What did people care about in the lead-up to the 2024 Presidential election? Last fall, Gallup ran a poll and asked. The economy was first on the list; most voters rated it as “extremely important.” Majorities of respondents also named a slew of other issues as either “extremely important” or “very important” to their vote: democracy in the U.S., terrorism and national security, picks for Supreme Court Justices, immigration, health care, gun policy, taxes, abortion, crime, income and wealth distribution, the federal budget deficit, foreign affairs, energy policy, race relations, and so on. In fact, only two issues on the list were not considered at least “very important” by a majority of voters. One was climate change, which half of those surveyed voted as “somewhat important” or “not important.” The other was transgender rights, which came last.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that transgender issues seemed less salient than the other topics. (As for climate change, tell that to a melting Greenland.) Only around one per cent of American adults identify as transgender, Gallup reported last year. And in the area that dominates discussion of transgender rights these days—sports—the fraction is much smaller. In mid-December, the president of the N.C.A.A., Charlie Baker, appeared before a panel during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about federal regulations on sports gambling. As often seems the case these days in politics, the subject turned to the participation of transgender people in sports. “How many athletes are there in the United States in N.C.A.A. schools?” Dick Durbin, a senator from Illinois, asked Baker. “Five hundred and ten thousand,” Baker answered. “How many transgender athletes are you aware of?” Durbin continued. “Less than ten,” Baker said. That’s less than .002 per cent. In October, a spokesman for the Michigan High School Athletic Association told the Detroit Free Press that, out of the hundred and seventy thousand high-school athletes in the state, only two are transgender girls—or roughly .001 per cent.

But the drive to ban transgender athletes from sports has never been about numbers. In 2023, Ohio’s House of Representatives passed a bill banning trans girls from competing in girls’ sports as early as kindergarten. It was called the Save Women’s Sports Act, conjuring an image of barbarians at the gate. But, when the journalist Pablo Torre went looking for these girls who were, purportedly, breaking all the records and stealing all the opportunities, he found that, when the efforts of the measure began, there was one trans varsity athlete in Ohio: a backup catcher. (She wasn’t very good.) When the governor of Mississippi signed a bill in 2021 barring trans athletes from competing in sports according to their gender, supporters of the bill didn’t present evidence of trans athletes at public schools in the state. Around that time, the Associated Press contacted two dozen lawmakers who were sponsoring legislation to prohibit transgender girls from joining girls’ teams at public high schools, in addition to reaching out to conservative groups that were supporting the bills. In most cases, no one could cite any problematic instances of transgender participation. Many of the bills’ biggest advocates did not know whether there were any transgender athletes in their states at all.

And yet, as the election neared, Donald Trump’s campaign doubled down on attacking transgender rights and trans athletes. He started talking about them all the time, even when there was, in reality, not much to talk about. (On top of that, he falsely labelled two female Olympic boxers as trans.) Banning the participation of transgender girls from girls’ sports, he said, would be a “Day One” priority. And he started airing ads calling attention to Kamala Harris’s support of the transgender community. He wasn’t the only Republican candidate to tack in that direction. In Ohio, Republicans spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars ahead of the election to attack the incumbent Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, according to a report from the data-tracking firm AdImpact. Some of the ads took aim at the subject of transgender people; one accused Brown of voting to “allow transgender biological males to participate in girls’ sports.” (The claim is false.) The report also stated that ads for the Ohio Senate race that mentioned transgender issues in sports were aired almost twenty-seven thousand times by Election Day. Trump’s campaign went even further. AdImpact found that his campaign spent more than nineteen million dollars last fall on two television ads alone that centered on transgender-rights issues, and that the ads aired nearly fifty-five thousand times in a span of two weeks or so. The campaign’s ads were played during N.F.L. and college-football broadcasts. “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” one of the taglines went.

