to stare at

the unpainted wall

of the windowless room

across the tiled hallway

from the bench

Read more

Andrew Villeneuve, whose Northwest Progressive Institute is part of the coalition against the measure, said that voters who “just open up their ballot to vote at their kitchen table” are “poised to vote yes.” He told KUOW that in polling he described but didn’t release, support dropped once voters heard that genital exams could be required of all girls.

There isn’t much public polling, and none of it settles the question. Let’s Go Washington, the conservative group behind I-638, says its own survey, which it describes as “based on the ballot titles,” has the measure ahead 56% to 24% in a projection it adjusted for party share, with 22% undecided.

The group hasn’t published its exact questions, field dates or margin of error. A May poll that the No campaign posted had 43% of voters planning to vote yes, but it didn’t say how many planned to vote no.

I understand why some people assume an anti-trans measure like this can’t pass in a state that, as KUOW put it, “tends to vote for progressive leaders and policies.” But I-638 doesn’t need to change anyone’s mind about trans people to win.

It only needs voters to read a few lines on their ballot about “verification of biological sex” and fill in the oval for yes without knowing what that verification would involve. The ballot won’t tell them that the verification would cover every girl on a girls’ school team, or who would pay for it.

I think the left is sleeping on I-638, and if it passes, it won’t just keep out the handful of trans girls it was written to exclude. It will put a new medical requirement on every girl who wants to play on a girls’ school team in Washington.

What I-638 would actually do

Let’s start with what voters will see. The I-638 entry on the ballot says the measure “would require verification of biological sex by students’ healthcare providers,” and it doesn’t say how.

The initiative’s text is much more specific. A student who goes out for a girls’-only team would need a statement from her “personal health care provider” that verifies her sex, “relying only on one or more of the following: The student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”

The attorney general’s office, which writes the explanation of each measure in the voters’ pamphlet, says that students “would thus have to undergo some type of medical evaluation of their sex to participate in interschool sports designated for female students only.” No student going out for a boys’ team would face anything like it, as the Washington State PTA, which opposes the measure, has pointed out.

Let’s Go Washington says the measure is just “adding a checkbox back onto a form that doctors already fill out,” as spokesperson Hallie Herzberg wrote in a statement quoted by the Seattle Times. It’s true that physicians in Washington had to mark a student’s sex on sports evaluation forms until that rule was rolled back in 2019.

But I-638 doesn’t just bring back a checkbox. It tells the provider what the answer has to rest on, and neither birth records nor a parent’s word is on the list, even though the Yes side’s own argument in the voters’ pamphlet says a provider could use a student’s “birth records.”

So what would verification look like for an actual kid? KUOW reported that, under the initiative, a genital exam “would likely be the most accessible option for most kids,” and that a medical professional can do it “without touching the child.”

Dr. Glenna Martin, a doctor in Washington who, as a medical student, volunteered at large group physicals for students without regular doctors, told the Seattle Times that at those events, “we were definitely never doing genital exams.” Dr. Eloi Hoopman, a family physician in Pierce County who opposes the measure, asked the Seattle Times, “Can you imagine that you have to get a genital exam, and you’re 12 and you want to play volleyball?”

I can’t, and I don’t think most parents in Washington can either. No girl should need a medical evaluation of her sex to play volleyball.

The initiative doesn’t say who pays

A blood testosterone test can cost $162 if insurance doesn’t cover it, and chromosome testing costs $1,310, according to the Spokesman-Review, but the initiative doesn’t say who would pay for either. Dr. Libby Loft, a family medicine doctor in Spokane who opposes the measure, told the paper that it’s “very unlikely that insurance companies are going to foot the bill for unnecessary medical testing.”

The verifying statement also has to come from a girl’s “personal health care provider,” and the PTA warns that this “may push families off the school-based physicals many depend on — including the group physicals some districts arrange for students without a regular doctor.” Because insurance is unlikely to cover the lab tests, the PTA says, “for many girls the practical result would be an intimate examination that serves no medical purpose.”

