rochester Institute of Technology proudly platformed Sadie Schreiner on its women’s team last year allowing the trans-identifying male to claim five school records in women’s track and compete in NCAA championships. This is a travesty.”

“Correcting the injustice of sex discrimination against female athletes in their own sports needs to happen at all levels of sport,” she told TWS. “We applaud the Trump administration for working to reclaim the titles, records, and achievements of women athletes as a key priority in its commitment to restoring women’s sports for women only.”

But the battle doesn’t end there, she cautions. The president may have gotten the ball rolling, but it’s up to the House and Senate to finish the job. “Congress has a responsibility to clarify the intent of laws like Title IX when they have been misused or abused. Gender ideology has turned laws to shield women into weapons of harassment and discrimination. What’s happening to women in shelters, prisons, locker rooms, and in women’s sports is a prime example of legal abuse.” It is absolutely “critical,” she insisted, “for Congress to pass laws to codify what President Trump has ordered. We must secure women’s protections by clearly defining the meaning of sex and the purpose of Title IX, a law enacted to protect equality of opportunity for women in education and athletics — not discriminate against us.”

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.