“Trans athletes have ‘stolen’ nearly 2,300 gold medals from women and girls in the US” blared the New York Post headline. The official social media accounts for the U.S. Department of Education picked up the story, sharing a screenshot of the headline with the ominous words, “This needs to end.” Fox News picked up the story as well, presenting transgender athletes defeating cisgender athletes as becoming increasingly commonplace.
Fox News, the New York Post and the White House all got their numbers from the same place: The evangelical public policy group Concerned Women for America. Founded by conservative activist Beverly LaHaye in the 1970s to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, the CWA is currently the largest public policy women’s organization in the United States and serves on the advisory board for Project 2025, the conservative handbook the Trump administration has been using to drastically remake the federal government.
In late September, leading up to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on women in sports, the group released a press release citing that their research “found that trans-identifying males have stolen over 2,293 gold medals from women and girls in the United States.” The CWA was vague on the extent of their research, stating that their numbers were taken from “recorded instances of natal males’ disruption in female events since the mid-1980s” compiled by the website HeCheated.
HeCheated is a volunteer-run website that describes itself as a centralized archive documenting male participation in female sports and the resulting effects on female athletes. The site’s operator — allegedly a former female college athlete and former prominent member of the now-defunct anti-trans web forum Ovarit — believes transgender athletes are “lying about their sex” and created the database as a way to expose what she sees as the prevalence of trans women dominating in sports.
To draw the chain of evidence line more clearly, a politically conservative evangelical advocacy organization is presenting a figure derived from an anonymous anti-trans advocacy database as research, and that unverified figure is then being reported by a tabloid-style right-wing news outlet before being amplified by the United States Department of Education.
That is not good journalism. Good journalism is going directly to the source.
What’s in the HeCheated database?
Which is why I spent more time than I care to admit sifting through the HeCheated database. This is a worldwide list of athletes from nearly 50 countries dating from the 1920s to the present. It covers a wide array of sports, from mainstream sports like American football to more obscure competitions like oyster shucking. That is not a joke.
The listing also contains 504 instances of an alleged trans female athlete winning an event — or “stealing gold,” as the CWA would put it — in which they were the only competitor.
As of October 2, 2026, the HeCheated database contains 21,359 distinct entries covering 1,133 distinct athletes. However, by the sheet’s own labeling system, 289 (25.5%) of the athletes are not transgender. To pad their stats, HeCheated includes 27 individuals identified as having DSD — an umbrella term for any difference of sex development. Included in this category are cisgender women like South African runner Caster Semenya and Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. They also include 264 athletes listed simply as “other.” A random sampling of the data reveals these “others” are cisgender males competing in functionally co-ed environments. For example, many of these were male gymnasts legally competing on a women’s team as their state had no sanctioned men’s competitive league.
South African Olympic champion Caster Semenya (L) competes during the Cape Town SPAR Women’s 10km Challenge in Cape Town on March 29, 2026. (Photo by Rodger Bosch / AFP via Getty Images)
The single collegiate instance of “other” is when HeCheated claims a “Sara Curren” won the women’s 100m dash at the Pomona-Pitzer track meet. The truth is that Sara is actually Jonny — a cisgender male YouTuber who entered the competition as a stunt. HeCheated is aware this was a stunt, as they link to Jonny’s video. When race organizers were made aware of the stunt, they officially changed the results. Nonetheless, HeCheated still records this as a “stolen” medal.
Beyond that, even the athletes HeCheated lists as “trans-identified” (their term) might exist in a liminal space. In one instance, it lists American Women’s Football League linebacker Missy Mahoney as winning the Northeast Conference with her team, the NY Knockout. Mahoney is transgender — she was raised male — but discovered she was intersex at the age of 25. The complaint of “biological males” competing against women does not hold here, because Mahoney carries typically female chromosomes. This, too, is listed as a “stolen” medal even though by HeCheated’s criteria, Mahoney also “won” the medal for all her female teammates.
HeCheated also inflates its numbers by including a variety of amateur sports that even ESPN’s The Ocho would not carry. Did you know about competitive oyster shucking? HeCheated does, and they want you to know that, from 2016 to 2023, Isabella Macbeth Cain, a trans woman, dominated the women’s oyster shucking circuit.
