Well, we’ve entered that time-honored
phase of the campaign that we’ve come to know so well: When Republicans turn
to their closing argument about the issue that is keeping Americans up at
night. Gas prices? The cost of a pound of ground beef? The war in Iran? The
cost of health care, or the closing of so many rural hospitals? No, no, no, and
no. The issue, of course, is transgender athletes.
“David Jolly is somebody who thinks it’s still okay for boys to be in girls’ sports,” said Byron Donalds, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Florida of his Democratic opponent. “Just pure insanity.” Ads of that nature are running against Sherrod Brown in Ohio, James Talarico in Texas, and many other places. Talarico has walked back his previously supportive stance, and other prominent Democrats in purple or red states have taken similar positions. But that won’t stop the deluge. You’d think—and of course, this is exactly what Republicans want people to think—that Brown and Talarico spend two-thirds of their waking hours scheming to figure out ways to get trans athletes into Buckeye and Longhorn uniforms.
It’s pathetic. Here we have a president and a political party that have done the following. They have seen prices rise dramatically on their watch and have not only had no response to it, but at least in the case of the president, have repeatedly denied that this is even happening; they have sanctioned and defended the detention (in harsh conditions) of innocent people and the shooting of American citizens by a lavishly funded and poorly trained paramilitary force whose members are recruited through appeals to racial extremism; they have started a calamitous war because the president created the conditions that made war, in his mind, necessary (that is, by rescinding the JCPOA); they have exploded the deficit and the debt; they have engaged in (the president) or turned a blind eye to (the rest of the party) corruption on a Ferdinand-Marcos type of scale. In these and numerous other ways, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have made daily life harder for regular Americans while simultaneously degrading the nation’s character and soul. And they’re going to finish this campaign by trying to terrify people about a thing that hardly exists.
That’s a point that can’t be made often enough. In December 2024, NCAA President Charlie Baker was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “How many athletes are there in the U.S. in NCAA schools?”, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin asked. About 510,000, said Baker. And how many of these athletes are openly transgender, Durbin wondered. The answer came back: “Less than 10.”
And what about the Olympics? In this century, which in this case is likely the same thing as saying “ever,” exactly two transgender athletes have competed in the Olympics, along with about six nonbinary athletes, out of something on the order of 13,000 Olympians every four years (the International Olympics Committee has banned trans women from competing in women’s categories starting in 2028; you can agree or disagree with this decision, but whatever one’s view, the fact is that it means that the future numbers will be zero).
Finally, firm numbers on high-school participation don’t seem to exist. It stands to reason that it could be a bit higher, because a lot more athletes make high school teams than win a collegiate scholarship or a spot on an Olympic team, but it’s hard to think of a good reason why it would be that much higher.
The argument that there are very few trans athletes in the country is one Democrats make a lot. But there’s a second argument that I don’t hear them make very often at all, which I think would be extremely effective, maybe even to the point of ending the debate in most voters’ minds: Individual sports all have governing bodies, and it’s not as if those bodies haven’t been thinking about this issue. They have, and they, or most of them, have drawn up policies. So why don’t we just leave it to them?
It’s a more important point that it may seem. Indeed, I would argue that allowing Republicans to talk generally and vaguely about “sports”—a category that includes everything from football to curling to underwater hockey (yep, it’s a thing), as well as everything from the heights of organized professional sports to local rec leagues—amounts to allowing the demagogues to set the terms of debate.
There are all kinds of sports being played out there, and what’s right for one sport might not be right for another. From the web site transathlete.com, here’s a sampling of policies:
•USA Badminton: admits trans women “on a case-by-case basis.”
•USA Biathlon: states that all athletes “may participate in the gender category that best aligns with their gender identity without restrictions, medical intervention, or proof of gender.”
•USA Cycling: adopted a policy last year making the “female” category “open only to those assigned female at birth on their original birth certificate.”
•US Figure Skating: essentially the same as USA Cycling.
•US Golf Association: Promulgated a policy in 2024 allowing trans athletes to participate “if they meet requirements.” Golf!
•USA Roller Sports: a policy that “follows the 2015 IOC Consensus Statement and requires testosterone levels below 10nmol/L for trans women” (that’s a low testosterone level for young men).
•USA Swimming: adopted a policy in 2025 to “limit the female category to those assigned female at birth.”
Several governing bodies have not promulgated a policy, meaning presumably that it’s not a burning issue in their realms: canoe and kayak, equestrian, luge, pentathlon, skateboarding, softball, table tennis, a few others.
This is important information for people to have. Again, one may agree or disagree with these policies; that’s not the point. The point here is what Democrats should tell voters. And I think they can flip the tables on Republicans by bringing these facts to light, because doing so will make voters see that thousands of responsible adults who have devoted their lives to getting young people to play sports have given this matter a lot of thought, and maybe it’s true that politicians don’t need to meddle in this. Facts don’t usually defeat demagoguery, but in this case, they would help a lot.
So, Democrats should say that. But the larger questions here for Democrats concern tone and context. And this is where Democrats have to understand a crucial point: We aren’t still in the 1990s, when Democrats could use the left as a punching bag on such issues. That isn’t the reality anymore, and doing that would be a political, and moral, disaster.
