Time - INT (2022-06-20)

56 TIME June 20/June 27, 2022

SOCIETY

IN SPRING 2020, IDAHO BECAME THE FIRST STATE IN THE
U.S. to ban transgender girls and women from participating
in women’s sports. Two years later, 17 states have enacted
similar laws. Trans athletes—particularly trans girls—are now
in the midst of America’s raging “culture wars,” as bills tar-
geting trans and gender- expansive young people proliferate
across the country.
Sports bans have often served as the fi rst move in a larger
assault on trans rights. In 2021, Texas, Florida, and Alabama
each enacted a sports ban. This year, Texas has taken steps to
deny trans youth access to gender- affi rming care, Florida has
banned classroom discussion about gender identity and sexual
orientation in primary grade levels, and Alabama has done both.
“Trans people are either full members of society or we are
not,” says Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist at
the American Civil Liberties Union. “The moment our civil
rights start coming with asterisks and exemptions, it leaves
the door open for a lot of the very hostile and cruel legisla-
tion we’ve seen introduced this session.”
The reason for this explosion in sports bans isn’t a surge of
trans student-athletes dominating the playing fi eld, political
strategists and LGBTQ advocates say. It’s politics. Conserva-
tive groups and lawmakers realized that the issue could ex-
cite Republicans and potential swing voters, drawing them
into broader cultural debates surrounding trans rights in the
U.S.—battles that tend to serve Republicans electorally.
The idea of trans girls and women competing against cis-
gender female athletes tends to trigger emotional responses
in people who don’t know an out trans person, playing on ste-
reotypes about gender and biology. The issue acts as “sort of a
gateway drug for people into the larger debate around gender
and who gets to call themselves a woman,” says a conserva-
tive who works on Title IX issues, who requested anonymity
to speak candidly about the rise in legislation.
The bans “are gaining steam for the same reason that elec-
tion audits and [critical race theory] bans have been popular
over the past year,” says Republican strategist Sarah Long-
well, who had been critical of the GOP under Donald Trump.
“They are PR campaigns masquerading as legislation, de-
signed to keep culture wars at the center of the conversation.”
A March 2022 YouGov poll found that 77% of Republicans
oppose allowing trans student-athletes to play on sports teams
that match their gender identity, compared with 24% of Dem-
ocrats. Just as same-sex marriage was used as a wedge issue
for Republican voters in the 2000s, these are the “new wedge
culture- war issues that help drive GOP enthusiasm and, more
importantly, alienate Democrats from swing voters when they
fail to provide a coherent counternarrative,” Longwell says.
“Republicans are on off ense on these issues, and it’s working.
Democrats still haven’t fi gured out an eff ective defense, let

alone an off ense strategy of their own.”

While GOP lawmakers claim the

bans are designed to “protect women,”

rather than to discriminate against a

vulnerable group, LGBTQ advocates

argue they are a solution in search of

a problem. There are vanishingly few

examples nationwide of trans ath-

letes attempting to compete at all, and

those who do are subject to local pol-

icies. There isn’t reliable national data

on the issue, but in Michigan, for ex-

ample, the Michigan High School Ath-

letic Association (MHSAA) reviews

whether trans athletes can play on a

case-by-case basis, and the MHSAA

told the Detroit Free Press it’s had an

average of two requests a year out of

180,000 high school athletes in the

state. In that context, expansive state-

level bans are both unnecessary and

cruel, argues Cathryn Oakley, state leg-

islation director and senior counsel at

the LGBTQ advocacy group Human

Rights Campaign, which has chal-

lenged state-level sports bans in court.

T H E G OP ST R AT EGY TO

USE TRANS SPORTS BANS

FOR POLITICAL GAIN

By Madeleine Carlisle

WYO.

WASH.

ORE.

N.D.

N.M.

NEV.

IOWA

UTAH

MINN.

KANS.

IDAHO

CALIF. COLO.

ALASKA

MORE

PROTECTIVE

MORE

RESTRICTIVE

TEXAS

S.D.

ARIZ. OKLA.

NEB.

MONT.

MO.

SAFE HAVEN

California leads

the country

in gender-

equality laws;

it mandates

protections

such as LGBTQ-

inclusive

curricula

GENDER-

IDENTITY POLICIES

Degree to which current laws,

when taken together, protect

or restrict the rights of trans

and gender-expansive people

SOURCE: MOVEMENT ADVANCEMENT PROJECT

LGBTQ STATE EQUALITY RANKINGS

TIME MAP BY EMILY BARONE AND MADELEINE CARLISLE

EXCLUDED ATHLETES

17 states have banned trans

student-athletes from teams

aligned with their gender iden-

tity since Idaho did in 2020