Dr. Lelach Rave, executive director of the Washington chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, asked the Seattle Times back in March, “Are we now going to have a financial bar to enter into sports participation?” If I-638 passes, the girls who would likely have the hardest time clearing that bar are the ones whose families can least afford an extra doctor’s visit or a lab bill.

The girls this is about

The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, which oversees school sports in the state, knows of roughly 10 trans athletes among more than 200,000 kids who compete, according to KUOW, and The Cut reported that the count includes both boys and girls. To keep the trans girls among them off girls’ teams, I-638 would require verifying the sex of every girl on one.

I wrote in 2024 that this whole issue is a bit of a red herring, designed by right-wing strategists as a way to paint trans people as “other” for their own cynical political gain. The numbers in Washington show how small the issue is.

Only about four in ten U.S. adults told Pew in a 2024 survey that they know someone who’s transgender, so it’s worth hearing from the people who do. Tori, the mother of a 7-year-old trans girl in Washington, who asked The 19th to use only her first name, said, “Undergoing an invasive sex verification test will cause all girls far more harm than running around the same soccer field as someone that is different from them.”

In 2025, a Seattle-area mother whose trans daughter was in seventh grade told KUOW that “soccer is just a place where she can be herself.” Bella, a 17-year-old with trans teammates on her school’s ultimate frisbee team, told The 19th that her team is “just a group of girls supporting each other and hanging out on and off the field.”

Sports are about more than who gets a trophy, and they teach you about teamwork, discipline, and building healthy habits. Trans girls deserve those things too, and no girl should need a doctor to verify her sex to get them.

Why it could pass

For most of the past year, the people pushing I-638 had the conversation about it on social media almost to themselves. According to proprietary monitoring data from my firm, Pink and Blue Strategies, supporters’ posts naming I-638 drew about 33,900 likes, shares and comments in the accounts we track before the No campaign’s kickoff rally on June 17, not counting the campaigns’ own accounts or that of Let’s Go Washington’s founder.

Opposing accounts drew about 700 in the same stretch, and about 71% of the supporters’ total came from one conservative commentator, Brandi Kruse. Since the kickoff, supporters’ lead in likes, shares and comments has shrunk to about 1.2 to 1, but their posts have still drawn more than four times as many views on X.

On paper, the No side had more cash to work with. No Hate in WA State is the main campaign against I-638, and it’s also fighting I-001, another Let’s Go Washington measure.

No Hate had about $662,000 on hand on Aug. 31, according to its report covering August, while Let’s Go Washington had about $139,000. Let’s Go Washington has raised more in 2026 across its three measures, though, and reports about $4.8 million in liabilities, mostly loans from its founder, Brian Heywood.

No Hate’s itemized spending through August included no TV, radio or digital ad buys. As of Oct. 13, no committee working on I-638 had a political file, the public record a station keeps of political ad buys, at any of six Seattle-area TV stations.

No on 645, the campaign against Let’s Go Washington’s measure to repeal the state’s new income tax on high earners, had files at all six. Google doesn’t accept ads about Washington ballot measures, and Meta bars them from running in or targeting the state, rules that apply to both sides.

Reed, the state Democrats’ spokesperson, told KUOW that the fight over the income tax is “sucking up a lot of the oxygen in the room.” When I talked to KUOW for the same story, I said, “This is something that the right is just invested in bringing attention to and the left is focused elsewhere.”

I still think that’s true. With ballots going out on Oct. 16, there isn’t much time left to change it.

Ballots go out Oct. 16

When ballots arrive, the I-638 entry will say the measure “would require verification of biological sex by students’ healthcare providers,” and nothing about how. The voters’ pamphlet says what the ballot doesn’t: the verification “would have to be based on the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”

Brandi Kruse has asked her followers to text or call 10 friends and family members about the initiatives. We better be calling ours too.