Given how vanishingly few transgender athletes there are, and how many voters pointed to other policy issues as greater priorities, a rational person might have been confused. But the Trump campaign seemed to capitalize on a few things. A 2023 Gallup poll found that sixty-nine per cent of Americans favor restrictions on transgender athletes, a seven-percentage-point increase from 2021. It doesn’t seem to matter that there aren’t all that many trans people playing competitive sports. And fans are not rational when they’re watching the University of Michigan play Michigan State. Football is a zero-sum game. The ads were zero-sum, too—them versus you.

Last week, the House passed the so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, a bill that would withhold federal funds from K-12 schools that allow transgender girls to play on girls’ sports teams. The measure was first introduced in 2023, and passed in the House that year, but it failed to gain traction in the then Democrat-controlled Senate. Republicans reintroduced the legislation to Congress earlier this month. Leading the effort in the Senate was Tommy Tuberville, who also happens to be a former football coach. It’s still unlikely to succeed there, at least for now; even though Republicans have a majority, seven Democrats would have to break ranks for a filibuster to fail. Even so, bans on the participation of youth transgender athletes on teams aligned with their gender already exist in half of the states in the country.

There are people who want to “save” women’s sports who don’t like women’s sports. A new study in the Sociology of Sport Journal reviewed survey data collected between 2018-19—before the issue was highly politicized—and found that opposition to transgender participation in sports was correlated with idealized views of female attractiveness and traditional gender norms. The people who were more likely to oppose transgender women competing in women’s sports were the ones who were more likely to denigrate female athletes in the first place.

But there are also people who want to narrowly define women’s sports on a natalist basis who care very much about women’s sports. Some of them are, or were, élite athletes themselves. They see the gains of women’s sports as hard-won and dependent on biological differences—differences that are real, however difficult to define. Before puberty, there is no radical contrast in athletic performances between boys and girls. But in general people who have gone through testosterone-driven puberty have, on average, greater muscle mass, more cardiovascular capacity, and narrower hips. Their bones are denser, their tendons stronger. In timed races, élite men are, on average, ten to twelve per cent faster. In sports involving jumping and pure strength, the gaps are even bigger. Granted, there is immense variation within the sexes, of course, and, on an individual level, there are plenty of women who are stronger and quicker than most men. (Moreover, there is a significant number of people who are born with differences of sex development, in which the strict binary between the sexes breaks down.) But the fastest and strongest men are faster and stronger than the fastest and strongest women, and the equality of women’s and men’s sports depends on their segregation. There are ways to mitigate many of the disparities that result after hormone-driven puberty, including suppressing testosterone to a range more typically found in women. (That is currently the policy of some sports-governing bodies.) There are ongoing conversations and research into tactics to balance the demands of equity and equal rights. But all these bills are not really about fairness. They do not distinguish between dodgeball and ice hockey, between Ultimate Frisbee and Division I shot put. They target kindergartners as well as Olympians.

One of the Trump ads featured Harris describing her support for gender-affirming medical care for prisoners, from a 2019 interview. On the radio show “The Breakfast Club,” Charlamagne tha God described seeing the ad during a football game. “I don’t know if it was the backdrop of football, but, when you hear the narrator say, ‘Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners’—that one line—I was, like, Hell no, I don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to that,” he said. “That ad was effective.” Trump’s campaign used that “Breakfast Club” sound bite in a different ad, even after Charlamagne filed a cease-and-desist order to stop it. That new ad was also remarkably effective, according to analysis by a Harris super PAC.

Was it the backdrop of football? Perhaps the sight of massive men violently crashing into one another encouraged protective parents to worry about their daughters. Perhaps football reinforces traditional gender norms. Perhaps watching rule-based sporting events, which have been shown to affect responses to unconnected political topics, primed people to heighten their emotional responses to a socially charged issue. Perhaps there was actually no connection between football and the advertisements; football games simply have the biggest television audiences now. But people are tribal. We define ourselves in terms of our groups—the allegiances we are born into, and the allegiances we choose. Sports fandom can be a powerful experience of belonging to a group, and of loathing other groups, too. ♦