A Maine state representative made a confusing claim about transgender athletes and men competing in women's sports.
The state has had a tumultuous 2025 during President Donald Trump's second term, as state representatives have battled the president over his executive order to keep men out of women's sports.
Although Maine's university system eventually fell in line with the order to protect its federal funding, irreversible damage had already been done by letting boys compete in girls' sports, particularly in February, when a boy won a girls' pole vaulting competition.
'It takes a lot of guts for someone to say, "I'm not going to accept male privilege."'
Democratic state Rep. Rafael Macias from Maine's District 51 appeared on the "Muddy Waters Podcast" to discuss that very incident. Macias started by claiming that fellow state Rep. Laurel Libby (R) had "doxxed a young man" who simply "wanted to play sports" when she posted a picture of the transgender athlete competing against boys first, then girls.
It was soon after when Macias made a bizarre claim about how men competing in women's sports actually makes women better.
"It's an individual sport, so if you're worried about who you're competing [against], particularly if they're stronger and they can jump higher, I think that makes everybody in the field better, you know, jumping higher, running faster," he claimed.
Macias then cited the fact that while many men cannot complete a "four-minute mile," there are female athletes who can come close.
"They can run faster than me. They can run faster than you and probably most men that I know who can't run the four-minute mile," Macias claimed. "There are women that are doing that. So, you know, you can compare men and female and say men are stronger, men can jump higher, run faster, longer, all that good stuff, and that women shouldn't play in men's sports."
Confusingly, Macias then stated that women not being allowed in men's sports is "the whole reason behind Title IX."
RELATED: University of Maine System falls in line with Trump's prohibition on men in women's sports
Host Chuck Ellis immediately retorted, "Let's be clear about a couple things. Nobody on our side in any way is saying that we have any problem with women trying to compete in men's sports. That's not — nobody's saying that at all," he began. "The reason for Title IX wasn't that people didn't want to allow women to compete in male sports but that they couldn't."
Ellis noted the obvious truth that "men are stronger" and "faster" than women on average, and national stories of transgender athletes breaking women's records have highlighted this.
Macias himself admitted in the interview that the pole vaulting athlete in question came in first when competing as a girl, but when the height he jumped against females is compared to the male athletes' results, his height would have landed him in 10th place against boys, as Blaze News previously reported.
Still, Macias expressed that he had an issue with Rep. Libby posting a photo of the teen, who was in 10th grade at the time.
"She posted a picture of him when he was competing with boys and then a picture of her when she was competing with girls. And I'm using the pronouns out of respect for this person," Macias explained. "It takes a lot of guts for someone to say, 'I'm not going to accept male privilege.' And I'm using that term 'male privilege.'"
Macias and the host briefly debated what male privilege is, and Macias cited the example of a woman feeling afraid while walking through a parking lot at night while a man may not feel afraid.
Ellis replied that this was simply more evidence that men are more likely to be stronger or larger and, as such, less likely to be afraid in a similar situation.
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On Sunday, the second Trump administration turned six months old.
President Trump’s first four years in the White House were already a big success, which is why I fought so hard to bring him back for a second go-round. Yet I think Trump’s second has already surpassed it in just one-eighth the time.
The administration hasn’t just said the right things. It has done the right things.
Completely and instantly securing the U.S.-Mexico border after the four-year Joe Biden invasion is one of the most important and impressive accomplishments in American presidential history. TV news said the president’s tough trade talk would crash the economy in days; instead, the stock market hit record highs this very week, and blue-collar wages are rising faster than they have in nearly 60 years.
Under any other recent president, I am convinced the June Iran crisis would have ballooned into a full regime-change war, with far more money spent and many American lives lost. But under President Trump’s measured hand, America managed to strike a crippling blow to Iran’s nuclear program while suffering zero casualties and even bringing a ceasefire between Iran and Israel as part of the bargain.
Yet when I think about the events of the past six months, it’s not the big wins I think about the most — it’s the small ones. They’re the triumphs that don’t necessarily grab the largest headlines, but they show that this administration really is committed to systematically throwing out the suffocating groupthink and stagnation that have ruled in D.C. for decades.
Time and time again, this administration has been doing things that past Republicans could and should have done, yet inexplicably never did. For instance, back in 1981, the outgoing Jimmy Carter administration engineered a court ruling that abolished the federal government’s hugely successful hiring aptitude test because it was (you already knew this was coming) racist. Presidents Reagan, Bush 41, or Bush 43 could have fought to restore merit-based hiring. Yet they never did. Subsequently, over 45 years, our government went rotten as diversity, equity, and inclusion replaced merit.
