The front of the Dal Ward Athletic Center on the University of Colorado Boulder’s campus on April 9, 2025. (Camryn Montgomery/CU Independent)
On April 9, the University of Colorado Boulder’s Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization partnered with the Steamboat Institute, a conservative nonprofit organization, to host a debate from their Campus Liberty Tour. The debate focused on the issue of transgender athletes in women’s sports.
The Steamboat Institute’s Campus Liberty Tour began in 2018. Hadley Heath Manning, the executive vice president, said the goal is “to change the culture on college campuses, to make the environment more open to dialogue, free expression and free exchange of ideas from all perspectives.”
The debate moderator, Kaylee McGhee White, is the editor-in-chief of Independent Women’s Features and the 2023 recipient of the Steamboat Institute’s Tony Blankley Fellowship.
While the Campus Liberty Tour aims to promote civil discourse, the Steamboat Institute promotes “America’s first principles and inspires active involvement in the defense of liberty.”
Kevin Bolling, the executive director of the Secular Student Alliance, argued the affirmative: transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Bolling said that while he is not transgender, he is “happy to be in allyship with a community that needs a lot of help at the moment.”
Bolling has worked with nonprofit organizations for over 20 years and closely works with transgender and LGBTQ+ students in high schools and college SSA chapters across the United States.
“The real threat that we face is not transgender athletes in sports, it’s the broader threat to freedom of equality,” Bolling said. “Trans people, like other groups and issues in the past, are being used by those with a more insidious agenda to stoke fear and distraction, and really, it’s a rallying call to increase voter turnout for political gain.”
Jennifer Sey, the founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics and a former NCAA Champion Gymnast, argued the debate’s negative: transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports. XX-XY Athletics says that their mission is to “protect women’s sports and spaces.”
Sey also launched the XX-XY Athletics Fund to financially support female athletes and “qualified 501c3s standing up for women’s sports” who speak out against transgender athletes competing in women’s sports.
“I’m not seeking to ban anyone from sport, but sport, by its very nature, is exclusive. It is not inclusive,” Sey said. Bolling, in contrast, frequently emphasized the need for inclusion.
Throughout the debate, Sey emphasized the benefits women gain from sporting competition, discussed biological differences between men and women and highlighted that many sports are already designed around these differences to ensure fairness – a major theme of the debate.
Ash Neufeldt, the advocacy and education manager at Rocky Mountain Equality, expressed concern over possible negative outcomes that the debate has on transgender people and for public discourse, given the current political climate.
“I, as a trans woman, when I think about this fairness, I think about the rebuttal system. This is my everyday life,” Neufeldt said.
The “rebuttal system” is explored in feminist writer and scholar Sarah Ahmed’s 2016 article, “An Affinity of Hammers.” Ahmed argues that, as trans people are forced into providing evidence for their existence, their identity is chipped away and “dialogue and debate become techniques of elimination.”
“When an existence is understood as needing evidence, then a rebuttal is directed not only against evidence but against an existence,” writes Ahmed.
While both debaters agreed that there is a lack of research and evidence regarding transgender athletes and differences between sexes, Neufeldt emphasized the unique perspectives of transwomen, and the need for these conversations to be held within the trans community.
As the debate concluded, one message remained clear: discussions about transgender athletes are about real lives and identities. For many in the trans community, the rhetoric surrounding these events extends into their lived experiences and identity.
“We are not thought experiments. We’re living, breathing people,” Neufeldt said.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Camryn Montgomery at Camryn.montgomery@colorado.edu
