wants Billie Jean King to explain herself.
King is one of the most important figures in the history of womens sports, a icon who helped build the modern womens game and spent decades fighting for equal opportunity, equal pay and respect for female athletes.
But King has also publicly supported trans-identifying biological male athletes competing in girls and womens sports.
In a 2025 interview with The Telegraph ahead of Wimbledon, King called the broader transgender-athlete debate in sports “a nightmare” and said people should listen to transgender peoples stories and make them feel included.
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That position has frustrated Navratilova, another tennis legend and longtime and womens sports, because King has also publicly acknowledged the physical differences between men and women.
Asked how King could reconcile those two positions, Navratilova said the contradiction is obvious.
“I honestly dont know because it doesnt square,” Navratilova told OutKick.
Navratilova was responding to a clip of King discussing the obvious physical differences between men and women. In the clip, King said men are generally bigger and stronger, have different skeletal systems and bigger hearts, and that women never claimed they were physically the same as men.
Thats the entire reason womens sports exist in the first place.
In 2020, King joined nearly 200 athletes in supporting a friend-of-the-court brief against an Idaho law that barred trans-identifying male athletes from competing in girls and womens sports.
“There is no place in any sport for discrimination of any kind,” King said at the time. “Im proud to support all transgender athletes who simply want the access and opportunity to compete in the sport they love.”
That’s the gap Navratilova is pressing.
“I think she thinks that they play fair and square, meaning males identify as women, take all the hormones and do everything, like Renée Richards did 50 years ago,” Navratilova said. “And that its just nice to include everybody.”
But Navratilova said the issue cant be reduced to kindness or inclusion.
She offered a hypothetical scenario: a boys basketball team holds tryouts, 10 boys make the team, and five boys who dont make the boys team then try out for the girls team. If they make it, which they almost certainly would, five girls lose their spots.
“Thats not equality,” Navratilova said. “Thats a total takeover.”
And its not just about who wins, she said. Its about roster spots, podium spots, awards, prize money, privacy, safety and the entire purpose of female-only categories.
For Navratilova, the answer starts with .
“The solution is obvious,” she told OutKick. “No male bodies in womens sports and no for many different reasons, not the least of which is womens rights to safety, dignity and fairness and privacy.”
Navratilova said her private conversations with King have made King’s public position even more frustrating.
“Billie Jean has repeatedly told me over the last four or five years that she would love to talk to me about it, that she defers to me because I know a lot more about it than she does,” Navratilova said.
But Navratilova said the conversations she expected, never really happened.
“Without talking to me really and listening to what my points were, she just went her way and put out the statement by her and the Womens Sports Foundation about inclusion and all this stuff,” Navratilova said.
That, Navratilova said, is what surprised her most.
“I dont think she really has heard the other side of the