Online and mail registrations must be received by Oct. 26, and you can register in person until 8 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 3, according to the Secretary of State. If you live in Washington, please vote no on I-638.

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Democrat Sam Forstag, who used to parachute in to fight wildfires as a smokejumper, took a different route. “Government has no business sticking its nose into our personal lives, whether that’s a gun safe, whether that’s a doctor’s office,” he said, before adding, “Let’s leave sports to the leagues that actually run them,” and “let’s keep politics the heck out of it.”

The Bulwark, an anti-Trump news site, posted a 68-second clip of the answer that morning. According to proprietary monitoring data from my firm, Pink and Blue Strategies, it had drawn about 820,000 views on X by the next afternoon.

I think it’s one of the best answers to an anti-trans attack I’ve heard from a Democrat in a hard race. It’s worth understanding why it works.

The race

Montana’s 1st Congressional District covers the western part of the state, including Missoula, Bozeman, Butte and Kalispell, and Donald Trump carried it 54% to 43% in 2024. Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Republican, isn’t running again, and the Cook Political Report rates the open seat as leaning Republican, according to the Daily Montanan.

Polls in August and September put Flint and Forstag within four points of each other, according to the Flathead Beacon, and Trump was scheduled to rally for Flint in Kalispell on Oct. 14. If Forstag wins, he will be the first Democrat to hold a U.S. House seat in Montana in nearly three decades.

Flint has hammered Forstag on transgender issues, pointing to Forstag’s work lobbying the state legislature in 2021 and 2023, including for the ACLU of Montana. In the debate, he called Forstag “a high-paid LGBTQ lobbyist from Portland who lobbied for all the crazy stuff” and said the race was about “common sense versus crazy,” including a “crazy trans agenda,” the Daily Montanan reported.

One of Flint’s ads features a girl who says her mom “is my coach” and that “Sam Forstag expects us to compete against boys.” NonStop Local’s fact-checkers rated that line false because, they wrote, “the state’s legal standard in 2026 is that transgender women and girls are women and girls.”

What Forstag said

Forstag opened by saying that “lies and anger, they don’t solve these problems,” and then turned to the state constitution. “Everybody in Montana deserves to live the life with dignity that is protected in our state constitution,” he said, invoking Article II, whose dignity clause begins, “The dignity of the human being is inviolable.”

Then he talked about his mother, who was an ICU nurse, coached his middle school basketball team and still coaches his sister’s. “She taught me about keeping things fair,” he said, before turning to the line about gun safes and doctors’ offices.

He ended by tying Flint’s attacks to money. “What I see with that kind of anger and rhetoric is a lot of singing and dancing, and they’re singing and dancing while they pick our pockets,” he said.

When Flint came back by saying Forstag wanted “special rights” for trans women, Forstag said parents and patients should make their own decisions and that “the sports leagues know how to best run those leagues.” He called Flint’s attack “fear-mongering” meant to distract from the fact that Flint “does not have any solutions to make working people’s lives better.”

Why it works

The first thing worth noticing is what Forstag didn’t do. He didn’t argue about trans girls’ bodies, and he didn’t accept Flint’s premise that they’re “boys”; he argued about who should decide.

James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, made a similar move in September, when he answered a question about trans athletes by talking about giving “the power to make these decisions to local communities.” I wrote then that we need to allow our allies some rhetorical flexibility, and Forstag shows what that flexibility can look like in a Trump district.

The second thing is the language. Putting “a gun safe” and “a doctor’s office” in the same sentence ties medical decisions, trans people’s included, to the privacy argument many Montanans already make about guns.

The dignity line makes the same kind of local appeal. It comes from Montana’s own constitution, not from a national talking point, and Flint had just told viewers that everyone deserves dignity, too.

The third thing is the pivot. Forstag made his case on Montana’s terms and then spent the end of his minute on the “pick our pockets” line, which casts Flint’s attack as a distraction from what’s happening to working people’s money.

