Editor’s note: The following is a satirical article for The DisreGuardian, a series of articles published annually for The Guardian’s April Fool’s issue. Sports will resume publishing normal content next week.
The NCAA declared that transgender athletes were the latest sign of the apocalypse, according to a press release from Sunday.
The declaration came after a trans athlete competed in what many thought would be a routine women’s volleyball match between Kentucky Mountain Bible College and some university your conservative uncle likes to call “too woke” — the Mid-Atlantic Mountain Dew Athletic Conference’s premier rivalry.
The repercussions were swift, as God swooped in to give the middle finger to humanity for allowing a trans athlete to play in a sporting event that no one would remember in five hours. At the end of the first set, fire rained down in woke Minneapolis and even more woke Portland. God’s wrath continued in the second set; he targeted airports across the country, shutting down terminals for reasons other than the Trump administration’s incompetence. During the third set, God announced on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he would smite us all if the game continued.
Sadly, the game went to a fifth set, giving an extra hour for the carnage to continue. Thankfully for Earth, God’s secret second planet that he fathered with his mistress took away his attention, and the game concluded without any further issues. The appearance of four guys on horseback at the arena was unrelated to the apocalypse; the men are members of the university’s equestrian team. The trans athlete finished the game with a kill and a dig after playing 6 or 7 points.
The NCAA took swift action in a rare moment of the organization actually doing anything. Within hours, it barred trans athletes from competing. NCAA president Charlie Baker explained his rationale during a press conference.
“There are only four horses of the apocalypse, and there are maybe 10 trans athletes nationwide,” Baker said. “If they were all horses, they could cause two or three apocalypses at a time.”
The decision has been met with backlash from conservatives, who argue that trans women are taking away spots from cisgender women who are more than capable of causing apocalypses themselves. Conservative activists and the Trump administration are now demanding that the NCAA appeal to God to only allow apocalypses during women’s sporting events to be caused by cis women.
“These are not women causing apocalypses; these are men,” a knockoff Riley Gaines said. “The future for female athletes is scary if nothing changes because all of our apocalypses will be caused by men. And in that case, why do we even have women’s sports?”
