Republicans have manufactured a crisis in women’s sports, just in time for the midterm elections. Democrats should find the courage to defend trans children—or at the very least, leave them alone.

Women’s sports hasn’t historically been a big issue for Republicans, so why is it all anyone can talk about as the 2026 midterms approach? 

On Sept. 28, 2026, the Department of Education formally excluded LGBT students from legal protection against sex discrimination under the the federal Title IX program. The administration claimed that the rule change would help “women and girls,” including in sports. 

And whenever Democratic candidates for office sit for an interview, some talking head is bound to ask them about whether trans girls should play field hockey or whatever.

This is a ginned up trans panic, brought to you by Republicans who know that if you can manipulate public opinion on the culture war issue du jour, you can distract people from the economic issues that actually matter to them: outrageous gas prices and barely affordable groceries. 

Because here’s the truth: There aren’t enough trans athletes competing in sports, either at the elementary or college level, to warrant changes to federal law or a single state statute banning them—much less the more-than-two-dozen state laws now on the books. 

A fabricated culture war

The NCAA, college sports’ governing body, has already said as much. 

When asked how many transgender athletes were competing in the NCAA, Charlie Baker, NCAA president and a former Republican governor of Massachusetts, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in December 2024 that he was aware of fewer than ten transgender athletes out of 510,000 athletes in the NCAA. 

Two months later, the NCAA banned trans women from competing on NCAA women’s teams, capitulating to the trumped up anti-trans panic. The association cited President Donald Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order as the reason. 

In 2022, the founder of an anti-trans organization called Save Women’s Sports told a Time magazine reporter that she could only........

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