What were people interested in as the 2024 presidential election approached? Last fall, Gallup conducted a survey and asked. The economy was at the top of the list; most voters called it “extremely important.” The majority of respondents also cited a host of other issues as “extremely important” or “very important” to their vote: democracy in the United States, terrorism and national security, the choice of Court justices supreme, immigration, health care, gun policy, taxes. , abortion, crime, income and wealth distribution, the federal budget deficit, foreign affairs, energy policy, race relations, etc. In fact, only two issues on the list were not considered at least “very important” by a majority of voters. One of them was climate change, which half of those surveyed rated as “somewhat important” or “not important.” The other was transgender rights, which came last.
Perhaps not surprisingly, transgender issues seem less important than other topics. (As for climate change, tell someone melt Greenland.) Only about 1% of American adults identify as transgender, Gallup reported last year. And in the area that dominates transgender rights debates these days – sports – the proportion is much smaller. In mid-December, NCAA President Charlie Baker appeared before a panel at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on federal regulation of sports gambling. As so often seems to be the case in politics these days, the topic turned to transgender people’s participation in sports. “How many athletes are there in the United States at NCAA schools?” » Dick Durbin, an Illinois senator, asked Baker. “Five hundred and ten thousand,” Baker replied. “How many transgender athletes do you know?” “” Durbin continued. “Less than ten,” Baker said. That’s less than 0.002 percent. In October, a spokesperson for the Michigan High School Athletic Association said the strait Free press that, of the one hundred and seventy thousand high school athletes in the state, only two are transgender girls, or about 0.001 percent.
But the push to ban transgender athletes from sports has never been about numbers. In 2023, the Ohio House of Representatives passed a bill banning trans girls from participating in girls’ sports starting in kindergarten. It was called the Save Women’s Sports Act, conjuring up an image of barbarians at the gate. But when journalist Pablo Torre I went looking for those girls who were supposedly breaking every record and stealing every opportunity, he discovered that when the measurement efforts began, there was one college trans athlete in Ohio: a backup wide receiver. (She wasn’t very good.) When Mississippi’s governor signed a bill in 2021 banning trans athletes from participating in sports based on their gender, supporters of the bill did not present a evidence of the presence of trans athletes in the state’s public schools. At that time, the Associated Press contacted two dozen lawmakers who sponsored legislation banning transgender girls from joining girls’ teams in public high schools, in addition to reaching out to conservative groups that supported the bills. In most cases, no one could cite any problematic instances of transgender participation. Most of the bill’s biggest advocates didn’t know if there were transgender athletes in their states.
And yet, as the elections approach, Donald TrumpThe campaign has doubled down on attacks on transgender rights and trans athletes. He started talking about it all the time, even though there really wasn’t much to say. (On top of that, he falsely referred to two female Olympic boxers as trans.) Banning transgender girls’ participation in women’s sports, he said, would be a day one priority. And he started running ads drawing attention to Kamala Harriss support for the transgender community. He was not the only Republican candidate to move in this direction. In Ohio, Republicans spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars before the election attacking Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown, according to a report. report from data tracking company AdImpact. Some advertisements targeted the topic of transgender people; A accused Brown of voting to “allow transgender biological males to participate in women’s sports.” (The claim is FAKE.) The report also stated that ads for the Ohio Senate race mentioning transgender issues in sports were run nearly twenty-seven thousand times on Election Day. The Trump campaign went even further. AdImpact discovered that its campaign spent more than nineteen million dollars last fall on two television ads focused solely on transgender rights issues, and that the ads were shown nearly fifty-five thousand times in l within approximately two weeks. Campaign ads aired during NFL and college football broadcasts. “Kamala is for them. President Trump is for you,” one of the slogans read.