Leaving sports to the leagues doesn’t promise that trans athletes will get to play, and the NCAA, for one, limited women’s competition to athletes assigned female at birth last year, a day after an executive order from President Trump. But Forstag’s position is that politicians like Flint shouldn’t be the ones deciding, and in a district Trump won by more than 11 points, I think that’s a real answer.

Nov. 3

Zooey Zephyr, a trans state legislator who lives in Forstag’s district, put it this way on Bluesky: “If congressional candidates in western Montana—one of the most competitive House races in the entire country—can stand up for trans folks in every aspect of our lives, democrats everywhere should take note.” The race is still close, and if Forstag wins on Nov. 3, he’ll have won a Trump district with this answer on the record.

Every Democrat running in a hard district this fall will get some version of Bradley Warren’s question. If you know one, send them the Bulwark’s 68-second clip.

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For nearly four years, I worked in communications for a national LGBTQI+ organization. Much of my job involved responding to reporters, sitting for interviews, writing and trying to make complicated policy and legal developments easier for people to understand. That also meant noticing the circumstances under which people seemed most interested in hearing from trans people. There was almost always something happening that needed to be explained: a new law, a court decision, a restriction on healthcare, a school policy or another government agency deciding which parts of our lives it suddenly had an interest in regulating.

I believed deeply in the importance of that work, and I still do. There are real consequences when the public doesn’t understand what a policy means for the people who have to live under it. News also requires something to have happened, and I don’t expect a reporter to show up at someone’s house because a trans person had a reasonably pleasant Tuesday. But after years of explaining trans lives through the things happening to us, I started wondering what gets lost when crisis becomes one of the primary ways people encounter us.

I know this personally because I am the named plaintiff in Orr v. Trump, a federal lawsuit over the Trump administration’s passport policy for trans Americans. Being a plaintiff has required me to talk publicly about parts of my life I otherwise would have little reason to explain to strangers, and I chose to do that because I believe it matters. Being able to move through the world with identification that accurately reflects who you are affects everything from traveling and applying for jobs to whether you can hand someone your ID without wondering what will happen next. At the same time, it is strange to have something so politically significant become one of the most publicly recognizable facts about me when it represents so little of what it actually feels like to live my life.

Most days, my life is remarkably ordinary. I ride my bike, play board games with my spouse and friends, snuggle with our cats, fall asleep reading books and travel whenever I can. I get too invested in whatever new hobby has caught my attention—looking at you, bead tapestries—and spend an embarrassing amount of time wondering whether my beard looks good, whether my clothes fit the way I want them to or whether my body looks the way I think it should. These things occupy far more space in my life than federal litigation, and most of them aren’t interesting to anyone outside of it. I think that’s exactly the point.

Trans people have spent years being asked to make the most difficult parts of our lives useful to other people. We explain our healthcare so someone else can understand why we need it, our childhoods so someone else can understand how long we have known ourselves and our experiences of discrimination so someone else can understand the consequences of anti-trans politics. We explain our families, bodies and relationships, and sometimes the worst things anyone has ever done to us, because there is always the possibility that the person listening might understand trans people differently afterward.

There is enormous value in that kind of storytelling. I have also started to wonder what happens when suffering becomes the most publicly useful thing about us. If someone primarily encounters trans people when we are explaining why something hurts, what has been taken from us or why we are afraid, they may understand the danger we face without understanding much about the lives we actually live.

Even the way we talk about trans joy can carry the same expectation. There is the person who survived everything and built an extraordinary life anyway, the kid who was finally allowed to transition and is now thriving or the trans person who became the first to accomplish something previously inaccessible. Those stories deserve to be told. But somewhere between tragedy and triumph is where most people actually live, and I don’t think we have become very good at making room for trans people who exist there.

