Athlete and journalist Karleigh Webb opened Smith’s panel “A Conversation on Trans Athletes, Gender and Race” by speaking directly to her target audience: student athletes.
“Are there any athletes in the room with us tonight?” she asked, peering around the room of roughly forty students and faculty assembled in Weinstein Auditorium. A cluster of hands shot up in the far back right corner.
Webb grinned and gestured to the group — the volleyball team — to come forward, promising, “I don’t bite.”
Student-athletes should be in the front row, Webb explained, because they are the group that needs to be on the front lines when it comes to advocating for the rights of transgender athletes.
“The generation of athletes that must lead this charge are sitting in this room,” she said, “You are the generals.”
Webb hosted the panel on Oct. 8 for Smith students and faculty with activists Erica Tibbets and Anna Baeth. The Office for Equity and Inclusion and the Dean of the College sponsored the event, part of Floyd Cheung’s interdepartmental course “Thinking Through Race and Its Intersections.” Cheung is the Vice President for Equity and Inclusion as well as a professor of English Language & Literature at Smith.
Cheung’s class is always open to staff, students and faculty interested in learning about race and its intersections. He said the decision to create the panel sprouted from a conversation with Inclusion Education Trainer Toby Davis and members of the trans and non-binary community last spring.
“They thought, too, that students, staff, and faculty at Smith ought to be better educated on the issue,” Cheung said.
Tibbets, Webb and Baeth discussed current threats to transgender athletes, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) decision to ban transgender women from competing in women’s competitions, announced in February. Smith College changed their policy to ban transgender women from competing in games, in line with federal mandates.
In an Executive Order issued Feb. 5, 2025 titled, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” the White House effectively ordered federal agencies to rescind funding from colleges that do not ban transgender women from participating in women’s athletics.
Panelists encouraged students to educate themselves about recent laws and step in to teach others when conversations about transgender issues arise with friends and family.
Baeth noted that one major roadblock towards combating anti-trans legislation is that people who have strong feelings about trans athletes often do not actually know any trans athletes or information about them.
“A lot of people like to talk about trans athletes without talking to trans trans athletes,” Baeth said. She cited an Associated Press story that reported that many legislators who are passing and voting on legislation restricting the rights of transgender athletes cannot name one transgender athlete.
Baeth is a co-author of “Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports.” When she started working on the book five years ago, she said, all of the athletes she had interviewed could compete in their respective sports, including at the collegiate, competitive and recreational levels. Now only one of them can: they’re in their forties and compete in a recreational league.
Increasingly, lawmakers are restricting the rights of young transgender people to participate in sports. This means the next generation of trans individuals will not see themselves represented in elite and collegiate sports. Restrictive legislation creates a silence, Baeth said, where the voices of young trans athletes should be.
“The silence says a lot more than the stories I could potentially tell,” Baeth said.
Baeth’s story captured the panelists’ argument: that Smith students must speak up as allies for their transgender peers. There is power in conversation and education. Ruth Tullis 27’, one of the volleyball players, explained why events like this are vital for Smith students to educate themselves and connect.
“We thought it was a topic our whole team should be knowledgeable about and care deeply about,” she said.
When Tullis discovered that Smith would be banning transgender women from competing, she said it felt like a “very scary doomsday kind of situation.”
Tullis’s coaches discussed the NCAA decision with their team and talked through students’ feelings. Tullis expressed that in this case, there doesn’t seem to be any good solution.
“Obviously it’s not something we’re happy about,” Tullis said, “But we also understand the implications of what could fall back on Smith,” citing restrictions on federal funding and bans on athletes’ participation in NCAA competitions. “There [were] no good options where everyone gets what they need.”
The panel also provided students with the opportunity to learn more about the history of women’s sports and the participation of transgender individuals. Tibbets, a senior lecturer in Exercise and Sports Sciences at Smith, argued that the desire to protect women’s sports from transgender individuals is rooted in racism and sexism.
“The whole notion that people can neatly fall into two categories,” Tibbets said, affects women of color more because racism posits women of color as inherently less feminine than their white counterparts.
“We’re policing what womanhood looks like,” Webb said. When sports officials determine who is female enough to participate in women’s sports, non-white women are more likely to be questioned and perceived as masculine, the panelists said.
In addition to discussing the motives for restrictive legislation on trans athletes, panelists discussed one athlete in particular who became a leading example for the opposition of transgender women competing in women’s sports.
Webb told the story of Lia Thomas, a former University of Pennsylvania swimmer that won a NCAA Division I title in 2022.
Thomas tied for fifth place with Riley Gaines in a 200-yard freestyle race at a 2022 championship meet. Since then, some media outlets reported that Thomas had “stolen” the title from Gaines. “She happened to win one race at the right time,” Webb said, “And she became the poster child for this issue.”
In March, the Trump administration suspended approximately $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania. In response to a federal investigation by the Department of Education, The school updated their website to transfer titles Thomas won to the athletes that competed and lost against her, and issued an apology letter to each of those swimmers.
Legislators argue that cases like these are brought forth to protect the health and safety of women in sports. But Webb questioned, “Whose health and safety are you concerned about?” She cited Thomas as one example of an athlete whose life has been negatively affected by the disproportionate media scrutiny and political targeting of transgender athletes.
Members of Smith’s volleyball team argued that Smith can do more to broadcast support for Smith’s transgender and nonbinary students publicly.
“I feel like we need to be more outspoken,” said Olivia Teske ‘26. “I think there needs to be more visual and auditory support for trans and nonbinary students at Smith.”
Teske suggested Smith could issue pins and patches at well-attended sports games that express support for transgender individuals.
Her teammate, Madelyn Manzer ‘26, agreed, “When people hear LGBTQ+, they think gay, they don’t think trans.”
“We have platforms, especially as an institution at Smith as well, a historically women’s college,” Teske concluded, “I think there’s a lot of potential for more explicit support.”
Panelists concluded the evening with a call to action to Smith students to expect more from their institution and to try to create the future they want to see. They argued students should imagine options beyond the NCAA to support, such as the Association for International Collegiate Athletics for Women, an organization that existed in the 1980s and allowed schools more freedom to push progressive policies.
“We are the historical template right now,” Webb said, “We need to put our heads together and figure out the future we want.” Panelists emphasized that current restrictions on transgender athletes are unprecedented, and that it is necessary for the next generation to resist these changes to work towards a freer future.
