ESPN personalities’ willingness to publicly criticize transgender athletes continues to grow. The last couple years have seen more and more ESPN figures bashing trans athletes on high-profile platforms. And the latest to weigh in on this is Stephen A. Smith.
In an interview with Bloomberg’s Randall Williams at Radio Row at the Super Bowl last week (Bloomberg published the clip Saturday), Smith brought up trans athletes unprompted. That came as part of a response to a question (around 1:30) on if he’s interested in running for president in 2028.
When asked if he was interested in a 2028 presidential run, Smith said “Zero, zero interest.” But he went on to share why he talks about politics, and to share a bunch of political takes. Smith said he loves political commentary and considers much of it “social commentary” rather than political, discussed how his podcast/YouTube show is outside of ESPN because it’s not just sports, and then called himself “a centrist” before pivoting to discussion of trans athletes (3:10):
“I’m a centrist by nature. I don’t believe in operating on the fringes. I don’t like MAGA right and I don’t like the woke cancel culture on the left. I’m a centrist. To me, it’s about a strong economy, it’s about being fiscally conservative and socially liberal, but within reason. So that’s how I look at it. LGBTQ rights and all that stuff, I’m in full support of that, but when transgender athletes, men are transitioning to women and they’re competing in female sports, that’s a different animal to me.
“That’s not just about LGBTQ rights. That’s about prying on the rights of females out there everywhere who were born female, and they’re at a decided disadvantage.”
Even just two years ago, these comments from Smith would have been unexpected comments from an ESPN personality and comments that might have led to action from the network, regardless of those remarks coming on a non-ESPN platform. Indeed, in a December 2023 Outkick interview with Riley Gaines, ex-ESPN host Sage Steele said the network told her and Sam Ponder to stop tweeting about trans athletes, and did so even after Steele filed a lawsuit against the company in April 2022. (That lawsuit eventually saw an August 2023 settlement that included Steele leaving ESPN “to exercise my First Amendment rights more broadly.”)
But the wider discourse around trans athletes has changed since then, especially with moves like President Donald Trump’s recent “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order to try and block trans women and girls from competing in women’s sports. And ESPN figures from Kirk Herbstreit to Dan Orlovsky to Chris Evert have seemingly expressed their own criticisms of trans athletes and of other gender issues such as the Imane Khelif saga (although some of those figures have since backed off a bit) over the past couple of years.
Thus, Smith’s remarks here don’t stand out anywhere nearly as much as they would have just a little while ago. And he’s already in his own category when it comes to ESPN figures talking political issues (or “social commentary,” as he puts it), so significant ESPN pushback here for his remarks to Bloomberg seems unlikely. But it is fascinating to see a subject that ESPN once tried very hard to avoid individual commentary on now being brought up unprompted by some of their personalities in response to general questions about politics.
