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This past week Team USA won gold in both the women’s and men’s ice hockey at the Winter Olympics, presenting Donald Trump with a golden opportunity. Instead of seizing the easy political points, he embraced his chance to ingratiate himself with the boys by inviting them to the State of the Union address. He followed up his offer of a military jet shuttle to Washington DC with a lament that he would have to also invite the women’s team. It was a bit that lit up the locker room with laughter.
The women’s gold medal had been a prime opportunity for Trump to live up to his stated commitment to “protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports”, a claim made last February when he sought to position himself as the figure saving women’s sports. Instead, he decided to make a joke at the expense of Olympic champions.
But we shouldn’t be surprised, because Trump and his allies were never interested in boosting women’s sports. The Trump administration’s purported commitment to female athletes occupies a rather narrow lane. It is a product of the meticulously structured and audience-tested rhetoric of the “Save Women’s Sports” movement, a coordinated and well-funded right-wing campaign that marries women’s sport with its perceived negation – the threat of trans participation. On the right, female athletes are only significant in the shadow of the transgender menace. They are little more than useful pawns for a political project aimed not at advancing women’s sport but purging transgender people from public life. Instead of concentrating on important matters such as funding for women’s sports or celebrating the achievements of outstanding athletes such as the US women’s hockey team, right-wing activists and advocates have used their political and social cache to advance a purely negative political project. Women’s empowerment through exclusion and nothing else.
This is precisely why a shining moment of women’s excellence in sport is so easily written off by the people, like Trump, who claim it to be a priority. The light of the culture war is a blinding guide that lacks a moral foundation. It offers scripts for speeches, media tours and congressional testimonies, but when a moment deviates, even slightly, from the established ideological framework people reveal their already existing convictions. Trump and the right more broadly have no actual interest in women’s sports, so when they actually come across them, as Trump did on Sunday, they revert to the dismal, chauvinistic gender politics that underpin so much of the American Right.
Trump’s comments are a stalwart example of how the right has successfully developed a discourse on women’s rights that is hollow but resonant because it makes almost no demands beyond toeing the proper line around a handful of cultural signifiers that have been imbued with undue significance. It should come as no surprise that the politics of spectacle have so thoroughly managed to weaponize sport but it remains a political and social travesty that a movement superficially branded around women’s empowerment has so thoroughly failed to raise women’s place in its chosen domain. If Trump wants to empower female athletes in the US, maybe he could address the income imbalance between the men’s and women’s ice hockey teams. Or look at why WNBA players are considering labor action so they can get paid fairly.
Men always come first in the pseudo-feminist political program of the right. Trump’s locker room showboating is less of a Freudian slip than a summation of the gender politics that have been center stage in the United States over the last seven years. An embrace of a firmly held belief that in many domains of life women are lesser. The logical conclusion of a women’s empowerment project that in rhetoric and in practice insists on keeping women in the shadow of men.