I think everyone, save maybe a small number of ideological activists, understands that this is a tough issue for Democrats, especially in places like Ohio and Texas. Earlier this year, The New Republic commissioned a poll of around 2,400 rank-and-file Democrats on a broad range of issues. Bear in mind here that this was a very liberal group—when given five ideologies by which to label themselves, about a third said they were “liberal” and another third “progressive,” which was clearly defined to respondents as being a little left of liberal.
We asked folks about their level of support for three aspects of trans rights: protecting trans people from discrimination; allowing trans youth access to gender-affirming care; and allowing trans youth to compete in sports according to their chosen gender identity. The answers: protection from discrimination was supported by 80 percent of respondents; gender-affirming care, by 62 percent; playing sports, just 39 percent. And remember—these were loyal Democrats only. Polls of Americans in general tend to show about three-quarters of the population opposed to allowing trans women to compete in women’s sports.
Those kinds of numbers make it tough for Democrats in purple or red states to take a pure pro-trans athlete line. Again, I think most people understand that. But there are defensible ways to finesse the issue and indefensible ways.
Under “Indefensible,” see Gavin Newsom. The California Governor decided it would be dandy to announce his anti-trans athlete position on his podcast with Charlie Kirk as his guest. Kirk, of course, expressed his hatred of gay and trans people on numerous occasions. It was the debut episode of the podcast, in March 2025. Someone aching to be the Democratic nominee for president telling someone like Kirk that “I agree with you completely” on that issue—it’s the textbook definition of throwing a small and powerless constituency under the bus and pandering to a notoriously homophobic right-winger.
A generation or two ago, what Newsom did would have been very widely praised by pundits for “standing up” to the left-wing loonies. There was some of that when he did it, but not very much. There was far more criticism. That’s what’s different today from, say, 1992, when Bill Clinton created his famous “Sister Souljah moment.” Centrists who pine for Democrats to do a Sister Souljah on trans people today fail to understand how things have changed. In a world where verdicts on such moves are decided not by David Broder and Tim Russert but by TikTokkers and podcasters and YouTube influencers, any attempt at such a moment is guaranteed to backfire and offend liberal base voters. It’s also, you know, the wrong thing to do from a moral and ethical standpoint.
More broadly—and this is the needed context I referred to above—Democrats need to keep in mind that trans people are under assault in this country from the right wing. In many states, trans people—not children, but grown adults, who should be able to live their lives without the state threatening their political and civil rights—live in fear of everyday situations, or circumstances like having to go to the hospital. Calls to LBGTQ hotlines have spiked. Forty-three states have passed 63 bills this year alone impinging on the rights of transgender people. In one poll, nearly half of trans respondents said they had moved or wanted to move to a more hospitable place.
If Republicans are going to bang on about trans athletes, then part of the Democratic response must be to broaden the conversation and remind Americans of this appalling dehumanization campaign. Your average American may not be willing to fight and die for his trans brothers and sisters, but I doubt he wants people to be persecuted in the United States of America. Polls tend to show that 70 or 80 (or more) percent of Americans think trans people deserve the same rights as everyone else.
So, to sum up, the Democratic response on the trans athlete question should consist of three parts:
1. Look, all these sports have governing bodies, and those bodies have all studied this. What works for fencing might not work for track and field. So why don’t we just leave it to the people who ponder these matters for a living, and keep the politicians out of it?
2. The president of the NCAA said there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of literally more than half a million athletes at America’s colleges and universities, so why is my opponent spending so much time talking about this and not gas prices and the war?
3. Finally, if my opponent wants to talk so much about transgender people, let’s talk about the way trans people, kids and adults, are being persecuted in red states and living in fear, and the fact that trans Americans who are willing and eager to wear this nation’s uniform and even die for their country if asked are being denied the right to do so.
Those three points defend a progressive political position without throwing anybody under any bus or bowing to right-wing framing or pandering to some presumed lowest-common-denominator thinking. They also, I wager, would sound like common sense to your average person.
It’s worth pointing out just how
much the landscape has changed since the 2024 election bred fear that Trump’s
“they/them” political ads hurt Kamala Harris’s chances. Need proof? Here is
Lanae Erickson, the senior vice president for social policy for none other than
Third Way, talking
about trans issues in a September piece at Assigned Media, a web site that tracks
trans issues:
<blockquote>“Going after healthcare for adults, kicking people out of the
military, taking people’s driver’s licenses away, they can’t pick up their kids
at school – these are well beyond the pale for most American voters. We’ve got
an HHS secretary right now who believes the only appropriate healthcare for
transgender people is conversion therapy. That’s crazy.” If Third Way’s
point person on this issue isn’t afraid to say the right thing, no one in the
Democratic coalition has any excuse.
I realize that Democrats still have to answer the basic “do you support trans females participating in girls’ sports?” with a simple yes or a no. Some, like Talarico and others, will feel they have to say no. But I think if they say it in the context of the kind of rhetoric I suggest, most activists will grant them some leeway. Activists worry that yielding on the athletes question will inevitably lead to giving way on other issues, which is certainly a fair concern. But making a broader defense of the rights of transgender people—and actually meaning it—can allay that concern.
And most regular voters will think what they said is fine, and they can pivot back to the issues people actually care about. And if the Democrats can fight off the relentless and vile Republican attacks on this issue, that leaves the Republicans with nothing. Which is precisely what they offer the country.
