American Catholic bishops have applauded President Trump’s executive order banning biological males from participating in women’s sports.
“We welcome the President’s Executive Order that protects opportunities for women and girls to compete in sports safely and fairly,” said Bishops Robert Barron and David M. O’Connell, who head up — respectively — the Bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth, and the Committee on Catholic Education.
“Consistent with the Catholic Church’s clear teaching on the equality of men and women, we reaffirm that, in education and in sports as elsewhere, policies must uphold human dignity,” the bishops stated.
“This includes equal treatment between women and men and affirmation of the goodness of a person’s body, which is genetically and biologically female or male,” they added.
In his Feb. 5 executive order “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” President Trump said that the practice of allowing men to compete in women’s sports is “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports.”
Trump further said that all funding would be rescinded from educational programs that “deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.”
In their statement, the bishops noted that according to Catholic teaching, man and woman have been created “in perfect equality as human persons” in their “respective beings as man and woman.”
“‘Being man’ or ‘being woman’ is a reality which is good and willed by God,” they added.
Students who experience gender dysphoria “bear the full measure of human dignity, and they therefore must be treated with kindness and respect,” the bishops said. “Similar to their peers, those students must be assured the right to participate in or try out for co-educational activities in accord with their biological sex.”
The executive order was also widely praised on social media, even by public figures not known for their support of the president.
J.K. Rowling, author of the bestselling Harry Potter series, offered congratulations “to every single person on the left who’s been campaigning to destroy women’s and girls’ rights.”
“Without you, there’d be no images like this,” she added in her X post, sharing a photo of President Trump signing his executive order surrounded by smiling female athletes championing his directive.
Similarly, tennis icon Martina Navratilova, an open lesbian married to a woman, shared a video on X of women and girl athletes walking into the White House to witness the president’s signing of his executive order.
“I hate that the democrats totally failed women and girls on this very clear issue of women’s sports being for females only,” Navratilova said.
