What did people care about in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election? Last fall, Gallup ran a reconnaissance And he asked. Economy was first on the list; Most voters rated it as “very important.” Majorities of respondents also named a large number of other issues as “extremely important” or “extremely important” to their vote: democracy in the United States, terrorism, national security, selects Supreme Court justices, immigration, health care, gun policy, taxes, abortion, crime, income and wealth distribution, deficit Federal budget, foreign affairs, energy policy, race relations, etc. In fact, only two issues on the list were considered “at least very important” by a majority of voters. One of them was climate change, which half of those surveyed voted as “somewhat important” or “not important.” The other was transgender rights, which came last.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, transgender issues are less prominent than other topics. (As for climate change, tell that to A Greenland melting.) Only about one percent of American adults identify as transgender, Gallup I mentioned last year. And in the area that dominates the discussion of transgender rights these days — sports — the fraction is much smaller. In mid-December, NCAA President Charlie Baker appeared before a panel during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on federal regulations on sports gambling. As seems so often these days in politics, the topic turned to transgender participation in sports. “How many athletes in the United States are at NCAA schools?” Dick Durbin, a senator from Illinois, asked Baker. “Five hundred and ten thousand,” Baker answered. “How many transgender athletes do you realize?” Durbin continued. “Less than ten,” Baker said. That’s less than 0.002 percent. In October, a spokesman for the Michigan High School Athletic Association He said Detroit Free press That is, out of one hundred and seventy thousand high school athletes in the state, only transgender girls are girls—or roughly .001 percent.
But the motivation to ban transgender athletes from sports was never about the numbers. In 2023, the Ohio House of Representatives passed a bill banning trans girls from competing in girls’ sports as early as kindergarten. It was called the Save Women Sports Act, conjuring up an image of barbarians at the gate. But, when journalist Pablo Torre I went looking As for these girls who were, allegedly, breaking all the records and stealing all the opportunities, it was found that when the efforts of this measure began, there was one cross-varsity athlete in Ohio: a backup catcher. (It wasn’t very good) Around that time, The Associated Press I called Two lawmakers who were sponsoring legislation to ban transgender girls from joining girls’ teams in public high schools, in addition to reaching out to conservative groups that were supporting the bills. In most cases, no one can cite any problematic instances of transgender participation. Many of the bills’ biggest advocates didn’t know if there were any transgender athletes in their states at all.
However, as the elections approached, Donald TrumpThe campaign to attack the rights of transgender people and trans athletes has doubled. He started talking about them all the time, even when there was, in fact, not much to talk about. (Furthermore, he falsely described two Olympic boxers as trans. He began airing ads Kamala HarrisSupport the transgender community. He was not the only Republican candidate to trend 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 From data tracking company Adimpact. Some ads took on a transgender theme; one Brown was accused of voting “to allow transgender biological males to participate in girls’ sports.” (The claim is bloomerThe report also stated that ads for the Ohio Senate race that mentioned transgender issues in sports had aired nearly twenty-seven thousand times by Election Day. The Trump campaign went further. Adimpact found that his campaign spent more than nineteen million dollars last fall on two television ads alone centered on transgender rights issues, and that the ads aired nearly fifty-five thousand times within two weeks or so. Campaign ads were played during NFL and college football broadcasts. “Kamala is for them/them. President Trump is for you,” one line went.
Considering how invisible a few transgender athletes are, and how many voters cited other policy issues as bigger priorities, a rational person might be confused. But the Trump campaign appears to be taking advantage of a few things. A 2023 Gallup poll found that sixty-nine percent of Americans favor restrictions on transgender athletes, an increase of seven percentage points from 2021. It doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of people who play competitive sports out there. And fans are not rational when they watch the University of Michigan play Michigan. Football is a scratch game. The ads were zero-also-for-you.
Last week, the House passed the so-called Protections for Women and Girls in Sports, a bill that withholds federal money from K-12 schools that allow transgender girls to play on girls’ sports teams. First introduced in 2023, the measure passed the House that year, but failed to gain traction in the then-Democrat-controlled Senate. Republicans reintroduced the legislation to Congress earlier this month. Tommy Tuberville, who is leading the effort in the Senate, was a former football coach. It’s still unlikely you’ll succeed there, at least for now; Although Republicans have a majority, seven Democrats would have to break ranks for the failure to fail. However, bans on young transgender athletes from participating on teams that align with their gender are already in place in half the states in the country.
There are people who want to “save” women’s sports who don’t like women’s sports. new He studies in Sociology of Sports Journal It reviewed survey data collected between 2018-19—before the issue became highly politicized—and found that opposition to transgender participation in sports was linked to idealized views of female attractiveness and traditional gender norms. People who were more likely to oppose transgender women competing in women’s sports were also more likely to identify as female athletes in the first place.
But there are also people who want to narrowly define women’s sports based on birth who care a lot about women’s sports. Some of them are, or were, elite athletes themselves. They see the gains of women’s sports as brute and dependent on biological differences—real processes of difference, however difficult to define. Before puberty, there is no dramatic difference in athletic performances between boys and girls. But in general, people who have gone through testosterone-driven puberty have, on average, more muscle mass, more cardiovascular capacity, and narrower hips. Their bones are denser, and their tendons are stronger. In specific races, palmist men are, on average, ten to twelve percent faster. In sports that involve jumping and pure power, the gaps are larger. Granted, there is enormous variation within the genders, of course, and on an individual level, there are a lot of women who are stronger and faster than most men. (Moreover, there is a large number of people who are born with differences in sex development, where the strict binary between the sexes It collapses.) 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 class. There are ways to mitigate many of the discrepancies that result after hormone-driven puberty, including suppressing testosterone to a range more normal in women. (This is currently the policy of some sports governing bodies.) There is ongoing conversation and research into tactics to balance equity and equal rights demands. But all these bills aren’t really about fairness. They don’t differentiate between Dodgeball and Ice Hockey, between Ultimate Frisbee and Division I Lut Put. They target kindergarteners as well as Olympians.
One of Trump’s Harris ads describing her support for gender-affirming medical care for prisoners, came from a 2019 interview. On the radio show “The Breakfast Club,” charlamagne tha god Describe seeing the ad during a football game. “I don’t know if it was the football background, but when you hear the narrator say, ‘Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes on prisoners’—that one line—I was, like, ‘No, I don’t, no, I don’t pick up.’” . “He wanted to go to taxpayer dollars,” he said. “This ad was effective.” The Trump campaign used this “Breakfast Club” sting in a different ad, even after Charlamagne filed a cease-and-desist order to stop it. This new ad was remarkably effective, according to analysis by Harris Super Buck.
He was Is it a football background? Perhaps the sight of huge men violently attacking each other encouraged protective fathers to worry about their daughters. Football may reinforce traditional gender norms. Maybe watch rules-based sporting events, which were He appears To influence responses to unrelated political topics, people have prepared to heighten their emotional responses to a socially charged issue. There may not have been any connection between football and advertising; Football games simply have the largest television audiences now. But people are tribal. We define ourselves in terms of our groups—the loyalties we are born into, and the loyalties we choose. Sports Fandom can be a powerful experience of belonging to a group, and hating other groups as well. ♦
