Every few months, the fight over transgender athletes flares up again, louder than the last time, and every time I notice the same thing: the volume never quite matches the size of the actual problem. This summer the argument reached the highest court in the land, when the Supreme Court upheld state laws barring transgender girls from school sports — a decision I revisited one season later. So it feels like the right moment to say plainly where I stand.
Let me start by granting the other side its best point, because I think we owe each other that much. The stated goal — protecting fairness and safety in women’s sports — is a good one. Women fought a long time for their own leagues, their own scholarships, their own record books, and it is not bigotry to want to guard them. I want to guard them too. The question is not whether to protect women’s sport. The question is whether these bans actually do it, or whether we are pouring enormous energy into a problem that barely exists.
Consider the numbers. Across professional leagues and the N.C.A.A. — which counts more than half a million athletes — the N.C.A.A.’s own president told a Senate panel there are fewer than ten transgender competitors. Fewer than ten. Out of more than 510,000. We are writing laws, holding hearings, and arguing on national television about a group of people you could fit around a dinner table.
And even within that tiny group, the picture is far less lopsided than the shouting suggests. Yes, a few transgender women may carry some residual advantage. But most have been on hormone replacement therapy for years, sometimes for decades — long enough that a cisgender woman with naturally high testosterone could well be the stronger athlete in the race. Biology is not tidy. There are natal women walking onto the track today with hormonal profiles that would raise more eyebrows than the trans woman two lanes over, if anyone bothered to test.
There is another wrinkle the debate almost never mentions. Muscle and frame do not always move together. A transgender woman who has lost much of her muscle mass to years of estrogen is often carrying a larger skeletal frame with less strength to power it — which, in plenty of sports, is not an advantage at all but a genuine disadvantage. So when we draw the line at the birth certificate, we are using the crudest possible instrument for a question that is anything but crude.
If fairness is what we actually care about — and I believe it should be — then the honest line isn’t biology at birth. It’s hormones in the body now: estrogen versus testosterone, measured, not assumed. That is a standard rooted in what actually affects performance, and it would treat the natal woman with high testosterone and the trans woman on long-term HRT by the same rule. It asks more about the body than what a birth certificate says. It also happens to be fairer.
Now bring it down from the elite level, because that is where these laws do their quietest damage. Before puberty, boys and girls have little physical advantage over one another at all. After puberty, a teenage trans girl on testosterone blockers — many of them also on estrogen — develops in close proximity to her female-born classmates. And at that age, sport is not about world medals or podiums. It is about showing up, being on a team, learning to lose and try again, belonging somewhere on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s camaraderie, competition, and fun.
Denying a young trans girl a place on that team is not protecting anyone. It is just mean-spirited. And here is the part that should give even the bans’ supporters pause: in many of the states that have passed this legislation, lawmakers could point to one actual case, or none at all. They wrote the law first and went looking for the problem afterward. That is not how you protect children. That is how you find a villain to run against.
So forgive me if I see this for what it is. While the economy flails, while wars grind on, while corruption loots the treasury and picks the pockets of the very people cheering it on, we are told the urgent threat to the Republic is a handful of teenagers who want to run relay races or play basketball. It is a solution in search of a problem. In other words, just more noise in a very loud debate.
I have spent a long time writing about how we sort people — into the boxes we build to define transgender people, into categories that flatten the real complexity of gender identity, into narrow ideas about what we actually mean by womanhood. This is another box, dressed up as a rulebook. If you want more of where these arguments come from, you’ll find the rest of my columns and commentary here.
Protect women’s sports. Please. Just do it with a standard that measures what actually matters — and with enough honesty to admit when the emergency was manufactured. The girls on that Tuesday-afternoon team deserve at least that much.
FAQ Section
Q1: What is the main argument against banning transgender athletes from school sports?
A1: The main argument is that such bans are a disproportionate response to a very small issue. With fewer than ten transgender athletes in the NCAA’s half-million, the focus on bans is seen as a manufactured political issue rather than a genuine effort to protect fairness in sports.
Q2: Is there a fairer way to ensure competition in women’s sports?
A2: The article proposes that a fairer standard would be to measure current hormone levels (testosterone vs. estrogen) rather than relying on a person’s sex assigned at birth. This approach would apply the same scientific standard to all athletes, including cisgender women with naturally high testosterone.
Q3: Do transgender women always have a physical advantage in sports?
A3: Not necessarily. Many transgender women have been on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for years, which significantly reduces muscle mass. While they may have a larger skeletal frame, they often have less muscle to power it, which can be a disadvantage in many sports.