Transgender people — especially athletes — have become political pawns for both Republicans and Democrats. No longer human beings who make personal choices about their bodies, they are now campaign slogans, supposed pedophiles invading bathrooms and threats to women’s safety. Even several Democrats, including Gavin Newsom, who have spent decades championing for LGBTQ+ rights are denouncing or distancing themselves from trans athletes to stay politically viable.
President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign spent nearly $215 million on ads vilifying trans people, many of which specifically focused on trans athletes. Because of the efforts to manufacture panic about trans people — who make up less than 1% of the U.S. population — many people think that trans athletes are extremely common. The reality is that trans athletes make up an insignificant portion of competing athletes in America, amounting to less than 10 out of more than 530,000 college athletes within the NCAA. Nevertheless, just two weeks into his presidency, Trump signed an executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” falsely equating trans women with men and giving sports organizations and the Department of State and Department of Homeland Security 60 days to create and enforce rules barring them from playing in women’s divisions. The next day the NCAA announced that only women assigned at birth would be allowed to compete in women’s sports.
But this misinformation and fear-dictated policy did not begin with Trump’s first administration. For years, state legislators have been enacting transgender sports bans and regulations, coming from a moral panic that has swept the nation: Biological men are completely destroying women in sports. The problem? This isn’t happening.
Take former West Virginia Governor Jim Justice, who signed a bill in 2021 banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports, despite the fact that he could not name a single instance of a trans woman competing in his state. While West Virginia currently ranks 48th in education, health care and the economy and 50th in infrastructure, trans kids have somehow been framed as a top-priority issue.
More recently, during his address to Congress, Trump said that a trans woman, whom he referred to as a man, “finished a long-distance race five hours and 14 minutes ahead of a woman for a new record by five hours. Broke the record by five hours.” This is a gross misinterpretation of reality. The record, which was set in an 800-mile long bikepacking race by Austin Killips — who is a trans woman — was eight days, 23 hours, and 27 minutes. The five hours and 14 minutes in question amounted to about a 2% difference from the original record, which was previously held by a man. Another detail Trump chose not to mention is that the leaderboard for this race, the Arizona Trail Race, is co-ed, which Killips said is where her interest in it began. And that record she set? Beaten by over a day just a few months later.
The science behind these supposed biological advantages is extremely complicated. First of all, there is no official scientific consensus on whether trans women even have an advantage over cisgender women. In fact, latest studies might show the opposite. The most comprehensive studies showing a biological advantage come from military recruits, not athletes. And a majority of them are flawed — many use cisgender men and only examine a single variable, overemphasizing its impact on athletic ability.
The truth is that sports have always involved biological and social advantages. What’s often overlooked in the transgender debate is that anyone winning in sports — regardless of whether at a K-12, collegiate, or elite level — has some sort of advantage. Socially, this can look like economic factors which allow some players to pay for extra lessons or better equipment and coaching.
Biologically, many players are competing with bodily advantages they were born with, not necessarily related to gender. Consider Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time. He has every advantage for a swimmer in the book, including a disproportionately large chest and wingspan, long torso and short legs, and double-jointed ankles, which bend 15 degrees farther than his competition. Researches also found that he produces half the lactic acid of other athletes, allowing him to have a swifter recovery. And yet, he’s celebrated as an American hero and has never been barred from competing due to his biological advantages.
The question of enforcing transgender sports bans also comes into play. There have been several cases of cisgender women who are targeted for naturally having higher rates of testosterone or not looking stereotypically feminine. Caster Semenya, a cisgender woman, was forced to undergo a “gender verification test” by the World Athletics due to rumors of gender fraud, and has since been forced to take testosterone-suppressing medicine in order to compete. In the 2024 Paris Olympics, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif came under extreme scrutiny and had her sex questioned, simply because she excelled in her sport. Trump referred to her as a boxer who “transitioned” though Khelif is a cisgender woman.
This type of enforcement gets even fuzzier for K-12 children and college students who want to play. Trans sports bans create environments in which schools are either forced to do sex verification tests on their students — who are minors — or depend on rumors and physical attributes. The same West Virginia bill that bans transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports relies on birth certificates and physical inspections to enforce it. So, instead of protecting cis women, these bans have put all women and girls under a microscope, forcing them to adhere to a very specific idea of femininity, specifically women of color who are often hyper-masculinized and more likely to be caught in the cross fires of anti-trans movements.
But none of this matters to elected officials who are using trans athletes as a political football. They’re simply looking to gain votes by taking an underrepresented marginalized community with no political power and manufacturing a crisis around them. They don’t care that the science doesn’t line up or that they’re passing bills that hurt all women in the long run while failing on more important issues, such as education and the economy. Don’t let them distract you from their failings.
WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Sam Kats at [email protected].