Anti-trans activists have spent years insisting that trans women are taking women’s medals. Last week, one of their groups put out a new number, and the U.S. Department of Education repeated it without saying what it counted. The number came from a website that counts nearly every first place it can find, including middle school dual meets, age-group races for adults, and hundreds of events where the winner was the only person who entered.
At 2:31 p.m. Eastern on September 24, the Department’s official account on X shared a New York Post story with a message of its own: “NEW from @nypost: over 2,000 GOLD MEDALS stolen from women and girls across America. This needs to end.” Two minutes later, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, whom President Trump ordered last year to “facilitate the closure” of the department she runs, quoted the post and added, “It is unconscionable that even one gold medal meant for a woman was stolen by a man.”
The number came from the legislative arm of Concerned Women for America, a religious-right group dedicated, in its own words, to “promoting Biblical values” in public policy. On September 22, the day before a Senate hearing on trans athletes, the group announced that trans athletes had “stolen over 2,293 gold medals” from women and girls in the United States. Its press release credits the data to HeCheated, an anti-trans website that says it exists to “call out” the athletes it lists and describes itself as “an entirely volunteer effort.”
I’ve gone through HeCheated’s rules and the results it posts, and the number doesn’t measure what the Department of Education told its followers it measures. HeCheated counts first-place finishes at every level of sport. CWA took some share of them, using a rule it has never published, and called them stolen gold medals, which means nobody outside CWA can check the count. McMahon’s own post said even one medal would be too many, so they didn’t need 2,293 to make their argument. They needed it for the headline.
A “Gold Medal” Is Any First Place
HeCheated includes every level and age category of competition, “from grassroots to professional.” When critics pushed back on CWA’s number, the site’s account on X explained that a gold medal, as CWA used the term, means “a 1st place finish at any level of sport.” By the time the New York Post wrote it up, those first places had become “championship spots.”
CWA’s release claims that each of those medals pushed “each rightful champion down to second place.” HeCheated’s own About page undercuts that. The site says it exists alongside SheWon, an older database it says inspired it, because for “all team sports, single-elimination tournaments, and most awards,” it is “impossible to know who may have won.” HeCheated logs team-sport results anyway.
The release calls the athletes “trans-identifying males.” HeCheated’s category for them covers anyone it considers male who says they are a woman or “nonbinary,” so its lists sweep in nonbinary people too, and it decides who belongs on the list partly from “Visual Evidence,” meaning old photos and media coverage. (In other words, someone looked at pictures.) It also counts mixed events like mixed doubles when the athlete in question took the “female” spot on the team.
What the release never says is which of the site’s entries CWA counted. For its data, it links only to the site and to CWA’s July 2025 fact sheet, and neither one explains the filter. Even HeCheated’s account could only guess: “I believe the CWA report narrowed the scope to ’trans’ ID’d athletes only and only those from the USA.” Nobody outside CWA can tell you whether its 2,293 includes a mixed doubles match, a nonbinary athlete or a team sport.
Right-Wing Media Carried It to the Department of Education
CWA timed its release to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s September 23 hearing, “Standing Up for Women in Sports,” which I wrote about in my last piece. One witness, Kim Jones, a co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, submitted written testimony that cites two of HeCheated’s posts on X as sources, for claims about USA Ultimate and professional women’s soccer.
Right-wing media and Republican officials spent the next two days repeating the number. That evening, the New York Post reported that trans athletes had “bumped biological women out of championship spots 2,293 times since the mid-1980s,” though it did describe HeCheated as “a volunteer-run online database.” According to proprietary monitoring data from my firm, Pink and Blue Strategies, the Post’s post about the story on X was viewed about 2.7 million times, far more than any other post we tracked about the number that week.
About two hours after the Post’s story went up, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who in 2024 introduced a resolution to keep Sarah McBride out of the Capitol’s women’s restrooms, posted “2,293 gold medals. $501,498 in prize money,” along with an insult about trans people’s mental health that I’m not going to repeat. The next afternoon, the House Republican Study Committee told its followers that “new data” showed women and girls had lost out on nearly 2,300 gold medals. An hour and a half later, the Department of Education posted the number, and half an hour after that, Moms for Liberty used it to tell Sen. Dick Durbin that “this isn’t a ’non-issue.’”
CWA’s release ends by asking Congress to pass three bills, including the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. If Congress passes that bill, trans girls will be barred from girls’ teams at any school that takes federal money. As I wrote in 2024, this whole issue is a bit of a red herring, designed by right wing strategists as a way to paint trans people as “other” for their own cynical political gain. A number nobody can check serves that purpose as well as a real one.
This isn’t the first time. In August 2024, a United Nations Special Rapporteur, an independent expert who reports to the U.N., published a report repeating, “According to information received,” that more than 600 female athletes had lost more than 890 medals in 29 sports. A footnote credits submissions from outside groups, including the Women’s Liberation Front. Fox News turned that into “Biological females have lost nearly 900 medals to trans athletes: UN report,” and turned 890 medals into “nearly 900 biological females.”
