Ted Cruz thinks trans athletes make fencing unfair, dangerous. Two Olympians disagree | Opinion
Lee Kiefer is a three-time Olympic gold medalist. At 30, she is still in her prime and widely considered the best at her sport. So, I had to ask the question burning inside the heart of every American:
Are trans women holding you back?
Kiefer may have been chatting with me on the phone, but if the top-ranked foil fencer in the world followed me to Capitol Hill and gave me a quick shank to my arteries, I wouldn’t blame her.
Fencing may be a niche sport, the kind that even its ardent American followers pay closest attention to every four years at the Summer Games. But since an unranked fencer named Stephanie Turner knelt in protest during a scheduled bout with Red Sullivan, her also-unranked transgender opponent in a low-stakes regional competition, Republicans have recast USA Fencing’s gender inclusivity as the latest example of an existential threat to women athletes.
But female athletes such as Kiefer, who, unlike the unranked and D-rated Turner, arguably have something to lose if a supposed onslaught of men blocked their title chances. And they have a wildly different narrative about their sport.
“It’s just, like, crazy,” Kiefer said. “All these politicians, they don’t care about sports, and they specifically don’t care about fencing.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has made this a wedge issue, accusing USA Fencing, the sport’s governing body, of “demeaning women and denying them a chance to succeed.”
“I do not think she gives a [expletive] about fencing,” Kiefer told me. “And I do not agree with her statement whatsoever.”
She says the same of the others, like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who called for a federal investigation into USA Fencing. Cruz told me that trans fencers made it “fundamentally unfair to force a girl to compete against a boy or to force a woman to compete against a man in sports.”
The GOP has made USA Fencing into a political priority, with Greene leading the charge over the future of the sport. Greene, chair of the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, or DOGE, subpoenaed USA Fencing board chair Damien Lehfeldt to testify.
During the hearing, Greene and other Republicans accused Lehfeldt of endangering the women in USA Fencing’s purview, demanding he resign from his role. Rep. Nancy Mace — the South Carolina Republican who once tweeted 326 times in 72 hours about trans women using women’s bathrooms — accused Lehfeldt of being a “groomer,” a term referring to those who manipulate children into falsely consenting to sexual abuse. Flower Mound’s Brandon Gill cut multiple videos of his exchange with Lehfeldt, saying the board chair was “hell-bent on destroying women’s sports.”
Though Ken Paxton was not present at the hearing, Turner’s match with Sullivan was in Maryland, and neither fencer resides in Texas, the Texas attorney general inserted himself in the national crusade by launching a state investigation into USA Fencing, vowing to “never back down from defending the integrity of women’s sports.”
If men (or “men”) were destroying women’s sports, fencing is the worst possible example. Lehfeldt told Congress that through USA Fencing’s mixed bouts, men competing with women comprise a “plurality” of its supervised competition. Lehfeldt also noted that one week before Turner’s protest, she competed in a mixed gender tournament, defeating four opponents bearing the dreaded and deadly XY chromosome.
The absolute normalcy of women and men — err, “biological males” — fencing each other was one of my first observations upon encountering the sport. While profiling 2021 Olympian Curtis McDowald for GQ, I watched the tall, lanky epeéist mow down Northwestern University’s Pauline Hamilton, treating a late-night sparring match with the same intensity as a gold medal match in Tokyo.
Some studies indicate differences in physical capacity between cisgender and transgender women — even after undergoing hormone therapy. But until Cruz, Gill, Greene and other Republicans campaigned against trans inclusion, and Turner successfully got them to pivot their gaze in her direction, this culture war was not USA Fencing’s problem.
But Turner twisted her anxieties and mediocrities into a pogrom, a charge she resents. In her opening statement to Congress, she dismissed the notion she should seek to improve instead of complain, calling the suggestion “unbelievably demeaning to female fencers.” She failed to mention that some of those “female fencers” are not only adamant about transgender inclusion, but they also credit their careers to fencing against anybody who wanted that smoke.
“When I was coaching and fencing there, typically I’d beat [Turner] significantly,” said Ambika Singh, a former Division I champ at Princeton University who told me she used to coach at the same Philadelphia gym where Turner trained. According to Singh, Turner inquired how to get to her level. “I fenced mainly with men growing up, and that’s how I got faster and stronger,” she recalled telling Turner, then advised her to “fence guys [and] fence girls.” (Turner did not respond to my request for comment in time for publication.)
“I truly, from the bottom of my heart, don’t think that I would have ever made an Olympic team had I not been training with men,” said Monica Aksamit, a 2016 bronze medalist in saber fencing. Aksamit said she started training with grown men at 15 and attributes much of her growth to Olympians like Keeth Smart and Ivan Lee “teaching me all the things that I know.” She says the only injuries she’s ever sustained from fencing were, believe it or not, from other cisgender women.
“When I was younger, I would fence a lot of regional mixed tournaments,” Kiefer said. “I thought that was a great environment for me to become a better competitor.” Though Kiefer is a lithe 5’4” — visually imposing on the fencing strip and perhaps nowhere else — she told me that she has never been injured competing against men.
Kiefer and Aksamit have proved, definitively, that they are among the best Americans to ever fence. But instead of turning to experts, congressional Republicans demand we treat Turner like the Rosa Parks of a sport they don’t understand.
If Republicans approached fencing with enough curiosity to survey women who actually accomplished something, we could have had an interesting and nuanced discussion about fairness. Maybe we could have heard Congress discuss how to protect Title IX — the landmark civil-rights law prohibiting sex discrimination in education (including sports) — a policy that Cruz told me he valued for expanding “opportunity for millions of girls and women.”
The Republicans on the DOGE subcommittee failed to mention that the Trump administration has defunded the federal agency tasked with ensuring girls are treated fairly in sports.
For now, Kiefer’s message to Cruz, Greene and the rest of the party is simple:
“I don’t need their help,” Kiefer said. “They should put their energy elsewhere.”
So, I ask again — if not trans people, who is holding women’s sports back?
This story was originally published May 17, 2025 at 5:25 AM with the headline "Ted Cruz thinks trans athletes make fencing unfair, dangerous. Two Olympians disagree | Opinion."
