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President Donald Trump stirred the hearts of the University of Alabama graduates when he reaffirmed his promise to “keep men out of women’s sports.”
During a commencement speech at the university’s graduation ceremony on Thursday night, Trump gave a shutout to the school’s SEC champion women’s track and field team before igniting a raucous applause by “vowing to defend women’s sports.”
“As long as I’m president, we will always protect women’s sports. Men will not play in women’s sports,” Trump said before the crowd erupted in cheers for its loudest and longest applause of the night.
“No way. They say it’s an 80-20 issue. No, it’s a 97-3 issue, I think,” Trump said. “No, men will not be playing in women’s sports. I said that, and I classified it with a very powerful executive order, as you know. It’s done.”
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Later in the speech, Trump circled back to the subject, mocking Democrats for allowing trans athletes in women’s sports and trans athletes themselves in a lengthy rant.
During this section of the speech, Trump also discussed the Paris Olympics women’s boxing competitions, which included two gold medalists who were previously disqualified from international competitions for failing gender eligibility tests. However, neither boxer, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, identifies as transgender.
“They had a great champion, a female boxer, and after one punch she walked back to the corner and said, ‘I can’t get hit like that, I’ve never been hit like that before,” Trump said.
At one point, Trump did a physical impersonation of a female weight lifter and a trans weight lifter, and reenacted a scenario where the female loses a competition to a trans opponent.
Then Trump took aim at transgender swimmers, telling the story of a swimmer who he joked was “windburned” by a trans opponent.
“One young lady, she was going to set the record, she fought all her life to set the record,” Trump said. “Then she looks to the right, and she sees the same thing, but there’s a person next to her who’s a giant … that was a person that transitioned, and he had the wingspan of Wilt ‘the Stilt’ Chamberlain.”
Trump made similar references to the weightlifting and swimmer scenarios in June 2023 while speaking at the North Carolina Republican Party Convention in Greensboro.
On Thursday, Trump also referenced female volleyball players who have been affected by trans inclusion.
“You look at all the volleyball players who have been hurt so badly, that are hit at levels that they’ve never seen before,” Trump said.
One former University of Alabama women’s volleyball player, Brooke Slusser, was thrust into a situation where she had to share a locker room and bedroom with a trans athlete when she transferred from the university to San Jose State University in 2023. In a lawsuit, Slusser alleges she was made to share those spaces with trans teammate Blaire Fleming without being told Fleming was a biological male.
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Graduating students listen to President Donald Trump’s speech at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa on May 1, 2025. Trump’s remarks came the day before official commencement ceremonies. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Slusser has since left San Jose State University and returned home to Texas after facing alleged backlash and harassment in the aftermath of filing her lawsuit.
Trump signed the Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports executive order on Feb. 5. One day later, the NCAA revised its gender eligibility policy to restrict participation in the women’s category to only biological females. However, the new policy has also come under criticism by some women’s sports activists for not going far enough.
Alabama has had a state law in place since 2021 to prevent trans athletes in girls’ sports. In 2023, it was extended to include college students. Unlike other laws addressing the issue, Alabama’s law also bars athletes assigned as female at birth from participating in the boys’ category unless there is no comparable girls’ opportunity (such as football).
Trans inclusion in women’s and girls’ sports emerged as a hot-button issue in Trump’s 2024 election victory as most Americans came to take the Republican’s side on the topic.
A national exit poll conducted by the Concerned Women for America legislative action committee found that 70% of moderate voters saw the issue of “Donald Trump’s opposition to transgender boys and men playing girls’ and women’s sports and of transgender boys and men using girls’ and women’s bathrooms” as important to them.
President Donald Trump delivers remarks to graduating students at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa on May 1, 2025. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Six percent said it was the most important issue of all, while 44% said it was “very important.”
The issue inspired a national counterculture movement against Democrat policies that keep trans athletes in women’s sports, heavily influenced by young college-educated women. Biden’s 35-point lead over Trump among young women in the 2020 presidential election cycle shrank to a 24-point margin for Trump’s 2024 opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, per an NBC News exit poll.
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President Donald Trump delivers commencement remarks at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa on May 1, 2025. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
A New York Times/Ipsos survey found the vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, don’t think transgender athletes should be permitted to compete in women’s sports.
Of the 2,128 people who participated, 79% said biological males who identify as women should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports. Of the 1,025 people who identified as Democrats or leaning Democrat, 67% said transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete with women.
Nearly 70% of Americans say biological men should not be permitted to compete in women’s sports, according to a Gallup poll last year.
In June 2024, a survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago asked respondents whether transgender athletes of both sexes should be permitted to participate in sports leagues that correspond to their preferred gender identity instead of their biological sex. In that survey, 65% answered that it should never or rarely be allowed. When those polled were asked specifically about adult transgender female athletes competing in women’s sports, 69% opposed it.
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