Now, this administration is finally acting to bring back merit in government. Imagine that! From Harvard to Hennepin County, this administration has begun toppling the race- and sex-based discrimination that had taken root all over America in flagrant defiance of both our Constitution and historic American values. It is purging DEI commissars from federal agencies, imposing uniform standards on the military, and sending out warnings to the private sector as well. This isn’t superficial — it’s the destruction in detail of a rotten, anti-American ideology.
It would have been easy for Donald Trump to make a few speeches and sign a couple symbolic orders about “protecting women’s sports” — past Republican administrations would have settled for exactly that. But this administration has genuinely done the work to protect American children from the transgender mania, one of the great evils of our time.
Across America, health care providers are ending their involvement in child mutilation and similar treatments because of the dramatic increase in regulatory hostility from this administration. Children’s National Hospital in D.C., Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Stanford Medicine, and others have stopped providing surgeries or puberty blockers to minors in the face of this administration.
Where it matters most, the Trump administration has stepped up to save children from predators calling themselves “doctors.”
For my entire life, Republicans loved to make a show of complaining about America sending billions in aid to foreign countries. But they never stopped it — until Trump. He actually delivered by cutting USAID down to size and keeping more of America’s money in America. The same goes for defunding NPR, PBS, and Planned Parenthood: long years of talk, until the Trump administration fought to make it actually happen.
RELATED: In 6 months, Donald Trump has done the impossible
It was obvious for almost 20 years that the TSA’s policy requiring passengers to remove their shoes before boarding a flight was a pointless bit of security theater, yet Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden all kept the policy in place anyway. This administration finally got rid of it.
While the Biden administration treated the cryptocurrency industry as a borderline criminal enterprise, Trump signed the GENIUS Act, which positions America to lead this innovative industry.
The administration hasn’t just said the right things. It has done the right things, in detail, to ensure its promises are delivered at the micro level. The administration even made showerheads great again. And it’s that commitment to the small things and common sense that will pay dividends over the next three and a half years. Because an administration that cares about the details of governing will make all of America great too.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on RealClearPolitics.
Donald Trump, now in his second term, has executed a political masterstroke — cornering Democrats into the unpopular side of nearly every 80/20 issue. From transgender athletes in women’s sports and the DOGE to the airstrike on Iran’s nuclear sites, he’s boxed them in. But Trump isn’t the Democrats’ biggest threat. Their worst enemy is themselves — and the radical candidates they continue to put forward.
The truth is that the left has always flirted with the absurd. Leftists rant that the rich must “pay their fair share,” but can’t define what “fair” means. They champion equity over equality and preach that government handouts — not markets — will lift the poor and working class. This worldview teeters between naivete and madness.
The Democratic Party isn’t just drifting — it’s accelerating toward the cliff. And no one pushed the Democrats. They drove themselves.
Then came 2018, when “the Squad” stormed Congress and dragged the party from the edge of absurdity into full-blown lunacy.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — raised in a comfortable New York suburb — rebranded herself as “Alex from the block” in the Bronx. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota dismissed 9/11 as “some people did something” and still won a seat in Congress. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan was censured — by both parties — for chanting “from the river to the sea” after Hamas massacred Jews on Oct. 7, 2023. In 2020, Jamaal Bowman of New York joined their ranks and was later caught on video pulling a Capitol fire alarm to delay a budget vote. His excuse? He thought it would “unlock a door.”
Some Squad members have lost re-election bids, but the core group marches on, peddling the Green New Deal, defunding police, and attending Fighting Oligarchy rallies via private jet.
Meanwhile, Soros-backed prosecutors decriminalize shoplifting, eliminate cash bail, and release repeat offenders. These are not policy missteps — they are self-inflicted wounds. And Republicans couldn’t ask for better material.
Enter Zohran Mamdani — the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist running for New York City mayor. His platform makes Bernie Sanders look centrist.
Mamdani wants to defund police, make New York a sanctuary city, and jack up the minimum wage to $30 an hour. He calls for rent freezes, free buses, and city-run grocery stores — as if the Soviet model didn’t already prove that government-run markets lead to scarcity and dysfunction.
RELATED: Vance on Mamdani: ‘Who the hell does he think that he is?’