On March 3, 2025, Senate Majority Leader John Thune read the paragraph on the Senate floor twice and called it “from a United Nations report.” The next month, s. baum reported for Erin in the Morning that the statistic “did not originate from a United Nations report” and that its real source was SheWon, the database HeCheated says “largely inspired” it. CWA’s first version of its own count came out that July and said 1,941. Each time, the people repeating a tally from an advocacy database gave it a more official name than the last: a U.N. report, then a study, and now a post from the Department of Education.
Where the Quick Rebuttals Went Wrong
I understand why so many of us reached for the fastest debunk we could find when this number was everywhere. Some of those rebuttals got the facts wrong, and HeCheated’s account answered them one by one.
The most widely shared rebuttal in my firm’s monitoring said CWA had counted every win by a trans woman in anything from darts to ultimate frisbee over 40 years. HeCheated does list ultimate frisbee results, but every darts result on the site comes from outside the United States. Other posts the account answered said the count included pageants and baking, or that it had been promoted as 2,000 Olympic gold medals. The site’s About page says non-athletic awards “are not included in the athletic totals,” and CWA never claimed Olympic medals.
When critics noted that only 94 of the medals came from the professional level, the account replied, “Yes that’s irrelevant.” To the self-described defenders of women’s sports behind this database, a Masters age-group race and a professional final count the same, and they’ll say so in public. I’d rather hold them to that answer than argue about darts.
The centrist version doesn’t work either. You’ll hear that the number might be inflated but is probably pointing in the right direction. Nobody outside CWA can reproduce it, so there’s no way to know which direction it points, and it stopped being a silly sports story when the Department of Education posted it. We don’t need to exaggerate what’s wrong with this number. The website’s own rules are enough.
The Reality: Masters Meets, Middle Schoolers and Races With One Entrant
HeCheated publishes its full results table on its website, and the Internet Archive saved a copy on September 25. I counted the entries that match CWA’s own description of its count, which is also the scope HeCheated’s account guessed: first-place finishes in the United States by athletes the site labels “trans-identified.” There are 3,798 of them, which is more than 2,293, and none of the simple filters I tried gets to CWA’s number. Dropping high school and middle school results leaves 2,865, and dropping Masters results leaves 2,758. CWA’s count is some part of this pool, chosen by a rule nobody outside CWA has seen.
More than a quarter of the pool, 1,040 entries, comes from Masters competition, where adults compete against others their own age. About a quarter, 933, comes from high school and middle school. Only 211, about one in 20, are professional, and 182 come from college sports. The pool does include real titles, with 147 entries from events the site files as national championships, but ten athletes account for 1,091 of the entries.
The pool also includes 393 entries marked “1st (of 1),” meaning the athlete was the only person in the event. I checked two of them against the events’ own results pages, and each had one entrant. I don’t know whether CWA counted any of them, but a site that files a field of one under first place isn’t counting champions who were pushed down to second.
By sport, track and field leads with 916 entries, followed by swimming with 439 and disc golf with 417. There are 132 from ultimate frisbee and 11 from oyster shucking. None come from the Olympic Games, and the site doesn’t even have an Olympic level. NCAA President Charlie Baker told the Senate in December 2024 that out of more than 500,000 college athletes, he knew of fewer than 10 who were trans. This list isn’t a record of trans women dominating anything. It’s a record of us showing up, at Masters meets, disc golf tournaments and middle school track meets, and of a website counting every time one of us finished first.
The Database Names Children
HeCheated’s About page says the site “seeks to call out these male athletes and expose the damage that they have each caused to women and girls in sports.” Its table lists 364 high school and middle school athletes in the United States by name, with a school or team on almost every entry and a grade on most, from sixth through twelfth. It labels 132 of them “trans-identified.” Those are our kids. The rest include boys it lists for playing on girls’ teams under rule exceptions.
When Erin in the Morning asked about the minors on the site in April 2025, the response it got was that “all results are already publicly available including those for minors.” I don’t think that answers the problem. A meet’s results page lists who won, while HeCheated’s list exists, in its own words, to “call out” the students on it. I’m not going to link to it or describe anyone on it.
Sports are about more than who gets a trophy. They teach you about teamwork, discipline and building healthy habits. HeCheated files middle schoolers’ first-place finishes under the word “cheated,” as if a trophy were the only thing a kid gets out of a season. At the hearing, Durbin warned against “categorically treating every trans athlete, no matter their age or level of competition, as a threat to women’s sports.” The site behind the Department of Education’s number lists children by name, school and grade.
McMahon said even one medal would be too many, and her department posted the number anyway. It got that number from a site whose About page states its rule this way: “Males are not ’female’ whether they are on an Olympic team or running a local 5k.”
If CWA wants the Department of Education to keep repeating its count, it should publish the results it counted. Until it does, I’d ask everyone else, including the reporters who wrote it up, to call 2,293 what it is: a number nobody outside CWA can check.
