In July, the Guardian reported that the NWSL had quietly allowed its policy on the participation of transgender players, established in 2021, to expire. The scrapped policy used the testosterone levels of transgender players to determine their eligibility to play in the league. In the same article, the Guardian revealed that this lack of an official policy was being eyed by conservative lobbying groups seeking to exclude transgender women from the league entirely.
What that story didn’t anticipate, however, was that a player from inside the league would take up the cause. In an Oct. 26 social media post that was republished the next day as an editorial by the New York Post, Angel City benchwarmer Elizabeth Eddy criticized the NWSL’s lack of gender eligibility policy. She suggested the league should adopt standards like requiring players to have ovaries, or to undergo genetic testing. She wrote that players who those policies would exclude should be forced to play in separate divisions and leagues. Eddy, who began her NWSL career in 2015, played a grand total of zero minutes in 2025 and 87 minutes total in the two years prior—the fact that the Post called her an “Angel City FC star” is a level of truth-bending that should cast serious doubt on the integrity of the editorial.
Anti-trans lobbyists could not have asked for a better gift than Eddy’s editorial. The movement dedicated to using sports as a vehicle for advancing transphobic laws and policies is one that relies on cycles of manufactured controversy. There are no known transgender players in the NWSL, which means that anti-trans bigots wait around and seize on things like Eddy’s editorial in order to force culture-war flare-ups on the rest of us. The ultimate goal is always to make this country a more hostile place for trans people, and to enforce a blinkered definition of femininity.
Racism, transphobia’s close cousin, is never far behind in situations like this, and the Post gave the game away with the photo it chose to pair with Eddy’s editorial. The article featured a photo of Orlando Pride striker Barbra Banda, a cisgender woman whose status as one of the best players in the world has made her a target for transphobes and racists. She was previously barred from participating in the Africa Cup of Nations for allegedly failing the type of bogus “gender verification” test that Eddy wants implemented in the NWSL. Her agent maintains that she never took such a test.
Banda later became the target of harasser-in-chief J.K. Rowling and her sad cronies after she won the BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year award in 2024. Last year, as Banda was facing the heat of the right-wing rage machine, the NWSL only reposted celebratory statements about her win and offered tepid admonishments of the bigotry to The Athletic. During an away game against Gotham in March of this year, a fan in the stands verbally abused Banda. His comments were understood to be transphobic and racist. After the incident, the league wrote that the “hateful language directed at Barbra Banda during this weekend’s match … is unacceptable and has no place in our league or our stadiums.”
Eddy’s screed did what it was designed to, which was to become a rallying point for some of the worst people in women’s sports and to aim a refreshed campaign of bigotry at players like Banda and Eddy’s own teammate, Prisca Chilufya, a Zambian international who has spoken about being intersex and joined Angel City recently after playing most of the season for Orlando. For days, the league and the NWSL Players Association did not make statements of their own accord, instead only responding to individual press requests, like those of The Athletic, with equivocating quotes that committed only to deferring to players’ wishes when considering new policies.
More than 40 hours after the editorial went up, Angel City finally made a statement. “In response to an op-ed published on October 27th, we want to make clear that while we respect the right for an individual to express their opinion, it does not reflect the opinion of an entire organization,” it reads. “Since our founding, Angel City has remained committed to equity, inclusion, and belonging. These principles will always guide how we show up for our team, fans, and community.”
It was a disappointing statement from a club that has a transgender flag in its social media bios and participated in Transgender Day of Visibility in March. This dissonance is a recurring problem in a league where corporate feminism is the flavor of choice, and on the team that embodies that girlboss energy the most. It is one thing to constantly tout inclusive values, but another to actually stand by them when push comes to shove.
On Oct. 30, Angel City captains Sarah Gorden and Angelina Anderson did what their bosses wouldn’t and disavowed their teammate’s editorial. Gorden spoke first:
That article does not speak for this team in this locker room. I’ve had a lot of convos with my teammates in the past few days, and they are hurt and they are harmed by the article, and also they are disgusted by some of the things that were said in the article. … We don’t agree with the things written for a plethora of reasons, but mostly the undertones come across as transphobic, and racist as well. The article calls for genetic testing on certain players and it has a photo of an African player as a headline, and that’s very harmful, and to me it’s inherently racist because to single out this community based on them looking or being different is absolutely a problem. As a mixed woman with a Black family, I’m devastated by the undertones of this article. … There are players in this league and in this locker room that are directly harmed by what was written in the article.
Anderson added, “When I think of LA and I think of Angel City, I think of a place that was founded upon inclusivity and love for all people. That’s what our locker room is, that’s what our staff is, that’s what our fan base is. Angel City is a place for everyone. It always will be. That’s how it was from the beginning. That’s how it always will be, period. … We’re doing our best in the locker room to preserve respect and belonging on this team.”
Only after their players, one of whom is the only black captain in the league, spoke up, did Angel City echo their message. “Our captains spoke with courage and clarity. No one in our community should be questioned, harassed or targeted because of their identity,” the club posted, accompanied by a video of the players' statements.
Many other figures from the league have spoken out against Eddy’s message. Multiple supporters’ groups, including those that support Angel City, have made clear statements against transphobia in the sport. Nikki Stanton, a former NWSL player who now plays in Canada's Northern Super League, posted a rebuttal, as did Sam Mewis’s The Women’s Game. Fans at NWSL and USWNT games have held flags and banners with anti-discriminatory messages. Haley Carter, general manager of Orlando, posted in support of Chilufya: “P, you’re exactly what makes our space special. Wherever your path takes you, whatever kit you wear, know this: we’ve got your back,” she wrote.