Even more alarming is his plan to “shift the tax burden” from homeowners in the outer boroughs to “richer and whiter neighborhoods.” That’s not policy — that’s race-based redistribution.
And his foreign policy? Mamdani wants to “globalize the intifada.” That’s a genocidal rallying cry, and New York’s Jewish community should treat it like the five-alarm fire it is.
So can the Democrats still correct course? Can the party of JFK and FDR find its footing again?
One glimmer of sanity remains: Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. Despite his hoodie-and-shorts aesthetic, to say nothing of the stroke that nearly killed him in 2022, he has emerged as a lonely voice of reason. He has called out the party’s excesses. But will anyone listen? Or will the Democrats toss him aside for failing the purity test?
The Democratic Party isn’t just drifting — it’s accelerating toward the cliff. And no one pushed the Democrats. They drove themselves.
On July 1, the University of Pennsylvania was forced to apologize and retract awards from transgender swimmer Lia (Will) Thomas after a federal investigation found the school violated Title IX by allowing him to compete on the women's team. Awards and titles were restored to their proper female competitors approximately three years after Thomas stole them. On top of that, UPenn banned transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports altogether.
Rest assured, “UPenn is not sincere in their apologies,” says Liz Wheeler, BlazeTV host of “The Liz Wheeler Show.” “They're just trying not to have their federal dollars taken away from them by President Trump.”
To get the insider scoop on what it was like to train with and compete against Thomas, Liz invites former UPenn swimmer Paula Scanlan to the show.
Paula recalls the first time she saw Will Thomas, who was a swimmer on UPenn’s men’s swim team before he decided he was a girl. She was a sophomore and only 19 years old when one day, a meeting was called and Thomas was brought before the team.
“He just looks at us and goes, ‘Hey guys, just wanted to let you know I'm transgender; I'll be joining your team next season. Please refer to me now with she/her pronouns, and I'll let you guys know soon what I'm going to rename myself to, but for now, you can keep calling me Will,”’ she says. “I actually thought this was a prank. … I thought [my coach] was just going to say, ‘Gotcha!”’
She quickly found out that it wasn’t a prank when anyone who did not refer to Thomas using female pronouns was labeled “hateful and transphobic.” Many of the female swimmers, however, welcomed Thomas with open arms. “I saw my teammates clapping. They were like, ‘We're so proud of you. We're so excited for you being your authentic self. Thank you for sharing this with us,”’ Paula recalls.
Confused, she looked up the NCAA handbook and sure enough found the “transgender inclusion handbook,” which states that “if a man wants to join a women's swim team, he just has to suppress his testosterone for one year [and] he’s good to go in any women's sport."
The season kicked off, and Paula and her teammates were forced not only to practice with and compete with Thomas, they were also forced to share a locker room with him. “We were dressing in the locker room with him 18 times per week,” she says, noting that swimming is not like other sports in that being naked to change in and out of swimsuits is a requirement.
“That aspect was really, really hard,” she says.
Some teammates raised concerns about sharing a locker room with Thomas, but these complaints were always filed “privately” to avoid being seen as bigoted. Publicly, most swimmers, even the ones who secretly begged coaches not to room them with Thomas at travel meets, cheered that UPenn was “progressing transgender rights.”
Paula, however, was “open” about her opposition to Thomas competing on the women’s team. She even conducted some “anonymous interviews” with media outlets to get the word out about the injustice the UPenn women’s team was experiencing.
But when word got out on the team that she was the one behind these secret interviews, Paula was ambushed by her progressive teammates. One of them sent her the following text message:
— (@)
“Now I think [the message] is funny,” says Paula, but “in the moment, I felt really alone and isolated in dealing with this.”
In the days following UPenn’s apology and restoration of awards to the proper winners, Paula hasn’t heard from many of her teammates. “Most of them agree with me. They just don't really feel comfortable saying that or sharing that,” which “shows why this was something that happened because if no one was willing to speak up, even though we all agreed, that's how the crazies were able to put in these nasty, wild policies.”
To hear more details of Paula’s story and the role she played in advocating for women’s rights, watch the video above.
To enjoy more of Liz’s based commentary, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
When recently asked about her stance on allowing students to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their “chosen identity” instead of their biological sex, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger refused to condemn such policies. Late last month, the U.S. Department of Education found five counties in Virginia to be in violation of Title IX […]
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