Trans Athletes Didn’t Lose Democrats the Election

As they deal with the shock of losing both the presidency and Congress, Democrats have been trying to figure out what went wrong. It appears some are convinced they lost the election because of Harris’s support of transgender people and, in particular, trans athletes. They’re wrong.

First of all, most Americans didn’t see school sports or transgender policies as priority issues this election. Exit polls showed that voters’ primary concerns were the state of American democracy, the economy, abortion, immigration, and foreign policy. Issues related to transgender people were not top of mind. 

This is probably because the trans people in sports crisis is an issue Republicans manufactured. Transgender people simply aren’t dominating sports leagues. Every day Americans aren’t impacted by transgender people’s sports participation. In the history of the Olympics, only one transgender woman has competed: weightlifter Laurel Hubbard. She was eliminated in her first round. When state legislators introducing trans sports bills were asked by The Associated Press to name a single trans athlete in their state, most couldn’t. Republican governor of Utah Spencer Cox vetoed his state’s trans sports ban when his research found there was only one trans girl out of 40,000 students playing school sports in his state. The NCAA has estimated that out of 500,000 student athletes competing, fewer than 40 are transgender (many of whom are transgender males not competing in women’s leagues, the leagues supposedly under attack).

So why are we talking about this at all? Because Republicans want us to be. They invested over $60 million dollars in ads targeting transgender people. Democrats appear to have invested next to nothing. Harris never uttered the word transgender during her campaign. Each time she was asked a question about transgender rights, she evaded. It’s not particularly surprising that when one side goes all in on an issue and you try to ignore it, that you lose the messaging war on that issue.

Trump has explicitly stated that he shares the goals of organizations like the evangelical legal group The Alliance Defending Freedom to promote “the nuclear family.” It is important to these groups that Americans act in accordance with traditional stereotypes based on their sex assigned at birth. To start working toward this goal, they want transgender women to live as American men. This includes, for example, playing on boys’ sports teams, even if they live as girls in every other aspect of their day. They also hope to paint transgender women as scary and threatening, so that there will be less sympathy as they roll back their rights and create their ideal version of what America should look like – conforming to traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.

Republicans know that the best way to convince Americans to dislike transgender people is to make them feel like transgender people are taking something away from them. It’s a strategy they’ve used against minority groups who don’t share their values for decades. In the 1990s, inspired by civil rights groups hitting a wall on affirmative action, they used the slogan “equal rights not special rights” to try to fight LGBT anti-discrimination laws. Now they are painting a picture of transgender women taking sports titles and scholarships away from cisgender people. The reality, of course, is that transgender people are stigmatized and face disadvantages all throughout American life. 

I don’t purport to know why Democrats lost this election so badly. But I can tell you with relative certainty that it isn’t because of transgender athletes in sports. The more Democrats convince themselves it was, the more they feed in Republican’s hands. Republicans want you to think of transgender women as men, so they can enforce their overarching worldview that we all need to abide by the traditional expectations of our sex. Trans sports bans are only their first step in their plan.

Jack Turban MD is a pediatric psychiatrist and author of the book Free to Be: Understanding Kids & Gender Identity. Find him on BlueSky.