How trans children became 'a political football' for the Republican party
Republican lawmakers in more than 25 US states have advanced legislation banning transgender children from certain sports teams and limiting their access to gender-affirming healthcare.
Trans youth represent just a fraction of the US population – recent estimates suggest they make up 0.7% to 2% of youth. But conservative lawmakers have introduced more than 80 bills regulating their lives in the first three months of 2021, the highest-ever number of anti-trans legislative proposals filed in a single year.
The volume of bills, which have spread in nearly every region of the country, and the coordinated campaigns behind some of them, suggests trans kids’ lives have become a central focus of the GOP culture war following the 2020 presidential election.
“They are acting like we aren’t humans, that we don’t deserve the same things as them,” said Kris Wilka, a 13-year-old football player and trans boy in South Dakota, where lawmakers have passed legislation that would prohibit trans students from playing on the sports teams that correspond with their gender.
“Trans rights have been turned into a wedge issue,” said Jules Gill-Peterson, professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the University of Pittsburgh, who has researched the history of trans children in the US.
“The Republican party is hardly interested in defending women’s sports. This is a purely calculated political play,” Gill-Peterson said. “And it’s really easy to use children as a political football, because we don’t grant children the privilege to speak for themselves and defend their own interests.”
‘This is not a real issue’
The bills have largely focused on two issues: sports and healthcare. The sports bills seek to ban trans kids from competing on teams that correspond with their gender. The healthcare bills block their access to gender-affirming medical treatments, and in some cases criminalize doctors and parents who support them.
The youth sports bills, which claim to “promote fairness in women’s sports”, are based on a simple claim: that boys will be allowed to compete against girls and have an unfair advantage.
“They’re telling parents of cisgender children that you’re losing something by allowing transgender youth to play in sports,” said Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an LGBTQ+ rights group. “We’ve seen this playbook before – you’re losing something if you allow same-sex couples to marry, if you protect racial minorities in the workplace, if immigration laws are respected. It’s us v them.”
But there is no research suggesting that trans girls have a competitive advantage. When the Associated Press recently contacted lawmakers behind the proposed bans, most couldn’t cite a single local example of a trans girl playing sports. Some pointed to a Connecticut case in which cisgender girls’ families sued, alleging that two trans female sprinters had an unfair advantage.
But two days after that lawsuit was filed, one of the cis girls beat her trans competitor in a state championship race, noted Dr Jack Turban, a child psychiatry fellow at Stanford who researches trans youth mental health: “This is not a real issue impacting America’s youth.” In California, schools for years have been required to allow trans students to participate on the teams that match their gender, and there have been no concerns, he said.
Some GOP lawmakers were supporting the bans because they knew it would galvanize voters afraid of change and unfamiliar with trans people, said the Arkansas state senator Joyce Elliott, a Democrat who has spoken against the proposed ban in her state.
Elliott, who is Black, noted that youth sports had long been a battleground for civil rights: she was barred from playing on the school basketball team with white students when she was 15 in 1966. A coach, she said, told her: “‘We don’t have a uniform that will fit you.’”
“I just had flashbacks of standing in that gym and the coach saying those words to me that I knew were based on my race and nothing else, and how deeply that hurt,” she recalled. “All I wanted to do was play.”
Jeanette Jennings, the mother of the trans reality star Jazz Jennings, who was banned from girls’ soccer when she was eight years old, believes the legislative focus on trans children is a response to increased visibility. “Trans kids have always been there, but in the past they were afraid to come out, so they waited until they were adults. But more and more, kids are not afraid to express who they are, and parents and family are supporting them, which is what we’ve been fighting for all along.”
From bathroom bills to sports bills
The legislative offensive around trans youth follows years of legislative battles over so-called bathroom bills.
In 2015, the year the US supreme court’s ruling legalized gay marriage, Republican lawmakers in states across the country began introducing a first round of bills that sought to block trans people from using bathrooms that corresponded with their gender.
Supported by conservative groups, the drive echoed the campaigns against abortion access and gay marriage that had mobilized Republican voters in years past.
The measures largely failed, but in North Carolina, a bathroom ban became law. That measure, which passed five years ago this week, resulted in boycotts from sports leagues, corporations and musicians that cost the state billions of dollars and the law was ultimately repealed.
Kasey Suffredini, an advocate who led a campaign to defeat an anti-trans ballot initiative in Massachusetts in 2018, said that the organizers behind the measures weren’t actually concerned with the safety of women in bathrooms. Instead, he said, “they just don’t want LGBTQ people out in daily life”. He pointed to a 2018 blogpost, published by Mass Resistance, an antiLGBT group, that said backers of the bills “concocted” a “bathroom safety male predator argument” as a way to confront “LGBT ideology”.
Republican strategists began to recognize that bathroom bills were a losing battle. The American Principles Project, a leading conservative thinktank, acknowledged in 2019 that its research found that GOP voters were not concerned about trans women using women’s bathrooms. Its polling, however, found that voters were more swayed by messages raising fears about trans girls in sports.
The new wave of sports bills and other anti-trans proposals started spreading last year amid concrete victories for LGBTQ+ advocacy, including a supreme court ruling defending trans rights in the workplace. They intensified this year as Joe Biden took office.