By usual Olympic standards, Elis Lundholm was never supposed to be an Olympic story.

 

A 25th-place finish in women’s moguls at the 2026 Winter Games is unremarkable; Lundholm did not break into the semifinals, win a medal, or rewrite world records. Yet the Swedish skier became a headline story when an NBC News commentator misgendered him on the live broadcast, referring to the first openly trans man at the Winter Olympics as “she,” even though his pronouns and gender identity had been communicated in advance. In response to public criticism, NBC issued an apology and deleted the replay from the network’s Olympic archive, framing the misgendering as an unfortunate but correctable mistake, something that could simply be edited out of existence.

 

Erasing the footage protects the broadcast’s reputation (a gesture that echoes earlier mishandling of nonbinary skateboarder Alana Smith), but it also erases an already fragile record of transmasculine athletes on the Olympic stage. Lundholm’s participation itself, however, was never framed as dangerous. Because he skis in the women’s division and has not begun masculinizing hormone therapy, there was little public debate about whether his body posed an unfair threat to cisgender women. His presence was awkward enough to trip the commentator’s tongue, but not powerful enough to “trouble” the category of women. He is celebrated as a “first” out trans man Olympian while remaining, competitively and discursively, non-threatening.

 

Hergie Bacyadan’s story follows a similar arc at the latest Summer Olympics. The Filipino boxer’s participation in the women’s middleweight division at the Paris Games likewise ended without a medal and outside the top 16; like Lundholm, he did not “upset” the women’s sports. The controversy that surfaced around Bacyadan centered instead on language and representation: a mistranslated interview casting him as hostile to intersex athletes in women’s events, followed by his public affirmation of solidarity with Imane Khalif and Lin Yu-ting, two female boxers whose rights to compete as “women” have been aggressively questioned. Throughout the controversy, Bacyadan repeatedly insists that he has never taken testosterone and never will, a stance that deflects cisgender women’s critiques that his participation “threatens” the integrity of women’s boxing, and reassures anxious audience that no “male” advantage is at play in his case.

 

When we compare the media discourses around these two “first” trans men at the Olympics—neither medalists nor close to winning—it becomes clear that the central concern of contemporary sports regulation is not simply “biology.” Trans men like Lundholm and Bacyadan are granted a relatively visible and less hostile place in women’s divisions precisely because they are cast as competitively “harmless”: their assigned-female-at-birth physiology and refusal or postponement of hormone therapy make them legible to the public and to other elite cisgender athletes as “safe” women’s bodies for the purpose of regulation, even as their presence is hailed as barrier-breaking in Olympic history.

 

The example of Lundholm and Bacyadan suggests a potential pathway for transmasculine athletes who either cannot or do not want to access testosterone. This pathway, however, normalizes a conditional bargain in which transmasculine athletes are plausible only so long as they embody the “right” biology for women’s sports, that is, no testosterone, assigned female at birth, and minimal visible “masculinization.” While their participation “opens many doors to athletes of trans experience being out without medical intervention,” their “safe” presence in women’s divisions can function as a hinge that both reveals and stabilizes bio-essentialist underpinnings of the category “women” in sports, showing that what is being protected is less a vulnerable group of women athletes than the need to keep “male” bodies—trans women’s bodies and women deemed “too male”—out of women’s events at all costs.

 

This is not, however, an argument for blaming transmasculine athletes for choosing or feeling compelled to compete in women’s divisions. Rather, these cases create an opening to interrogate the masculinist sporting structures that make these choices thinkable and legible in the first place. As more assigned-female-at-birth transmasculine and nonbinary athletes enter elite women’s sports, their presence is likely to be taken up by anti-trans rhetoric in new ways. Say, what happens when more transmasculine and nonbinary athletes such as Nikki Hiltz begin to dominate women’s events even without testosterone?

 

In Hiltz’s case, their success has already prompted opponents to falsely reclassify them as “biologically male” the moment they begin to dominate, revealing how anti-trans discourse can simply redraw the boundary of “male” whenever an assigned-female-at-birth athlete exceeds expectations. Such rhetoric is far from protecting “women”: instead, it weaponizes the category of women to police bodies that trouble the presumed alignment of sex, gender, and athletic performance.

 

The challenge, then, is not only to defend trans and nonbinary athletes against bad-faith attacks, but to refuse the terms of a debate that treats “male advantage” as self-evident while leaving intact the hierarchies that render men’s sports the unquestioned norm. Asking what counts as “male” instead of “female” bodies, and how we might reimagine competitive categories beyond simple sex assignment, becomes essential if we are to move toward a more thorough rethinking of sports structures themselves.

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March 6, 2026