Sorry, Seattle: Science, Logic Tell Us Women Have No Chance Against Transgender Women

I held off weighing in on The Seattle Times’s latest effort to erase biology, so certain was I that a retraction or, at the very least, an editor’s note, was forthcoming, rendering my voice unnecessary.

Silly me.

For reasons known only to them — multiple editors at the newspaper to whom I reached out by email for clarification failed to respond — the newspaper that “enlightens, informs and engages with storytelling that is as dynamic and vibrant as our region” is standing by an entirely baseless assertion, made in a whopper of a story last weekend attempting to make sense of why Washington voters passed Initiative 638, which bars biological males from girls sports, from kindergarten through 12th grade:

“There is no serious scientific evidence that trans girls or women are better athletes than cisgender girls or women. A few transgender girls have won at the high school level, but across the US, just a few trans women have competed a elite college or professional levels, and none have dominated their sport.”

My old shop, the Seattle Times, actually published a piece claiming there’s “no serious scientific evidence” trans women are better athletes than biological women. It’s another example of a paper that has abandoned journalistic integrity for activism.

https://t.co/FhryeuQxlC

— Matt Calkins (@Matt_Calkins) November 10, 2026

Say what? The paragraph could only have been written by journalists who played with anatomically incorrect Ken dolls as children.

Meantime, back in the real world, there’s an abundance of evidence proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that biological boys at any age are physiologically equipped to perform better in sports than biological girls.

Let’s look at my favorite sport, swimming. Being a time-based sport, it contains a treasure trove of documented evidence to show that at every age the best boys are faster than the best girls. It’s contained in something called a record book.

The Miriam Sheehan example

A quick glance at the long-course national age-group records for boys and girls aged 10 and under shows that in nine of the 11 individual events, the boys’ mark is faster – by an average of 0.70 seconds in the 50-meter events, 0.90 in the 100s, 2.60 seconds in the 200s and 7 seconds in the 400-meter event.

The two outliers are the girls’ 50 butterfly and 100 breaststroke, both over a decade old. In the butterfly, Miriam Sheehan’s 2015 record is 0.43 seconds better than boys’ mark. In the 100 breaststroke, Meaghan Lynch in 2014 went 0.82 faster than the fastest-ever boy. Interestingly, by the time swimmers hit the next age-group level, 11-12, the boys are significantly faster in every event.

“Boys start growing then,” Sheehan, now a senior on the Arizona State women’s swim team, said Friday by telephone. “Sometimes girls can start growing a little earlier.”

Sheehan described her 50 butterfly time as a 10-year-old as “a big flex for me.” Asked what would happen now if she raced against the butterflyers on the men’s team, Sheehan said, “Oh, gosh, I definitely would be slower than the slowest boy.”

That’s how biology rolls. Sheehan’s career-best in the 50-meter butterfly of 26.56 is the 83^rd-fastest performance in history by a woman affiliated with a United States Swimming club. Four men are tied for the 82^nd-fastest performance at 23.59.

In researching this topic, I stumbled upon the X account of Matt Marshall, a Washington state representative who filleted The Seattle Times’ argument like a Michelin chef. He quoted The American College of Sports Medicine, which in 2023 released a consensus statement stating the obvious: males typically outperform females by 10 to 30 percent in endurance, strength, speed and power events, with the performance gap tied to male puberty.

The Seattle Times says there is “no serious scientific evidence” that trans girls or women are better athletes than girls and women.

I’m a WA licensed medical provider who specializes in sports medicine, so I’ll be blunt: that sentence is false, and the Times doesn’t name one study to back it up. No expert said it. The reporters just wrote it.

Here’s what they left out:
• The American College of Sports Medicine’s 2023 consensus statement: males typically outperform females by 10–30% in endurance, strength, speed and power events, and the gap is tied to male puberty.
• A 2021 British Journal of Sports Medicine review of 24 studies: strength, lean mass and muscle size stayed above female levels even after 36 months of hormone treatment.
• U.S. Air Force fitness records: after two years of treatment, trans women still ran the 1.5-mile test 12% faster than the female average.

And I-638 covers K-12 kids, most of whom aren’t on any hormones at all. Ask the Camas cross-country girls who walked off the course in October whether this advantage is “serious.”

More than 1.25 million Washingtonians, 56.6%, voted to protect girls’ sports. Now the Times is trying to talk them out of what they saw with their own eyes, while Seattle’s school board and mayor go to court to undo their vote.

I-638 takes effect Dec. 3. With a House supermajority that can now amend initiatives, I’ll fight any attempt to gut it, and I’ll keep correcting the record every time the Seattle Times won’t.

— Matt Marshall (@Matt4_Liberty) November 13, 2026

Marshall also quoted a 2021 British Journal of Sports Medicine review that concluded that strength, lean mass and muscle size stayed above female levels after three years of hormone treatment. He highlighted a US Air Force review of fitness records, which showed that after two years of hormone treatment, trans women were 12 percent faster than the female average in the timed one-and-a-half mile run.

Fundamental right of Title IX

As a child of Title IX, even a single biological male in female sports is infuriating because, at the end of the day, the athlete born with the penis is not really at the heart of the issue. It’s about the fundamental right granted to biological women by Title IX to have female-only sports.

If one biological boy is allowed to participate in a girls’ sport, essentially every boy is granted the right to do so while girls lose all their rights to participate in female-only competition. In addition to erasing biology, activists for biological boys in girls sports also seem hell-bent on erasing girls’ sports as we’ve known them since 1972.

Honestly, The Seattle Times was doing so much erasing in that paragraph, it could have been written on an Etch A Sketch magic screen. (If you’re old enough to know what sports were like for girls before Title IX, you understand the reference.)

To say that no biological men who identify as women have dominated a woman’s sport is to erase the achievements of Lia Thomas, who won the 500-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA championships and CeCe Telfer, who won the 400-meter hurdles at the 2019 NCAA Division II championships; AB Hernandez, who won multiple CIF State championships in track and field in 2025 and 2026 and Logan Mihailoff, a biological male whose performance at the Washington state regionals catapulted his Camas HS team to the state championships.

“AB” Hernandez finished the season ranked #4 in the entire nation compared to girls in the triple jump.

Compared to other boys, he was tied for #3,053 with 15 other boys.

— HeCheated.org (@hecheateddotorg) June 2, 2026

The list is long and growing, even as voters in Washington state and elsewhere have made it known that they do not endorse biological boys in girls’ sports. The U.S. Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into the Camas School District following allegations that the aforementioned male student shared intimate facilities with female athletes — in this case an ice bath in the hotel room shared by three of his female teammates — and sexually harassed girls during a school trip.

The feds just opened a Title IX investigation into Camas School District in Washington. Good.

Not only should this boy not be competing against them, he should not be bullying them.

Parents and girls on the Camas cross country team say a male runner walked into a hotel room three girls were sharing on a team trip, took an ice bath in their bathroom, and harassed them. And when the parents complained the district’s investigator asked the girls if they were “transphobic.”

— Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) November 12, 2026

The department’s Office for Civil Rights will determine if the school district violated the biological girls’ Title IX rights. Let’s get real. The serious empirical evidence is all on the side of the biological girls, no matter what The Seattle Times says.       

More from this network:
Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

Donate to GOTPeople.org