Merkley is Wrong About Men Competing Against Women in Sports

For over fifty years, Title IX has stood as one of America’s greatest civil-rights achievements: it guaranteed women and girls a fair playing field by creating sex-segregated sports. That separation wasn’t arbitrary—it was the only way to give females a realistic chance to compete, win, and earn scholarships when biology otherwise stacks the deck overwhelmingly in favor of males.

Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley now wants to dismantle that hard-won fairness. He insists that biological males who identify as transgender must be allowed to compete in women’s and girls’ sports, dismissing mountains of evidence that male puberty confers irreversible advantages in muscle mass, bone density, heart size, lung capacity, and fast-twitch fiber—advantages that even years of hormone suppression do not erase.

Merkley waves away broken records, crushed dreams, and locker-room privacy violations as acceptable collateral damage in the name of “inclusion.” In reality, his policy sacrifices the rights and safety of millions of female athletes to accommodate a vanishingly small number of transgender-identifying males.

Republican challenger Russ McAlmond refuses to let that happen. He understands that genuine equality and authentic human rights for women are protected only when sports remain separated by biological sex—the very principle Title IX was written to defend. McAlmond points out the obvious: when males compete as females, women’s records vanish overnight, podium spots disappear, and scholarships evaporate.

That is not compassion; it is the opposite of fairness.The American people, the scientific community, and now the governing bodies of sport have overwhelmingly rejected Merkley’s position:February 2025:

President Trump signs an Executive Order banning transgender females from women’s sports and withholding federal funds from any school or program that refuses to comply. 

The NCAA (Feb 2025) and NAIA (2024) immediately bar athletes assigned male at birth from women’s competition. 

25 states have enacted full bans on males in girls’ school sports—Oregon, under Merkley’s party’s control, remains one of the holdouts. 

The International Olympic Committee and nearly every major Olympic federation are moving toward blanket bans on biological males in elite women’s events. 

A January 2025 New York Times/Ipsos poll finds 79% of Americans believe transgender-identifying males should not compete in women’s sports. 
Female athletes across the country are forfeiting matches rather than legitimize the injustice—most notably the 2024 boycotts of San Jose State’s volleyball team.

Russ McAlmond is clear: the rights of 99.9% of female athletes cannot be held hostage by the wishes of a tiny fraction of a percent. True compassion does not require girls to step aside so boys can take their places, their medals, and their opportunities.

Real equality is not achieved by pretending biology doesn’t exist—it is secured by respecting it.

This November, Oregonians have a choice: stand with Jeff Merkley and watch women’s sports be rolled back to pre-Title IX days, or stand with Russ McAlmond and defend the fairness, safety, and human rights of every daughter, sister, and granddaughter who simply wants to compete on a level playing field.

The evidence, the public, and justice itself are all on the side of keeping men out of women’s sports.