Given the tiny number of transgender athletes and the number of voters who named other policy issues as higher priorities, a rational person might have been confused. But the Trump campaign appears to be capitalizing on certain elements. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 69% of Americans support restrictions on transgender athletes, an increase of seven percentage points from 2021. It doesn’t seem to matter that there are no many trans people who play competitive sports. And fans are not rational when watching the University of Michigan play Michigan State. Football is a zero-sum game. The ads were also zero-sum: them versus you.
Last week, the House passed the so-called Protecting Women and Girls in Sports Act, a bill that would strip federal funds from elementary and secondary schools that allow transgender girls to play on sports teams feminine. The measure was first introduced in 2023 and passed the House that year, but it failed to gain traction in the then Democratic-controlled Senate. Republicans reintroduced the bill in Congress earlier this month. Tommy Tuberville, who also happens to be a former football coach, led the effort in the Senate. This is still unlikely to succeed, at least for now; Even though Republicans hold the majority, seven Democrats would need to break ranks for a filibuster to fail. Despite this, bans on the participation of young transgender athletes on teams aligned with their gender already exist in half of the states in the country.
There are people who want to “save” women’s sport but who don’t like women’s sport. A new study in the Journal of sociology of sport examined survey data collected between 2018 and 2019 – before the issue was highly politicized – and found that opposition to transgender participation in sports correlated with idealized views of female attractiveness and norms of traditional genders. The people most likely to oppose transgender women participating in women’s sports were those most likely to denigrate female athletes in the first place.
But there are also people who want to narrowly define women’s sport on a pronatalist basis and who care a lot about women’s sport. Some of them are or were elite athletes themselves. They consider that the achievements of women’s sport are hard-won and depend on biological differences – real differences, however difficult to define. Before puberty, there is no drastic contrast in the athletic performance of boys and girls. But in general, people who have experienced testosterone-induced puberty have, on average, greater muscle mass, greater cardiovascular fitness, and narrower hips. Their bones are denser, their tendons stronger. In timed races, elite men are on average ten to twelve percent faster. In jumping and pure strength sports, the gaps are even greater. Granted, there is of course immense variation between the sexes, and on an individual level many women are stronger and faster than most men. (Additionally, there are a significant number of people born with differences in sexual development, in which the strict gender binary breaks down.) But the fastest and strongest men are faster and stronger than the fastest and strongest women, and the equality of women’s and men’s sports depends on their segregation. There are ways to alleviate many of the disparities that result from hormonal puberty, including suppressing testosterone to a level typically found in women. (This is currently the policy of some sports governing bodies.) Conversations and research are ongoing about tactics to balance the demands of fairness and equal rights. But not all of these bills are really about fairness. They don’t distinguish between dodgeball and ice hockey, between Ultimate Frisbee and Division I shot put. They target kindergartners as well as Olympians.
One of Trump’s ads featured Harris describing her support for gender-affirming medical care for prisoners, from a 2019 interview. On “The Breakfast Club” radio show, Charlamagne is God described seeing the ad at a football match. “I don’t know if it was the football context, but when you hear the narrator say, ‘Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners’ – that one sentence – I was like, ‘Okay blood, no, I don’t.” I don’t want my taxpayers’ money going to that,” he said. “This ad was effective.” Trump’s campaign used the “Breakfast Club” sound in another ad, even after Charlamagne filed a cease and desist order to stop it. This new ad was also remarkably effective, according to Harris’ superhero analysis. CAP.
Was Is that the backdrop to football? Perhaps the sight of massive men violently crashing into each other encouraged protective parents to worry about their daughters. Perhaps football reinforces traditional gender norms. Perhaps watch rules-based sporting events, which have been watch to influence responses to unrelated political topics, prompted people to increase their emotional reactions to a socially charged issue. Perhaps there was actually no connection between football and the advertisements; Football matches simply have the largest television audience at the moment. But the people are tribal. We define ourselves in terms of groups: the allegiances we are born into and the allegiances we choose. Sports fandom can be a powerful experience of belonging to a group, but also of hatred towards other groups. ♦