Social media users got slammed by a volley of misinformation.
“Venus Williams forfeits match against trans woman: “I’m not playing a man,” said the caption on an April 14 Facebook post that included a photo. The post’s caption pointed readers to a “full story” linked in the comments, but the body of the article included only a few lines of text from another, unrelated article.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Similar posts also were shared on Instagram and TikTok.
But this never happened.
PolitiFact reviewed news on Google and in Nexis news archives and found no reports that Venus Williams has ever forfeited a match to a transgender athlete. And this was not the viral image’s only inaccuracy.
(Screenshot of Facebook post)
In every post, many of which garnered thousands of likes, the tennis player pictured is not Venus Williams, but her sister Serena Williams. The photo comes from Serena’s winning match in the 2022 US Open against Danka Kovinic where Serena wore a black outfit with gold stars.
The other woman depicted in some of the posts is also not a transgender athlete, but Amélie Mauresmo, a retired French tennis player who now directs the French Open.
When the claim first circulated last year, fact-checking outlets found the story had originated on a self-described satire website called “America’s Last Line of Defense,” which has the disclaimer “Nothing on this page is real.” We have fact-checked many claims from this site, and a larger network of sites, run by the same person, Christopher Blair.
The story is now being shared with no sign that it is satire.
The claim taps into the current debate over transgender athletes, specifically trans women, competing in women’s sports. Commenters on the Facebook post, who appeared not to know the information was false, left remarks such as “Good (for) her! All female athletes need to take a stand against this nonsense.”
The number of trans athletes is very small, especially at the professional level.
We rate the claim that Venus Williams “forfeited” a match against a transgender woman, saying, “I’m not playing a man” Pants on Fire!