Not every trans person has a compelling transition story. Not everyone remembers knowing exactly who they were at three years old, and plenty of people took years to understand themselves. Some people’s families reacted terribly when they came out, while others were mostly concerned with getting their name and pronouns right. Some people transitioned and became much happier but still hate their jobs, struggle with money, have complicated relationships, pick up hobbies they abandon three weeks later and spend too much time worrying about things that will never matter.

There are also trans people who are selfish, irritating, difficult or simply unkind. Let trans people be villains. Marginalized people are often easiest to defend when we are sympathetic, and there is something deeply unfair about requiring someone to be likeable before deciding they are worthy of dignity. The trans person whose story is supposed to change someone’s mind is asked to be vulnerable enough to create empathy but composed enough to remain credible, angry enough that the harm feels real but not so angry that someone stops listening. After years of preparing for interviews and thinking about how something would land with an audience, I became very familiar with those calculations.

Sometimes those calculations are necessary. They are also exhausting when you realize how much freedom there is in being allowed to disappoint people only as yourself. A cisgender person can be an asshole without anyone treating their behavior as meaningful evidence about cisgender people as a population. Trans people deserve the same freedom to be mediocre, annoying, wrong or unlikeable without someone deciding our individual failures reveal something larger about whether people like us deserve to exist comfortably in the world.

I want that freedom in happier and more boring ways, too. I want trans people to get old enough that the biggest events in their lives have nothing to do with transition. I want someone to have been on hormones for 30 years and realize they forgot the anniversary. I want trans adults whose lives have accumulated so many careers, relationships, mistakes, hobbies, moves, vacations and friendships that being trans remains part of who they are without needing to remain the organizing principle of their biography.

I especially want that kind of life for trans kids, who have been asked to become public advocates for themselves at ages when most children should be allowed to worry about smaller things. Young trans people have testified before legislatures, spoken at school board meetings and answered deeply personal questions from adults with the power to make decisions about their lives. I admire the young people who are able to do that, but I don’t want courage to be required of them. I want trans kids to be bad at algebra, care more about whether someone likes them back than what their state legislature is doing, make questionable fashion choices, get embarrassed by their parents and eventually look back at photographs of themselves from middle school with the same horror afforded to everyone else.

For years, my work involved thinking about which stories could make someone understand something they hadn’t understood before. I still believe that work is necessary, but I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that trans people have to make our lives useful in order for other people to find them worth knowing.

There should be room in the public record for the parts of our lives that don’t prove anything. The hobbies someone picked up and abandoned, the place they grew up and still miss, the career they thought they wanted until they didn’t, the vacation they saved for, the person they loved, the friend they haven’t spoken to in years and the stretches of time when nothing important happened all tell us something about a person’s life without needing to tell us anything about trans people as a whole.

Right now, much of the public record of trans life is necessarily a record of conflict. People looking back at this period will find legislation, litigation, healthcare restrictions, discrimination, protest and resistance. They will know what governments tried to take from us and how hard trans people fought to keep it. Those things belong in the record. I just hope that isn’t all anyone finds.

I hope they also know what we did on Tuesday.

I hope they know that we went to work and came home, fell in love and got bored, changed our minds, made bad decisions, found new hobbies, abandoned old ones and worried about things that had absolutely nothing to do with gender. I hope they know some of us did extraordinary things and most of us didn’t, and that neither group was more deserving of a full life than the other.

Trans people deserve stories about our survival, our joy, our resistance and the extraordinary things people in our community accomplish, but we also deserve stories that ask nothing from us. Sometimes there is no larger lesson, no remarkable act of courage and nothing useful to take away from someone’s existence. Sometimes a person is simply living their life, and I want there to be enough room in the way we understand trans people for that life to matter, too.

Trans people deserve to be boring.

