We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: anti-trans sports bills are trying to “solve” a problem that doesn’t exist. ACLU communications strategist and Twitter user Gillian Branstetter hammered that point home by pointing out that the number of states that ban trans student athletes from competing at the K-12 level actually outnumbers the number of trans student athletes that exist in America.
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The text screenshot in Branstetter’s tweet comes from a May report in TIME which found that there are actually no nationwide estimates for the number of trans athletes competing in K-12 sports. In the article, the founder of the group Save Women’s Sports, which wants to ban trans girls from women’s athletics, says she can “verify five examples in the country of trans girls K-12” who have played on a women’s sports team.
To back up the founder’s assertion, the article cites statistics from individual states including Kentucky (which has one trans athlete) and Utah (four trans athletes, only one of whom was playing on a girls’ team). Kentucky banned that singular athlete, 13-year-old field hockey player Fischer Wells, from her sport officially last week. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who is a Republican, vetoed his state’s anti-trans sports bill in March, though the legislature overrode that veto.
In addition to Utah and Kentucky, 16 other states currently ban trans athletes from competing on the appropriately gendered sports teams, according to data from the Movement Advancement Project. That means over a third of the states have enacted such bans, despite the fact that in many of those states, there are no out trans athletes to be found.
There’s also no conclusive evidence that trans women and girls have any innate advantage over cis women when it comes to athletic competition anyway — for trans people who are transitioning, hormones and blockers radically alter fat distribution and muscle development.
Although the Biden administration has voiced support for trans children, many state laws banning trans children from sports remain in place. Still, recent legal developments offer some hope. In July, a federal judge ruled in favor of an anonymous 10-year-old trans girl who sued her Indiana school district in order to be able to continue competing on the girls’ softball team. While the decision did not block the law from enforcement as a whole, the judge wrote that there was a “strong likelihood” that the plaintiff would succeed in arguing that the law violates Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Even though anti-trans sports bans may not actually be directly impacting as many trans athletes as their proponents wish they were, the damage of those laws goes far beyond that. A January report from the Trevor Project found that 85% of trans and nonbinary youth, and 66% of LGTBTQ+ youth overall, stated that their mental health was directly impacted by anti-trans legislation, regardless of whether or not it was actually enacted.
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