Texas AG Paxton Invents Scourge Of Trans Athletes For NCAA Trollsuit

Texas AG Ken Paxton emerged from under his bridge to file another performative trollsuit yesterday. This time his target is the NCAA, which he accuses of violating Texas’s consumer protection statute by selling tickets to women’s sporting events with transgender participants.

As Lisa Needham pointed out in Public Notice, this is a solution to a non-problem. It’s already illegal for trans athletes to participate in collegiate athletics in Texas. And last month NCAA President Charlie Baker told a Senate Judiciary Committee panel that, of the roughly 510,000 student athletes participating in collegiate sports today, only ten are trans.

But Paxton’s got a culture war to fight, so he marched into the District Court of Lubbock County and filed this dumbshit suit premised on the theory that transgender people simply do not exist, and so Texas has the right to demand that the NCAA bar trans athletes nationwide, or at least out them and stop calling events where they play “women’s” sport.

Paxton begins by arguing that sex is binary, and it was ever thus.

Most consumers know that a “woman” means an adult human female. “Sex is an immutable characteristic determined solely by birth.” Gibson v. Collier, 920 F.3d 212,- 217 n. 2 (5th Cir. 2019) (cleaned up) (quoting Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 686 (1973) (plurality op.)). This definition of sex is ubiquitous and has been the same throughout human history. And, most importantly, it is how Texas consumers understand the word.

He then goes on to immediately contradict himself by citing several professional athletes who identified as female their entire lives, but whom the Texas AG, in his infinite wisdom, has decided are really men.

He starts with Caster Semenya, whom he describes as “a male with disorders of sex development (‘DSD’), despite displaying some physical traits of a female.” Semenya is an intersex runner with female characteristics who was raised from birth as a girl and would qualify as female under the very language Paxton cites from the 5th Circuit.

He moves on to Indian runner Dutee Chand, whom he refers to with male pronouns, despite the fact that she has undergone invasive and humiliating testing to prove that she is a cisgender woman whose body produces high levels of testosterone, a condition know as hyperandrogenism. And then to Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, whom the Russian-led International Boxing Association (IBA) disqualified due to some unspecified testing three days after Khelif beat Russian boxer Azalia Amineva, restoring Amineva’s perfect record.

The IBA first suggested that it had performed chromosomal testing when it disqualified Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting, before backtracking and saying that the women “did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential.” In 2023, the International Olympic Committee stripped IBA of its recognition as the global body for boxing, and Khelif and Lin went on to win gold medals in the Paris Olympics this summer.

Nevertheless, Paxton refers to Khelif as “a male with DSD” who “fought against another male boxer with DSD, Lin YuTing, in the final round of the women’s boxing competition at the 2024 Olympics.” This cites to a Fox News story which states as fact that Lin has male chromosomes, based solely on the IBA’s disputed allegations. There is no citation for Paxton’s claim that “The IOC’s actions, like those of the NCAA, ultimately left consumers confused, angry, and feeling cheated after they purchased goods and services associated with women’s boxing thinking they were supporting women’s competition, only to witness men fighting women and, ultimately, two men fighting each other over the gold medal.”

Nor could there be, because it never happened. Gross misgendering aside, Khelif won gold as a welterweight, and Lin took the top prize in the featherweight category. They didn’t fight each other in Paris.

This mixup is illustrative of more than just shoddy lawyering, though. It undercuts Paxton’s whole premise that sex is obvious and immutable from birth. Every single one of these athletes has lived her entire life as female and has female secondary sexual characteristics. Paxton points to Chand and Semenya’s exclusion from their sport due to testosterone levels as evidence that they are men. This would appear to concede the point that gender is not fixed, since hormone levels can be easily altered through medication. Would Paxton claim that a male-presenting person with high levels of estrogen (thanks to either biology or injections) was really a woman?

The International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) tried to thread the needle, decreeing that Semenya and Chand could participate as women if they’d agreed to take testosterone suppressants. Both athletes refused to alter their bodies, opting instead to retire from running. But Paxton seems incapable of nuance, much less appreciating the inherent contradictory nature of his position. Or maybe he just doesn’t give a shit, because he’s got to hit his quotient of garbage lawsuits, and he won’t be able to sue Joe Biden in two weeks.

Trolls gotta troll, y’all.

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.