September 30, 2026:

Women’s sports hasn’t historically been a big issue for Republicans, so why is it all anyone can talk about as the 2026 midterms approach? 

On Sept. 28, 2026, the Department of Education formally excluded LGBT students from legal protection against sex discrimination under the the federal Title IX program. The administration claimed that the rule change would help “women and girls,” including in sports. 

And whenever Democratic candidates for office sit for an interview, some talking head is bound to ask them about whether trans girls should play field hockey or whatever.

This is a ginned up trans panic, brought to you by Republicans who know that if you can manipulate public opinion on the culture war issue du jour, you can distract people from the economic issues that actually matter to them: outrageous gas prices and barely affordable groceries. 

Because here’s the truth: There aren’t enough trans athletes competing in sports, either at the elementary or college level, to warrant changes to federal law or a single state statute banning them—much less the more-than-two-dozen state laws now on the books. 

A fabricated culture war

The NCAA, college sports’ governing body, has already said as much. 

When asked how many transgender athletes were competing in the NCAA, Charlie Baker, NCAA president and a former Republican governor of Massachusetts, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in December 2024 that he was aware of fewer than ten transgender athletes out of 510,000 athletes in the NCAA. 

Two months later, the NCAA banned trans women from competing on NCAA women’s teams, capitulating to the trumped up anti-trans panic. The association cited President Donald Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order as the reason. 

In 2022, the founder of an anti-trans organization called Save Women’s Sports told a Time magazine reporter that she could only verify five transgender girls playing K-12 sports nationwide. 

Five. 

Yet somehow, if you ask the average parent—even one who otherwise would say they support trans people and trans rights—there’s a solid chance they’ll say that it doesn’t seem “fair” for trans girls to compete on a team with cis girls. 

Fairness is not the issue here. The science on this topic is limited, but both sides lob studies at each other that are supposed to prove or disprove whether trans women retain an athletic advantage after hormone therapy. I’m not refereeing that fight here. 

My argument is political: Republicans are building national policy around a manufactured crisis, and Democrats are treating it like a real one and debating it using Republican vocabulary. 

“Biological men.” “Gender ideology.” “Unfair advantage.” Just shut your yap, already! 

The cruelty is the point

But the exclusion of trans athletes from sports has never been about fairness. It has always been about cruelty.

This is our new culture war, everybody: Conservatives are being dicks to kids in the name of “fairness,” even though this supposed issue affects so few people. Some ten kids in a system with 510,000 college athletes. Maybe five children competing in K-12 sports nationwide. 

That may not be accurate, because doing a full trans headcount would involve disclosure of private medical information. But even if you double, triple, or quadruple that number, it’s still not enough to justify the deluge of anti-trans sports bans.

Yet conservatives have created a nationwide moral panic without even using these real numbers. All conservatives have needed is a sympathetic cisgender girl, a scary phrase like “biological men,” and a megaphone. 

Let’s call it the Riley Gaines playbook. 

Riley Gaines is the anti-trans activist who tied for fifth with trans swimmer Lia Thomas at the 2022 NCAA Swimming championships. Ever since, she has made it sound like Thomas kept her from being the next Olympic gold medalist. 

For its part, the International Olympic Committee, an organization that let trans women compete for two decades, announced in March 2026 that, beginning with the 2028 Olympics, trans women would be banned from competing in women’s events, and every female athlete will need a DNA test to compete. 

Becky Pepper-Jackson sued the state of West Virginia in 2021, when she was only 11, because she wanted to run cross country with her friends and feared a state law barring trans athletes from participating on sports teams that align with their gender identity would prohibit her from trying out. A years-long legal battle ensued. By the time the Supreme Court ruled against her in June, she was 16—and still the only publicly identified trans youth athlete in West Virginia. 

Yet, Pepper-Jackson spent years of her childhood in a legal fight over whether she could run track with her friends.

This is the fake trans panic working as intended. And too many Democrats are treating this manufactured outrage like it’s a real issue that must be addressed. They’re accepting the Republicans’ framing of trans children rather than countering with a more positive and pro-children framing. 

For example, when Texas gubernatorial candidate James Talarico was in the state legislature, he opposed legislation that would have banned trans athletes in sports. Yet, he went on Fox News last month and said he opposed trans athletes playing in girl’s sports “if it endangers safety or fairness.” 

That conditional “if” is load-bearing. And it hinges on paltry science cited by both sides. The concept of “fairness” works the same way. It’s a word people use to mean whatever they need it to mean. Fair to whom? Who decides what’s fair? 

None of it matters. There aren’t enough trans athletes to make a fuss over. Democrat Colin Allred, who is currently running for Congress, ran against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in 2024. In that Senate campaign, he ran an ad in response to criticism from Cruz saying he didn’t want “boys” playing in girls’ sports either. He lost to Cruz by more than eight points anyway. 

U.S. Representative Marcy Kaptur is an Ohio Democrat who back in 2021 co-sponsored the Equality Act, which was designed to enshrine LGBTQ+ protections into federal law. This election cycle, she ran an ad bragging that she’d voted with Republicans to keep “transgender ideology” out of schools. 

“Gender ideology” is conservative framing, brought to you by the same people who came up with “biological men.” 

And every Democrat who played into that messaging handed Republicans the same gift: the idea that the GOP’s anti-trans panic is legitimate. 

It isn’t. 

Remember the North Carolina bathroom ban?

What kills me is how far we’ve devolved when it comes to trans rights. 

Ten years ago, North Carolina passed a bill banning trans people from using the government and public school bathrooms that matched their gender identity. The country revolted. 

PayPal killed a planned operations center in Charlotte. Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr canceled shows in the state. The NBA moved its All-Star Game to Louisiana and the NCAA yanked championship events.

The Associated Press estimated that the bill cost North Carolina $3.76 billion. Gov. Pat McCrory, who signed the bill into law, lost his own reelection that same cycle. 

A decade later, Republicans found their next cultural wedge issue: young, trans athletes. And I think too many Democrats are making concessions they feel they have to make, because they’re reading polling numbers and have decided that trans kids are expendable. 

They’re claiming they understand parents’ concerns—when the likelihood that any parent is going to have a trans girl on their kids’ sports team is practically zero. 

Look at the WNBA. There isn’t a single trans woman playing in the league. Yet a (male) former NBA player, Enes Kanter Freedom, is still running a crusade against trans athletes in the WNBA, warning that “they” are coming “after your children.” 

Who the hell is “they?” Nobody. 

What I see here isn’t a school sports problem that needs a political fix: It’s a decade of Republicans discovering that being an asshole to a small, vulnerable group of people is free, popular, and endlessly renewable. And a chorus of Democrats is too scared to say so.

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