*Ash Lazarus Orr is a trans journalist, photographer and communications strategist from rural Appalachia, the creator of Conversations Across Borders, and the named plaintiff in Orr v. Trump.*

as it so often does:

sparks break free from a fraying wire of

a neglected appliance,

find new life in the folds of

a velvet curtain or

the soft surrounding embrace

of a plush pink carpet

and birth fire, licking the walls,

devouring the ceiling,

penetrating the floors above

and engulfing the entire

structure in silken flame

Read more

When I was born, everyone thought I was a girl. No questions, no doubts. I wonder if my parents ever knew that there could be any doubts. I was born in the industrial Ukrainian city of Donetsk, which is famous for its steel industry and had never been known for being especially progressive. Quite the opposite: it was much more conservative than other parts of Ukraine.

I knew I wasn’t a girl from the age of four, maybe earlier, if only I could remember it. It started almost like play. I asked everyone to call me Mowgli, like the character in my favorite version of The Jungle Book. I preferred the pronoun “he”. I wondered why I couldn’t have a beard when I grew up.

Adults treated it as harmless play, until they didn’t. Until it started to feel like it could be something sinful to them.

And my family were more religious Christians than most of the families I knew. Ukraine in the 1990s was nothing like what some people might imagine from watching TV news today. Today’s Ukraine is much more modern and European, while at the same time being religious. When I was a child, most adults I knew confused the stories of Noah and Moses from the Bible. Meanwhile, my father did not just read the Bible; he studied the Holy Fathers and listened to lectures for future priests. He wasn’t a priest—he was an engineer—but his devotion to religion grew with every year. He preached to my godmother, our neighbors, and our relatives.

Unfortunately, there is no affirmative theology in the Russian Orthodox Church—and my family was from the Russian Orthodox Church, not from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and very pro-Russian in general - which means, once again, more conservative. Transness and queerness were things my family would never mention in front of a child.

But all the same, I knew I wasn’t a girl. Out of simple self-preservation, I refused to be bullied in kindergarten for my non-feminine pronouns, and I tried to be good by calling myself a “girl”. When I think about little me, I feel such a profound desire to protect them that I dream about time travel.

I remember clinging to traditionally feminine interests, like dolls and parenting magazines, at the age of five, rather than the military history my grandpa told me about. At the same time, I struggled to understand why those interests should determine gender. I felt that gender and sex were not the same, but I didn’t have the words to describe it. I knew that I might like dolls or I might like bikes, but that didn’t make me a girl.

I wasn’t “just a tomboy.” I wasn’t even a tomboy. I was me: a little person who didn’t associate themself with girls and felt, physically, that something was wrong without having any explanation for it. A daydreaming geek. Who wasn’t a girl.

In my childhood and teenage years, I never met another trans person. I was restricted from using the internet, so I didn’t see any proper representation. My family wasn’t the kind of family that watched talk shows with trans people or other “dirty”, “anti-intellectual” programs, as they would call them.

I was raised hearing that gay people were going to hell. I learned conspiracy theories about the Global West—the idea that all Western powers, ruled by a secret group of almost-satanic oligarchs who don’t have real democracy or actual cultural differences inside “Western” countries. It’s something like an extremely popular post-Soviet analogy of QAnon theory before QAnons was even a thing. Part of this theory was the idea that this mystical “Global West” spread LGBT propaganda to make Slavic people infertile, or to promote pedophilia in the name of globalism. I know, it’s weird. Luckily, I didn’t believe in this conspiracy, but unfortunately, the “Global West” conspiracy fear stopped adults from letting me learn more about queerness, because my teachers and parents wouldn’t allow me to have queer-friendly books, and my time on the internet was restricted. At eighteen, I still didn’t even know the difference between a drag queen and a trans person. I was scared to learn because of religious trauma and societal pressure.

At my worst moments, I thought my physical discomfort and dysphoria during my teenage years were caused by sin and the fact that I couldn’t pray properly—a sign that I was going to hell. At my best moments, I saw it as internalized misogyny. And I couldn’t have been more wrong in both cases.

But, anyway, there was no way someone could have “promoted” “trans ideology” to me.

Because there is no ideology.

