At last month’s Western Conservative Summit, activist and former Levi’s executive Jennifer Sey joined a panel by the anti-LGBTQ group Protect Kids Colorado to make outlandish and often false claims about the number of transgender athletes participating in sports.
“It’s common sense; the world’s gone mad. I don’t know what happened in the last 10 years that we all went so crazy that we all decided boys can be girls if they just say so, but it’s not true, and we are going to come back to sanity,” said Sey, who owns the anti-trans sportswear line XX-XY Athletics.
Over the past month, Sey and her brand have been at the center of a controversy with the WNBA, after Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham called for “biological men” to be excluded from women’s sports. No trans athletes are currently competing, or have ever competed, in the WNBA. Cunningham supporters have shown up to games in XX-XY Athletics-branded apparel, and at one point got into an altercation with the co-owner of the Seattle Storm, who was subsequently given a temporary suspension by the WNBA. In another incident, former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom, who has declared his intent to sign up for the WNBA draft under the pretense of identifying as a woman, was ejected from an WNBA game after confronting a player from his courtside seat.
As a result of the controversy, “The sales [of XX-XY Athletics merchandise] are going through the roof,” Sey said in a recent interview on KHOW Radio’s Dan Caplis show.
WHY IT MATTERS: Sey and Protect Kids Colorado are pushing a set of ballot initiatives in the November election, one of which would restrict transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports. It’s not clear how many trans athletes are participating in sports. Sey framed her claims as evidence that conservative audience members could use to convince skeptics to vote ‘yes’ on the initiatives, or at least to defend themselves from critics.
Though she did not directly mention the local angle, Jeffco Schools has come under threat by the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) after an investigation claimed to find “up to 61 boys” playing in girls’ sports, even though the OCR did not publicly say how it came to that figure. Jeffco Schools has refuted the claim, saying that the numbers came from mascots, trainers, and managers.
Sey’s list of national and international talking points was, in some cases, based on similarly dubious information. In other cases, Sey made claims that were verifiably false.
“Don’t tell me it’s not happening,” Sey said at the panel. “Thousands and thousands of boys have displaced girls across the country.”
Sorry, but it’s not happening – at least, not at the wide scale Sey alleges.
CLAIM: “In the last year alone, 50 state championships have been won at the high school level by boys.”
FACT CHECK: This is a broad claim, for which Sey did not list the championships allegedly won by trans athletes, the sports those championships involved, or any source at all.
The claim was likely sourced from the anti-trans website HeCheated, which purports to document instances of trans athletes “displacing” cisgender girls and women. The Colorado Times Recorder reviewed the website’s database and filtered for incidents occurring in 2025, in State/Provincial Championships, and at the High School level. This search query brings up 52 alleged incidents. A Wayback Machine snapshot of the same page from July of this year, before the Western Conservative Summit panel, shows 48 allegations, showing that the database is actively being added to even a year later.
Using the same search query for the year 2026 brings up 25 similar allegations.
However, that database lists all alleged “male athletes” who participated in these championships, not just those who won. A smaller number are reported as placing top 3 in their respective competitions – 13 in first place, five in second place, and eight in third place. Additionally, many names are repeated multiple times due to competing in different events, bringing the actual number of winning athletes to about 18. One alleged “male athlete” came in last place, and four did not place.
The full “thousands” of entries listed on the site aren’t just limited to traditional physical sports. The data includes such categories as darts, billiards, and oyster shucking.
Any data taken from HeCheated should be taken as dubious on its own. Investigations by Last Week Tonight and Erin in the Morning have both cast doubt on the findings of HeCheated and its predecessor website, SheWon. The databases on these websites are taken partially from crowdsourced submissions, leaving an opening for bad actors to submit false reports.
An anonymous representative of HeCheated told Erin in the Morning last year that anyone could ask to be removed from the site if they sent administrators proof that they have ovaries.
CLAIM: “In the Olympics, 2024, two men won gold in women’s boxing.”
FACT CHECK: Here, Sey is relitigating two-years-old debunked claims disputing the eligibility of Olympic boxers Imane Khelif, of Algeria, and Lin Yu-Ting, of Taiwan. Neither woman is transgender. In Khelif’s case, medical and social transition are outlawed in her home country, as well as homosexuality.
Earlier this year, Yu-Ting took the required SRY gene test, which identifies the presence of a gene mostly found on the Y chromosome and is commonly used as a proxy to identify the presence of said chromosome. A positive test result does not mean you are a man – if there is a change in the gene, a person can be born biologically female. The test found Yu-Ting did not have the SRY gene, and she was subsequently cleared to return to competition. French sports magazine L’Equipe reported that Khelif had confirmed she had the SRY gene, but had undergone hormone treatments to suppress her testosterone in the lead-up to the 2024 Olympics.
The original claims were based on the fact that both women were previously disqualified by the Russian-led International Boxing Association (IBA), which claimed they failed unspecified chromosomal tests. Khelif in particular was only disqualified after defeating previously-undefeated Russian boxer Azalia Amineva. The decision was highly controversial at the time. The IBA has since been banned from the Olympics following decades of concerns about the organization’s ethics and integrity.
CLAIM: “In the Olympics in 2016, three men won all three medals in the 1600. Three men in the women’s category.”
FACT CHECK: First of all, there was no Women’s 1600 meter category at the 2016 Rio Olympics. There was a Women’s 800 meter race, and a Women’s 1500 meter race. Neither category was won by transgender athletes. While there was controversy around the 1500m results, it concerned allegations of doping, not sex eligibility.
Sey is presumably referring to the 800m race, for which the top three medalists were all cisgender women with high natural testosterone levels. Caster Semenya of South Africa is best known for placing first, followed by Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi and Margaret Wambui of Kenya. Of these countries, both Burundi and Kenya do not recognize a legal right to change one’s gender markers on identifying documents.
Subsequent testing by World Athletics found that all three women had XY chromosomes. But that in no way means they were secretly men – rather, it shows the diversity inherent in biology. All three women are known to have Differences in Sex Development (DSD), which can cause sexual development to happen differently from most people.
This, again, sparked a massive controversy at the time; World Athletics implemented a policy in 2019 requiring women with DSDs to take hormone-suppressing drugs in order to be eligible to compete. All three women refused, with Semenya accusing World Athletics of trying to make her a “human guinea pig.”
Ironically, what Sey promotes as proof of her imagined transgender athlete menace actually illustrates how the transgender exclusion policies she advocates for affect cisgender women, too. When the International Olympic Committee released its policy document earlier this year barring transgender women from competing in women’s sports, it included the stipulation that cisgender women with developmental differences, like Semenya, would also be banned from competing in any sport.
Further comments from Sey clarify that she believes there is no difference between women like Semenya, Khelif, and the others she falsely accuses of being men, and actual self-identified men. Speaking on former NBA players, including Kanter, declaring that they identify as women to register for the WNBA draft, Sey said the following in a recent episode of KHOW radio’s Dan Caplis show:
“I think there is no good-faith transness. They’re all men pretending to be women. That’s all this is.”
A request for comment sent to XX-XY Athletics’ press email was not returned. This story will be updated with any response received.
