The UFC’s biggest cards nearly always include women. Except at Freedom 250.

When Americans tune into UFC Freedom 250, the series of mixed martial arts fights taking over the White House on President Trump’s 80th birthday this Sunday, one key element of the sport will be missing: female fighters.

To the unfamiliar, that might seem unsurprising given the hypermasculine stereotypes that surround MMA. But as Kyle Green, a sociologist who writes on the intersection of sports and politics, recently told me, UFC cards for major events nearly always feature women. In fact, MMA is one of the rare sports in which women appear on the same cards as men and are not subject to different rules. For example, most sports have separate leagues for women; in boxing, women can only fight for a maximum of ten rounds, whereas men’s matches can generally go up to 12. And for more than a decade, the Ultimate Fighting Championship embraced the tradition, with its CEO Dana White touting the inclusion of women as evidence that the organization offers an “even playing field.”

But flexing such feminist bona fides wasn’t always the case, and White admits as much. “I completely own up to saying women would never fight in the octagon,” he said in 2019, referring to his past, staunch opposition to allowing women to fight in the UFC. “But you’ve got to remember at this time, I was trying to get people to accept the men fighting in the Octagon. It wasn’t allowed on pay-per-view. It wasn’t allowed on TV.”

“The reason that the women’s MMA has taken off and it’s so big is because these women are legit,” White continued. “Really good, very technical, and it’s amazing, and I never saw it coming.”

Yet in the days before the White House spectacle, where a hulking claw-like structure has essentially ripped through the South Lawn, White doesn’t appear to prioritize the female fighters he supposedly admires. In fact, when asked about the absence of women, White told Time that he had tried, but “we couldn’t get it done.” The CEO said that he had initially wanted a fight between Zhang Weili and Mackenzie Dern, but according to White, Weili was taking time off. When reached for comment, she did not respond to Time.

It’s a curious rationale coming from one of the most powerful men in sports, and to believe it is to extend White significant latitude, as it belies multiple realities: the UFC’s Rolodex includes many prominent women, ostensibly making it relatively easy to “get it done.” Not to mention the outsized attention given to arguably more extraneous logistics, such as the bathrooms designed to mimic a stay at the “fucking Four Seasons.”

“When the promotion stages its most politically symbolic event ever, and women vanish from the card, that’s not a glitch,” Jenn McClearen, author of Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC, said. “It tells you whose presence is considered essential to the story being told on that lawn and whose is optional.”

For Julie Kedzie, a retired mixed martial artist and former UFC fighter, shutting women out of the White House reflects White’s inclination to take on platforms that are “politically expedient for him.” That includes his muted response to the sexism that continues to vex the UFC, despite commanding a singular power to shape the opinions of the political right.

“People still say women can’t fight, that they suck, that when women fight is when they go and get a sandwich,” Kedzie said. “It’s a pervasive attitude that can be proven wrong. But White hasn’t put a stop to that, and he holds the court of public opinion. He has such a lock on the media and could change that story himself by saying, ‘Women can fight, shut the fuck up.’ But he hasn’t.”

Consider what happened with Bud Light. In 2023, after igniting conservative ire with its partnership with trans TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney, the beer partnered with the UFC in an apparent effort to win back the right. It was then that Ben Fowlkes, a sports writer and host of the Co-Main Event podcast, said that White carried out an aggressive campaign to rehabilitate Bud Light’s image. “He essentially provided Anheuser Busch the cover they were looking for, with somebody to go over to the right-wing crowd and tell them, ‘Come back over, you can buy Bud Light again, it’s safe.’ And it worked.”

The sidelining of women at UFC Freedom 250 comes as White insists that he and the UFC are apolitical despite their uncannily close ties to Donald Trump. Even the right-wing, anti-trans, anti-immigrant trash talk widely embraced by some of the organization’s most visible fighters can be traced along the contours of Trump’s political rise.

“Before 2016, it was a rarity to ever hear a fighter who had any political opinions or any political awareness,” Fowlkes said. “Every once in a while, you’d get somebody who had strong feelings, and they were almost always Republican—or anarchist.”

“But fighters just loved Trump. It baffled me because these fighters have worked their whole lives to be able to spot a fake tough guy or a bully. And here’s one, but you love him.”

It’s through the lens of an undeniable rightward shift within the UFC and its fanbase that the absence of women fighting on the White House card can be seen as indicative of the conservative gender ideals held by MAGA: hyperfeminine and reinforcing the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity.” In short: not a fighter. It makes sense, then, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has publicly argued against women in the military, is playing an unusual role in dictating strict physical requirements for military members attending the upcoming White House fight.

The UFC’s defenders are often quick to point to Ronda Rousey, the former UFC champion credited with single-handedly paving the way for women to compete in the UFC, as Exhibit A against such sexist accusations, as well as the MMA’s integrated gender structure.

“It genuinely is remarkable,” McClearen said. “Women in the UFC fight under the same rules, on the same cards, in the same cage as men, and they can headline over men. There’s no asterisk on a women’s fight the way there is in sports where people argue the women’s game is somehow a lesser version.”

But the impetus behind such a progressive structure, McClearen added, was partly business-related.

“The UFC figured out that promoting diverse fighters helps it reach diverse global audiences, so women’s visibility serves the brand,” she said. “Which is empowering and precarious at the same time, because visibility that’s granted for business reasons can be withdrawn for business reasons.”

As for Rousey’s role in reversing White’s fierce resistance to welcoming women in the UFC, Kedzie said, “Her star power was undeniable. She was also a very beautiful woman, and she was going to make [White] a lot of money.”

It isn’t criminal, of course, for the CEO of a major sports organization to prioritize profits. But it’s the nakedly transactional motivations with which White wades into the political that can cause someone to bristle. Take, for instance, White’s “equal playing field” boasts.

“When he says stuff about equality in UFC for men and women, in a sense, yes, it’s true,” Fowlkes said. “But in the sense that they treat them equally badly.”

Kedzie agreed, calling the UFC’s notoriously low fighter pay “poverty wages.”

In one sense, Kedzie said that the absence of women fighting on the South Lawn came as something of a relief. “Not because women can’t be just as fascist as the men,” she said. But ultimately, opting to compete at the White House, with its overwhelming sheen of corruption and disrepute, was a “moral choice.”

“I have absolutely no respect for any fighter that competes on that card,” she noted, “or for anybody who corners somebody who competes on that card.”