Ken Paxton Announces Another Investigation

May 21

After a trans woman won big at a swimming competition, Texas AG Ken Paxton quickly announced his plans to try and get the event hosts in legal trouble.

Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek

Paxton’s at it again, baby!

Attorney General for the state of Texas, Ken Paxton, announced an investigation into the nonprofit U.S. Masters Swimming on Monday. Why, you ask? Well, no you don’t. You already know exactly why the Texas AG is launching an investigation into an athletics group that holds athletic competitions.

Yes, you’ve guessed correctly: A transgender woman had the audacity to win at sport.

“The policy of US Masters Swimming, which allows men to compete in women’s events, is reprehensible and could violate Texas’s consumer protection laws,” said Paxton, via press release. “Not only is this policy insulting to female athletes, but it also demonstrates deep contempt for women and may violate Texas law. I will fight to stop these unfair policies and never back down from defending the integrity of women’s sports.”

What Paxton (and many other conservatives) are quivering with rage about is trans athlete Ana Caldas’ five wins at the USMS 2025 Spring Nationals, held last month in San Antonio. Caldas is absolutely jacked and she beat the competition by significant margins, and despite what Paxton and his buddies would have you believe, that’s totally okay.

Caldas has been competing in women’s athletics competitions since at least 2010. I don’t know exactly how long she’s been medically transitioning, but I do know that USMS only allows trans women to compete if their testosterone levels are under five nanomoles per liter (roughly on par with cis women’s pre-menopausal testosterone) for 36 continuous months. The truth is that Ana Caldas has every right to compete, and she isn’t winning because of some mystical innate man soul granting her preternatural powers of athleticism, it’s because she’s an absolute freak beast machine and has been for a very long time.

Caldas has been competing in the CrossFit Games since at least 2013, and if you know anything about CrossFit, you know that everybody who does it is clinically insane. I mean, people regularly hurt themselves doing CrossFit. No human being should be doing CrossFit, much less doing it competitively. Besides that, Caldas has been competing against other women at USMS since 2009, and her wins last month weren’t a fluke, she’s been smoking the competition for years.

Plenty of regular faces in the transphobia-for-profit arena have piped up about this, of course. The Independent Council on Women’s Sports, who abbreviate their name “ICONS” because having a catchy acronym is worth leaving women out, said, “There is no length of time during which testosterone suppression eliminates male advantage; therefore, it should not serve as a guideline permitting men to compete in women’s swimming. At a minimum, it is USMS’s responsibility to enforce its current policy.”

First of all, we have no reason to believe USMS isn’t enforcing their own regulations on transgender competitors. Given the current political climate, I highly doubt they’re just letting Caldas fly under the radar. Looking like you were cut from a granite slab doesn’t mean you have high testosterone; just ask female bodybuilders. Second, with regards to “male advantage,” a study funded by the International Olympic Committee handily disproves ICONS’ sentiment that, like diamonds, testosterone is forever. So… you know… get bent.

Riley Gaines said something about all of this, but I can’t remember what it was because I couldn’t stop staring at her broad, powerful shoulders. Swim much, girl? Sheesh!

Paxton’s chief regulatory enforcement tool here is going to be Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA), and it isn’t the first time he’s done this; last month he threatened USA Fencing with the exact same spiel because some loser DQed herself from a valid match so she could publicly flex her transphobia. Showoff!

It’s hardly Paxton’s first rodeo with regards to discriminating against trans people, either. In 2022, Paxton tried to get the Texas Department of Public Safety (what those weirdos call the DMV) to wrangle up a list of every trans person who had legally changed their name, which the DPS refused to do because it would require a tremendous amount of time and manpower and might not even be possible anyway. In August of last year, he ordered the DPS to stop issuing sex marker changes to trans Texans, and… again asked them for a list of trans people. In December of last year he sued the NCAA for allowing trans athletes to compete, trying to stick it to 10 out of 510,000 student-athletes just for being trans.

To hell with these dirtbags! I’m tired of pretending that trans women must be fragile, meek losers. As far as anyone knows, Ana Caldas has been medically transitioning for a long time, the science says she’s more athletically comparable to the cis women she’s competing against than she is to cis men, and she’s been putting in the work to become an absolutely shredded force of nature for literally decades.

She deserves those wins, and I don’t care what anybody else thinks.

Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.