'Save Girls Sports' shirts blasted as 'transphobic' by SF Chronicle culture critic: 'Next MAGA hat?'

T-shirts defending girls’ sports were condemned in the San Francisco Chronicle as the "transphobic" contender for the next "MAGA hat."

SF Chronicle’s columnist and cultural critic Soleil Ho wrote an opinion piece lamenting the rise of what she calls "anti-trans activewear." The article, headlined, "Is this the next MAGA hat? Transphobic apparel is the new hotness," cited T-shirts reading "Save Girls’ Sports" and "It’s Common Sense. XX ≠ XY."

Two female cross-country athletes at a high school in Riverside, Calif., say they wore the shirts after a transgender athlete, who didn’t consistently attend practices or meet key varsity eligibility requirements, was placed on the varsity team, displacing one of them from her spot. Athletic department school officials allegedly forced the students to remove or conceal the shirts, claiming they created a "hostile" environment and comparing wearing these shirts to wearing a swastika in front of Jewish students. 

The girls sued their school district for allegedly impeding on their First Amendment rights and Title IX violations. 

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Ho, formerly a producer of the "Racist Sandwich" podcast, argued that the controversy is a "sad, empty spectacle that demeans us all," claiming that science says sex and gender are a spectrum.

"On a basic level, not all cis women even have XX chromosomes, so these shirts make no sense. What are we even arguing about?" the SF Chronicle opinion columnist wrote. "Besides terrorizing Riverside’s trans community, one clear outcome this dust-up seems to be having is a whole lot of T-shirt sales."

"All of this led me to wonder — who and what are profiting from generating more interest in this decidedly unfabulous anti-trans couture?" she asked.

Ho then called out former Levi’s executive turned XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey, among others, who she said "has been quite vocal about the Riverside case — and she happens to own a company whose sole purpose is to pump out anti-trans activewear and fund right-wing influencers." 

The columnist also argued that one should not interpret the popularity of shirts with similar messaging popping up across the internet as a "meaningful wellspring of transphobia," but rather, "They’re likely sold with the same level of political conviction as shirts, in the same online storefronts, proclaiming, ‘Who needs luck when you have beer?’ or ‘I’m with stupid.’"

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"Between the dropshippers, the vendors looking to use real human pain and humiliation as a brand opportunity, and anti-trans influencers whose hatred of trans people seems to constitute their whole personalities, I don’t know what’s sadder," Ho lamented.

The opinion article met swift mockery online, particularly from Sey herself.

"This article wins for the dumbest thing I've read this year so far," she wrote on X. "Though I'm ok with the headline. Yes truth is the new ‘hotness.’"

Sey went on to quote from the article, "Studies of human genetics show that sex, like gender, is a spectrum, and the cases of female athletes like Algerian boxer Imane Khelif show that there are many, many ways a woman can look."

"No -- studies do not show that sex is a spectrum," Sey reacted. "How do people get away with writing such blatant falsehoods in an actual newspaper? Yes there are many ways a woman 'can look.' That isn't what's at play here. In fact, we'd really like it if this ‘movement’ stopped telling more masculine girls that they are probably boys."

Fox News' Jamie Joseph contributed to this report.

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