The viral graphic gets a lot wrong. The photo on the left shows Serena Williams, not Venus. The photo on the right shows French tennis champ Amelie Mauresmo, who is not trans. And there’s been no credible report of the match.
MARY ALEXANDER • 14 MAY 2024
Published by Africa Check on 20 May 2024
“Venus Williams forfeits match against trans woman,” reads text on a graphic circulating on social media in Nigeria, South Africa and elsewhere since late April 2024.*
“I’m not playing a man,” it quotes US tennis champion Williams as saying.
The graphic includes two photos, one supposedly of Venus Williams and the other of another female tennis player.
The graphic has been posted with comments such as:
- He should go and play with his fellow men or transgender. They should have their own category. They need to stop pitching them against biological women.
- Well said all women should do this.
- Venus is absolutely right on this. These people should stop forcing themselves on others.
The graphic can also be seen here, here, here, here, here and here.
But it’s false. Before we look into why, some definitions.
What is trans?
As categories, gender and sex are different things. Gender refers to socially accepted ideas of girlhood and womanhood, on the one hand, and boyhood and manhood on the other. Sex is based on biology and physiology, usually female and male but with some variations in between.
Trans or transgender people are born biologically male or female but have a different sense of themselves, unrelated to their biological sex. A trans woman was labelled male at birth but identifies as female. A trans man was labelled female at birth but identifies as male.
Trans encompasses a broad range of human experience. Some trans people simply dress and act according to their gender identity. Others choose to undergo hormone therapy or even medical procedures to make their bodies reflect their gender.
Trans is different to intersex, people whose bodies don’t fit neatly into the sex categories of male and female. Intersex people can be born with a range of differences in their chromosomes, genitals, genetic features or other parts of their bodies. South African athletics champion Caster Semenya is widely understood to be intersex.
Trans is the T in the acronym LGBTQIA+ and intersex is the I. The other letters stand for lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer or questioning, and asexual.
The rights of trans people have become an issue in the 2024 US presidential election. Likely Republican candidate Donald Trump has said he will roll back protections for trans people put in place by current Democratic president Joe Biden.
Back to the graphic.
Serena Williams and Amelie Mauresmo
Africa Check cropped the photos out of the graphic and ran them through reverse image searches.
We found the first photo, supposedly of Venus Williams, in a September 2022 article by the Japan Times. It’s headlined: “Serena Williams ends magical run at U.S. Open in what was likely her final tournament.”
Serena Williams is Venus Williams’s younger sister. She’s also a tennis champion.
In the article, the photo’s caption reads: “Serena Williams leaves the court after losing her third-round match to Australia’s Ajla Tomljanovic.” It’s attributed to the news service Reuters.
Other photos – here, here, here, here and here – show Serena Williams at the same September 2022 tournament, wearing the same outfit.
We found the second photo – claimed to be a “trans woman” – on the stock image site Flickr. It was uploaded 10 years ago in June 2014 and is titled “Amelie Mauresmo”.
Amelie Mauresmo is a retired professional tennis player based in France. She is not trans.
The photo can also be seen here, here and here, in each instance identified as Mauresmo.
Venus Williams is a famous, record-breaking athlete, and transgender issues have become a hot social and political topic. But there are no credible news reports of Williams forfeiting a match against a trans woman because she “refused to play a man”. If she had, it would have made global headlines.
The claim is false.
* Some claims posted on Facebook and Instagram may have been deleted by users after being rated via Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program.