The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a video for its “More Than a Game” campaign. “Supporting trans youth isn’t just about sports,” the video said. “It’s about freedom.” On its website, the ACLU further insisted that it is “in support of trans youth, their families, and their right to be themselves.”

Among other figures, the video features a handful of female athletes, including former Team USA women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe, former WNBA player Sue Bird, and WNBA player Brianna Turner. Critics have pointed out that these individuals “benefited immensely from women’s sports [and] now advocate for men in them.” Among the most outspoken is Jennifer Sey, a former USA National artistic gymnastics champion and the founder of XX-XY Athletics, an organization dedicated to promoting fairness and protecting women’s and girls’ sports and private spaces.

In an interview with Fox News, Sey directly countered the campaign’s framing of sports as a matter of “freedom” and self-expression. “Sports aren’t about any of those things,” she asserted. “Sports are about competition … and striving to get better. … [I]t’s about self-reliance and picking yourself up when you fall down.” She elaborated that sports are inherently not about freedom because “there [are] rules in sports. Three strikes and you’re out. There [are] rules across every single sport,” she repeated — suggesting that the notion that “sports aren’t about competition” is fundamentally illogical. Sey described the ad’s messaging as “twisting what competitive sports are about.” She added bluntly, “If you want to be all about self-expression, then go enter a talent contest and sing. That’s not what sports are all about.”

Sey went further, rejecting the idea of inclusion as the core purpose of athletics. “Sports are not about inclusion. Not everybody makes the team.” True success in sports, she explained, demands relentless effort, immense sacrifice, and a willingness to compete head-on. Drawing from her own elite experience, Sey shared, “I trained as a gymnast for 15 years. I trained up to 10 hours a day. I trained on broken bones. I was up driving to practice in the dark. You give up a lot. I gave up basically any high school social experience, you know, proms and all of it. You do it because you love the sport, and you do it because you derive a real sense of pride, and you do it because you’re competitive.”

This rigorous, merit-based reality of sports, Sey stressed, is precisely why allowing biological males to compete in women’s and girls’ categories represents such deep unfairness. “Male advantage is greater than performance-enhancing drugs,” she declared.

Sey reserved particular criticism for Rapinoe, one of the video’s key participants. “Megan Rapinoe has to be one of the most competitive women on the planet. She was on Olympic teams and World Cup teams. She’s one of the most famous soccer players ever.” For someone with that level of proven drive and achievement to now advocate for trans-identifying athletes to compete against hardworking girls and women leaves Sey deeply frustrated. “She’s full of it. It just makes me angry, and she’s pulling up the ladder behind her. And I’m sure she would not have tolerated a single player taking performance-enhancing drugs because that provides an unfair advantage.”

The ACLU’s “More Than a Game” video, paired with Sey’s impassioned rebuttal, arrive amid heightened national attention to the issue of trans-identifying athletes in women’s and girls’ sports. The debate has reached the highest levels of the judiciary: the Supreme Court. Just weeks ago, SCOTUS heard oral arguments in two pivotal cases — Little v. Hecox (challenging Idaho’s protection of female athletes) and West Virginia v. B.P.J. (challenging similar laws in West Virginia, with the ACLU representing the trans-identifying athlete involved in it).

Decisions in these cases are anticipated by early summer, and the rulings could either strengthen protections for fairness, safety, and sex-based categories in women’s and girls’ athletics or significantly undermine the ongoing efforts to preserve them. In fact, not long after arguments were heard, the Trump administration launched 19 new investigations into academic institutions for potentially violating Title IX — some of them centering around a high-profile case in California.

At Jurupa Valley High School in Riverside, a trans-identifying athlete competed in girls’ track and field. He won state gold in high jump and triple jump last year, as well as in volleyball, which ultimately led to multiple forfeits by opposing teams concerned about fairness and safety. Two former teammates, after what they described to be traumatizing experiences, filed a lawsuit against the district. They cited religious beliefs, privacy concerns in shared facilities, and personal backlash — including alleged death threats and social isolation after speaking out. The Department of Education responded not only by announcing a Title IX investigation into this school, but into its neighboring school (Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified) as well.

These probes are just a glimpse of the administration’s broader push, including a DOJ lawsuit against California, which has further amplified calls for restored fairness and highlighted the real-world impacts on female athletes who feel erased or unsafe.

And in this fight, the ACLU stands firm with trans-identifying athletes, even arguing that any rulings in favor of women and girls would be denying “freedom and safety to transgender youth.” The group framed challenges to trans-identifying athletes as “unconstitutional attacks” that “harm all women.” It concluded: “This is about more than school sports — trans children deserve the same equality, dignity, and opportunities as their peers. Together with a roster of sports stars, the ACLU is advocating for the freedom of all children to be able to live their authentic lives. This is More Than a Game.”

Meanwhile, in direct response to the ACLU, Sey asserted: “We have to push back. … We have [to] take the culture back. … It’s not fair. They’re asking these girls to erase themselves and to do it with a smile. They’re asking them to accept their erasure and to allow boys to take their medals and their team opportunities and to do so politely. Well, we’re not going to do it. … [E]very girl deserves fair competition.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Macy Petty, legislative strategist for Concerned Women for America, said that “Jen hit the nail on the head.” The ACLU’s campaign, she continued, “is about ‘more than a game,’ but frankly, it has nothing to do with the game. The ACLU isn’t concerned with sports or athletics; the answer there is clear. This is about forcing an extreme ideology on every sect of society, and they are using young children who play sports as pawns. They feature a few athletes, namely Megan Rapinoe, whose only skin in the game is making sure no other girl can reach the same level of athletic accomplishment she did.”

Petty concluded that “this kind of gaslighting isn’t going to work on real athletes who are well acquainted with hard work, resilience, and sacrifice.”