Unfortunately for that narrative, the competition became fully co-ed in 2025. Further, some entries have no confirmed data on the individual’s identity. For example, there are 41 entries dedicated to a teenage Canadian gymnast but none of the linked sources establish any proof the gymnast is transgender.
They’re starting with flawed, incomplete and biased data, working toward a conclusion they already support and are providing no roadmap for how they got there.
Simply put, this isn’t good data, which makes the CWA’s research less than reliable. They don’t share their methodology, and I was not able to independently replicate their numbers within the HeCheated database. They’re starting with flawed, incomplete and biased data, working toward a conclusion they already support and are providing no roadmap for how they got there.
The fearmongering
The Concerned Women for America and HeCheated want you to think transgender athletes are overrunning women’s sports, but even by their own data there have only been 844 female transgender athletes in all sports at all levels across the whole world in the past 100 years. For contrast, in the same time frame, more people have received a Nobel Prize.
Given that this so-called research was brought into the limelight by the Department of Education, let’s focus on high school athletics. In 2024 to 2025, there were 3,539,596 female high school athletes, about 41.9% of all female high schoolers. The HeCheated data lists 49 trans female student athletes during that school year. That’s 0.001% of all female high school athletes. Only 31 received a gold medal. That’s 0.0009%.
Republican candidate Steve Hilton held a press outside the CIF State Track Championship in Clovis, where transgender athlete AB Hernandez will be competing in the long jump, high jump and triple jump on May 29, 2026. (Tomas Ovalle / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Given national estimates of transgender youth, if trans women competed in high school sports at rates similar to all women, there would be about 195,000 trans women athletes. Instead, there are 49. If trans women were represented in high school sports at the same level as cisgender women, we would see 4,000 times the number of trans women competing.
Despite what conservatives want you to believe, if anything, repressive policies are preventing or discouraging transgender youth from participating in sports.
Do we actually care about women’s sports?
Sports have always had to grapple with questions of competitive equity, physical safety and the appropriate boundaries of different competitions. Ensuring safety and equality while finding a balance between recreation and competition always has been a challenge within youth sports. Transgender athletes bring their own set of challenges, but they are not unfamiliar ones.
If we actually care about women’s sports, then we should care enough to do the work. That means asking how many transgender athletes actually participate, in which sports, at what competitive levels, under what rules, and with what measurable effects on competitive outcomes. It means distinguishing youth recreation from elite competition, contact sports from noncontact sports and moving questions of competitive advantage to questions of physical safety.
It means listening to female athletes — including transgender women — rather than using either group as a political talking point. It requires grace, love and empathy, not to mention a reminder that athletics ought to be a fun game that enhances human flourishing.
“When a transgender athlete doesn’t win, it’s not news and their gender identity played no effect.”
These are difficult questions with complicated answers. The stated worry about “stealing” medals is that it creates a competitive disadvantage. But HeCheated’s own data shows us trans women are quite often not a lock on the podium. They are just as likely to be in the middle of the pack or even last. When a transgender athlete doesn’t win, it’s not news and their gender identity played no effect. Because we only hear of the successful trans athletes, we tend to think every story is like that.
That’s not to say trans women might have some competitive advantage. They might. They also might not. But we’ve found solutions to alleged competitive advantages in areas like weight, talent and school size. We can find a solution here as well.
But those shouting loudest aren’t looking for solutions. They’re searching for pawns they can sacrifice for political power and influence. There is a particular political power in portraying a small and often invisible minority as an imminent threat to something people value. Women’s sports are worth protecting. Girls deserve opportunities to compete. Athletes deserve to know that the rules of their sport are fair and that their physical safety matters.
And this also applies to transgender athletes. They are not abstractions or political props. They are children and adults who want to play sports, make friends, represent their schools and experience the ordinary joys and disappointments of competition. Yes, cisgender girls deserve the opportunity to play sports and be safe while doing so, and so do transgender girls. If anything is being stolen, it’s not 2,300 gold medals over a 40-year period — it’s the dignity, safety and humanity of transgender athletes.
Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.