Sarah Sanders is running for a second term as governor of Arkansas, and her campaign is spending on an ad about transgender athletes. It opens with a bearded, older, heavyset man in a women's sports uniform trying to join a team of young female athletes.
Then Sanders makes two claims. As journalism professor Rich Shumate describes the ad in an Arkansas Times column, she says she refused to "comply" when the Biden administration ordered Arkansas to let transgender athletes compete in girls' and women's sports. And she says she "won the fight to keep men out of women's sports."
Neither holds up.
There was no Biden order on sports
In April 2024, the Biden administration finalized new Title IX rules protecting students from discrimination, including LGBTQ students. Those rules did not address transgender athletes at all. A separate proposal about sports was stalled, and in December 2024 the Education Department withdrew it without ever making it final.
So the order Sanders says she stood up to never existed.
The sports ban came before she did
Arkansas already had a law keeping transgender girls and women out of girls' and women's school and college sports. Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed the "Fairness in Women's Sports Act" on March 25, 2021, almost two years before Sanders took office in January 2023. There was no fight left for her to win.
What Sanders did sign was a 2023 law restricting which bathrooms and locker rooms transgender students can use in public schools, with fines of at least $1,000 for teachers and principals who don't enforce it. The sports ban wasn't hers.
According to Shumate's column, there's also no documented case of a transgender girl or woman competing in Arkansas school sports. The Arkansas Activities Association doesn't even track it.
A cartoon, not a person
The ad's picture of a transgender athlete is a grown man with a beard. That isn't what a transgender girl or young woman looks like, and the ad isn't trying to show one.
Shumate notes Sanders is already almost sure to win in November. She's running the ad anyway, about a problem nobody in Arkansas has documented.
Meanwhile, the real problems
Arkansas has real problems a governor could fight. We've reported on a statewide survey finding 37% of Arkansans don't have enough food, while Sanders praised Trump's budget bill for moving welfare recipients "off the path to dependency."
What the record shows
Sarah Sanders's reelection ad says she refused to "comply" with a Biden administration order to let transgender athletes play girls' and women's sports, and that she "won the fight" to keep them out. Biden's 2024 Title IX rule didn't cover sports, and the sports proposal was withdrawn before it ever took effect. Arkansas's ban on transgender athletes was signed by Asa Hutchinson in 2021, nearly two years before Sanders became governor.
Source
Come for the hate, stay for the baloney: Sarah Sanders' anti-trans TV ad offends on many levels — Arkansas Times (commentary). Image: screenshot of the Sanders campaign ad, via Arkansas Times.