But no active NWSL players—or coaches, for that matter—have spoken up yet in solidarity with Gorden and Anderson. Perhaps they have remained silent in hopes that Eddy’s editorial will fizzle and fans and media will be able to turn their attention to the exciting soccer at hand, of which there is plenty. But Eddy attacked the integrity of the sport and the league outright, and as shown in the original Banda panic, silence is seen as a permission slip for a grotesque new front in the culture war to be established.
When there are only two active players who speak out against bigotry, with their own club hiding behind them, it’s no surprise that those players have been harassed online. Transphobic trolls have made their thoughts on Gorden known in replies to her most recent Twitter post, a repost of a missive from the official NWSL account. The league’s silence forced Gorden to be the face of the fight against transphobia and racism, and not even the bigoted replies on the NWSL’s actual account are motivation enough for the league to make a statement in support of her.
Gorden, Anderson, and Banda got an extra heaping of hate on Tuesday, when Jennifer Sey, a former gymnast who runs an organization dedicated to eradicating transgender women from women’s sports, went on Fox News to keep the furor going. Sey began her time on air by stating her delusional, unfounded belief that, “there are several males in the National Women’s Soccer League,” including Banda.
Sey said that Gorden and Anderson “smeared” Eddy. “They didn’t respond to the materiality of what she was saying, they just called her a racist,” she asserted. “It’s crazy, it has nothing to do with it.” Anti-trans bigotry is of course steeped in pseudoscientific notions of a femininity that is white and straight. There are plenty of deeply researched projects that explain how racism and eugenics have shaped the present-day freakout over this nonissue, like Rose Eleveth’s podcast Tested and Michael Waters’s book The Other Olympians. But Sey won’t engage with these resources, because she’s invested in being wrong; spewing lies is how she punishes athletes who don’t look exactly how she’d like them to.
Folks like Sey cloak their hate in language about wanting to protect women’s sports, but of course they can only conceive of leagues like the NWSL as battlegrounds on which to wage a manufactured war. Sey’s network of choice, Fox News, has itself played host to plenty of folks who clearly hate female soccer players and want them to suffer. As Lesley Ryder pointed out in the Guardian, the NWSL faces plenty of real problems, including an ongoing pattern of abuse—an issue Sey once cared about and made genuine change in her former sport of gymnastics. But now Sey has committed her life to loudly and intentionally harassing athletes in the name of their safety.
On Wednesday morning, the media cycle continued with Eddy herself making a Fox News appearance. “Reasonable people can disagree on this topic,” she said, “but there’s no need to go to bullying and name-calling, because it doesn’t set a good example for anyone.” She then proceeded to talk about her upcoming wedding, and the fact that she hopes her teammates will be there. In fact, she talked about her wedding (twice) more than she talked about the dangerous propaganda pushed on the same network just the day before (zero times). The casual cruelty with which a white, straight, cisgender woman like Eddy can maintain a veneer of civility while inciting violent rhetoric upon her marginalized colleagues is disturbing. Eddy also insisted that other players in the league want to speak out in support of her, but haven’t yet for fear of repercussions. “There’s a lot of fear involved because there’s a high, high cost for it,” she said, ignoring the fact that so far the only thing her own bigotry has earned her is more attention.
On Monday, Banda won yet another global award, this time being named to the FIFPRO Women’s World 11 for the second year in a row. Following Sey’s appearance on Fox, the NWSL and Pride both posted celebratory posts about Banda’s accomplishment, with the NWSL adding, “Any harassment or hateful attacks toward Barbra are unacceptable and have no place in our sport, league or our communities. We stand unequivocally with Barbra and with every NWSL player.”
On Tuesday night, the NWSL Player’s Association got around to releasing a statement:
We stand firmly with all our members - including, and especially, the African women who have been targeted by divisive and demeaning rhetoric. Every NWSL Player was assigned female at birth. Every NWSL Player has earned her place in the women’s game, and those whose eligibility is being questioned have already competed on the world’s biggest stages: the Olympics and the Women’s World Cup. Our league is better because they play in it.
The NWSL Players Association’s strength has always been its clarity of purpose: to confront the real threats to women in sport - underinvestment, lack of media attention, abuse, exploitation, and the constant pressure to look or behave a certain way. We know how to meet the challenges we face as a collective, and we reject any effort to undermine our shared strength.
This week should be about what’s happening on the field - the start of the NWSL Playoffs, as Orlando faces Seattle on Friday night at 8pm on Amazon Prime - not about those exploiting manufactured controversies for attention and financial gain. If you want to keep women’s sports safe, invest in the women who make them possible - their dignity, their rights, and their joy.
As heartening as it is to see the union stand up for its members and push back on bigotry, you can see in this statement the effectiveness of the traps that transphobic crusaders attempt to set during these skirmishes. It may be true that “every NWSL player was assigned female at birth,” but specifically mentioning that fact, and failing to explicitly name transphobia, raises serious questions about how welcoming the Players Association might ultimately be to any players who were not assigned female at birth.
The players union may have wanted to highlight the total lack of trans players in the NWSL to emphasize the unfounded nature of false claims about Banda’s gender. But transphobic attacks are harmful whether or not their targets are trans, and as Eddy and Sey have once again demonstrated, there is no controversy the right-wing grift machine cannot pull out of thin air. Now it is up to the league and its players to respond to these bigots. In Gorden’s remarks, she said “I feel very protective of my teammates and this community, who are also hurt by this, and that includes staff and everyone who is a supporter and a fan.” The NWSL and the Players Association will eventually have to decide who is worthy of their protection.
