Trump says he is a savior of women’s sports. His ice hockey joke showed what he really thinks | Austin Killips
This past week Team USA won gold in both the women’s and men’s ice hockey at the Winter Olympics, presenting Donald Trump with a golden opportunity,Instead of seizing the easy political points, he embraced his chance to ingratiate himself with the boys by inviting them to the State of the Union address,He followed up his offer of a military jet shuttle to Washington DC with a lament that he would have to also invite the women’s team,It was a bit that lit up the locker room with laughter,The women’s gold medal had been a prime opportunity for Trump to live up to his stated commitment to “protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports”, a claim made last February when he sought to position himself as the figure saving women’s sports.
Instead, he decided to make a joke at the expense of Olympic champions.But we shouldn’t be surprised, because Trump and his allies were never interested in boosting women’s sports.The Trump administration’s purported commitment to female athletes occupies a rather narrow lane.It is a product of the meticulously structured and audience-tested rhetoric of the “Save Women’s Sports” movement, a coordinated and well-funded right-wing campaign that marries women’s sport with its perceived negation – the threat of trans participation.On the right, female athletes are only significant in the shadow of the transgender menace.
They are little more than useful pawns for a political project aimed not at advancing women’s sport but purging transgender people from public life.Instead of concentrating on important matters such as funding for women’s sports or celebrating the achievements of outstanding athletes such as the US women’s hockey team, right-wing activists and advocates have used their political and social cache to advance a purely negative political project.Women’s empowerment through exclusion and nothing else.This is precisely why a shining moment of women’s excellence in sport is so easily written off by the people, like Trump, who claim it to be a priority.The light of the culture war is a blinding guide that lacks a moral foundation.
It offers scripts for speeches, media tours and congressional testimonies, but when a moment deviates, even slightly, from the established ideological framework people reveal their already existing convictions,Trump and the right more broadly have no actual interest in women’s sports, so when they actually come across them, as Trump did on Sunday, they revert to the dismal, chauvinistic gender politics that underpin so much of the American Right,Trump’s comments are a stalwart example of how the right has successfully developed a discourse on women’s rights that is hollow but resonant because it makes almost no demands beyond toeing the proper line around a handful of cultural signifiers that have been imbued with undue significance,It should come as no surprise that the politics of spectacle have so thoroughly managed to weaponize sport but it remains a political and social travesty that a movement superficially branded around women’s empowerment has so thoroughly failed to raise women’s place in its chosen domain,If Trump wants to empower female athletes in the US, maybe he could address the income imbalance between the men’s and women’s ice hockey teams.
Or look at why WNBA players are considering labor action so they can get paid fairly.Men always come first in the pseudo-feminist political program of the right.Trump’s locker room showboating is less of a Freudian slip than a summation of the gender politics that have been center stage in the United States over the last seven years.An embrace of a firmly held belief that in many domains of life women are lesser.The logical conclusion of a women’s empowerment project that in rhetoric and in practice insists on keeping women in the shadow of men.
Diagnosing mental health conditions need not be a case of yes/no | Letters
Lucy Foulkes explores the possibility that the rising numbers of young people receiving a diagnosis of mental illness or ADHD are subjects of overdiagnosis (Are we really overdiagnosing mental illness?, 22 February). She posits that changes in terminology, increasing societal awareness and reductions in stigma are all factors in the increase in diagnoses.However, there is another way of looking at this issue. If we treat ADHD as binary (you have it or you do not), we are missing the possibility that we all lie somewhere on a continuum with diagnosed ADHD towards one end (and perhaps an ability to focus and concentrate at the other). A diagnosis of ADHD then depends on where the line is drawn
‘Violent bully’ who broke partner’s neck and left her paralysed jailed for 16 years
A “violent and controlling bully” who broke his partner’s neck, leaving her paralysed and her life “destroyed”, has been sentenced to 16 years in prison.Robert Easom, a landscape gardener, violently assaulted Trudi Burgess, a schoolteacher and former singer, when she threatened to leave him after enduring eight years of coercive, controlling behaviour.A court heard that Easom, 57, pinned Burgess down in a rage and pushed her head into her body until her neck snapped. He denied a charge of causing grievous bodily harm with intent but was found guilty after 27 minutes of deliberation by a jury at Preston crown court in November.He had admitted causing the injury but denied intending to cause her serious harm
European girls aged 13-15 have world’s highest rate of tobacco use for age group
Teenage girls in Europe have the highest rate of tobacco use in their age group around the world, while one in seven adolescents across the continent use vapes and e-cigarettes, figures show.The data, based on analysis by the World Health Organization (WHO), shows that Europe is on course to maintain its status as the world’s biggest consumer of tobacco up to 2030, and reveals “particularly concerning” trends of tobacco use among women and young people.Four in 10 adult female smokers around the world – about 62 million women – live in Europe, while 4 million teenagers aged 13 to 15 across the continent use tobacco products.For vapes and e-cigarettes, Europe has the highest prevalence of teenage regular users, at 14.3% of children aged between 13 and 15
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Kinship carers in England to be given financial support in government pilot
Grandparents who step in to provide full-time care for their grandchildren to prevent them being taken into care will be given guaranteed financial support under a government pilot scheme.Charities welcomed the trial as groundbreaking and said if fully rolled out across England it had the potential to transform the lives of tens of thousands of children looked after under “kinship care” arrangements.Kinship carers are grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings or close family friends who take on full parental responsibility when a child loses their birth parents as a result of death, a family court order, severe illness or imprisonment.Campaigners have fought for more than two decades to establish financial recognition of the role and personal sacrifices that kinship carers make. Some carers say they have felt ignored and exploited as a “cheap option” despite saving the state billions it would otherwise have had to spend on foster or residential care
Drop in overseas workers is ‘car crash’ for UK hospitals and care homes, say experts
Hospitals and care homes in the UK face “an impending car crash”, experts have warned, as research shows the number of overseas nurses and carers has collapsed.Analysis of Home Office quarterly data reveals the number of overseas nurses granted entry to the UK has fallen by 93% over three years. Just 1,777 overseas nurses were granted entry in 2025, compared with 26,100 in 2022.Visas for workers in the caring personal service occupations category – which includes care workers, but also nursing auxiliaries, ambulance staff and dental workers – had the steepest decline in new workers from overseas in absolute terms.The figure fell from 107,847 workers granted entry in 2023 to just 3,178 in 2025, a 97% decline over two years
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