Martina Navratilova says Billie Jean King’s trans-athlete stance ‘doesn’t square’ with her own words

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Martina Navratilova wants Billie Jean King to explain herself.

King is one of the most important figures in the history of women’s sports, a tennis icon who helped build the modern women’s 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 women’s 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 people’s stories and make them feel included.

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That position has frustrated Navratilova, another tennis legend and longtime advocate of gay rights and women’s sports, because King has also publicly acknowledged the physical differences between men and women.

Tennis legends Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King teach youth tennis on Youth Day before the World Team Tennis match between the Philadelphia Freedoms and the Boston Lobsters at King of Prussia Mall in 2009. (Bill McCay/WireImage)

Asked how King could reconcile those two positions, Navratilova said the contradiction is obvious.

"I honestly don’t know because it doesn’t 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