Thread by @shewon_org

She Won recently made an appearance on Last Week Tonight. John Oliver stuck to his tired recipe: dishonest sanctimony wrapped in a thick coating of self-deprecation (all the easier to swallow), this time about male athletes in women’s sports and specifically about our org. 🧵1/n:

First, John Oliver leads viewers to believe that the content on is directly published by random people on the internet. This is totally false. We encourage people to submit tips, and our team of volunteers reviews each entry before we publish anything. 2/nSheWon.org

We only publish what we can verify from primary and secondary sources. We state this methodology clearly on our website, so check one off for deliberately misleading viewers. 3/n

Second, John Oliver also suggests our data is stale, mentioning that it dates back to the year 2001. This is extraordinarily misleading. 97% of our data is dated no earlier than 2014. 86% is from 2019 and onward. Check another off. 4/n

Third, John Oliver attacks our org to discredit the idea that a significant number of women are displaced by male athletes in women’s competitions. This is absurd because She Won does not purport to provide a comprehensive list of every woman denied a medal to male athletes. 5/n

On the contrary, She Won is a tiny organization run by volunteers. The database we compile is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg. We frequently exclude submissions, many coming directly from individual athletes, because there aren’t enough sources to verify against. 6/n

In fact, She Won came into existence as a response to the disturbing lack of data on this topic, and as a response to the disingenuous refrain “this isn’t happening.” 7/n

The sad truth is that no media outlet has seriously investigated the scope of the problem, and sporting organizations are more often than not hostile to providing any data about males in female competition. 8/n

John Oliver now attempts to undermine one of the few organizations documenting this problem, and suggests that if our data is flawed, the problem simply doesn’t exist. 9/n

Fourth, Oliver quibbles with our tally: one male winner displaces second, third, and fourth-place women, which counts as three medals lost. We see no issue with this methodology; three medals were lost. 10/n

Our focus is on the women who are affected by unfair male competition, not on the male athletes displacing them. Every single woman, from gold to bronze, suffered an injustice. We discount none of them. 11/n

The unfortunate truth is that we’re severely undercounting the number of affected women. Outside of the podium, women are denied placement on a team (like would-be Olympian Tania Edwards), or denied placement in a finals event (like NCAA swimmer Reka Gyorgy). 12/n

In a recent hearing, a high school girl recounts how she was deliberately and explicitly replaced by a male athlete on her cross country team. 13/n

https://x.com/JenniferSey/status/1909036825550975155

There’s another silent toll: women who never enter the game, knowing the game’s rigged or unwilling to undress beside a naked man in the locker room. Oliver never mentions these women. He does give generous airtime to two women who are “chill” and “happy” about losing to men.14/n

John Oliver makes an extraordinary effort to paint this issue as left versus right. He goes out of his way to frame the young advocates he’s chosen to focus on as far-right conservatives, showing countless clips of them being interviewed on Fox News (when he’s not ridiculing their athletic ability). This is an appeal to tribalism. It is an appeal for viewers to switch off their mental faculties - to think uncritically. But this isn’t a left versus right issue. It is a women’s rights issue. 15/15.