What the modern media calls “trans ideology” and “trans propaganda” is just the acknowledgement of a simple fact: some people are trans. We don’t know why, but we know that trans people have always existed, despite the fact that societies throughout human history have not been very trans-friendly. And we know that there are trans people in cultures and communities that do not support trans rights and do not provide trans representation. I am one of them.

I was lucky and privileged enough to be able to separate myself from my abusive family, to have free access to the internet as an adult, and to meet other trans people, first online. At 23–24, I finally accepted that I’m a transmasculine non-binary person, and it helped me better understand my body and my past. It made me happier. When I speak with conservatives, I just present myself as a male, and it feels much more natural to me than pretending to be a woman.

I had the childhood that far-right activists and trans-exclusionary “feminists” now want all trans children to have before social transition. No information about trans people. No support. As a result, I developed depression, very severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, and what was likely a dissociative condition.

I didn’t have puberty blockers when I was a teenager, just as conservatives and transphobes want, and it left me feeling detached from my body, from my senses, and from my own life, and had suicidal thoughts.

The JAMA Network Open (2022) study showed that appropriate gender-affirming care for young people was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality over a 12-month follow-up—and it was supported by other studies. Meanwhile, the Cass Review is now actively promoted in the UK (the country of my residence) and shapes British policy, despite serious criticism from academics of its methodology and consistency. Moreover, more than 200 Educational Psychologists signed an open letter expressing concerns about the Cass Review.

We also know that there are rare cases of people who regret transitioning, just as people regret many other decisions in their lives. The gender-affirming surgery regret is under 1%. But we don’t talk about prohibiting parenthood because some people regret having children, or prohibiting cosmetic surgery, despite the fact that there are far more regrets associated with cosmetic and other surgery (runs 5 to 33% depending on the procedure) and parenthood regret (5 to 14%). The idea that trans children and teenagers shouldn’t be allowed to be themselves, and that they become trans because of propaganda, has nothing to do with reality. It is a paternalistic, ageist idea based on the belief that until the age of 18, people don’t have the right to their own opinions or bodily autonomy. When I was a teen and spoke about family abuse, I noticed that people laughed at me, but when I repeated the same words as an adult, they took me seriously. Unfortunately, the same happened with any complaints I made, including those regarding my mental health.

People don’t understand that they aren’t just making kids less happy for their own comfort; they are actively causing harm for adults as well. Anti-LGBT laws almost always start with minors. For example, in Russia, a country where I unfortunately lived for four years, the 2013 “propaganda” law was written to protect children, was extended to all ages in 2022, and in 2023, a new law banned transition care for adults. The LGBT movement was then labeled as an “extremist organization,” and in 2024 Russia put it on the same government list of terrorists and extremists as Al-Qaeda. At first, Russian politicians promised that LGBT adults wouldn’t suffer and that children would be protected from the “Global West Conspiracy.” They lied. They were also saying—just like British politicians are saying right now—that trans children just need to be under the “watchful waiting” before making a decision about transitioning.

If the benefits of waiting were true, I would have had a perfect childhood. But I didn’t. My childhood was hell.

I know I’m not alone. As an adult and an LGBT activist, I have met a lot of trans young people. And they all shared the same trait: not a single one of them wanted to wait.

Ayman Eckford is a freelance journalist and a trans-masculine, non-binary person who was born in Donetsk, Ukraine, and now lives in Sheffield, UK. They have been published in the Washington Blade, Tagg, Queer Majority, Bi.org, OC Media, the Moscow Times, Diva, and other outlets, and they began their media career writing in English for the Ukrainian think tank Solid Info, focusing on gender and sexuality.

as they close gently but

inexorably around my neck.

The dark pools of your dinner plate eyes

are holes a thousand yards deep.

Your fine feathers flattened

by the force with which you fight

the very air that bears

you aloft. Golden sunset glints off

the deadly curve of your beak,

sharp as a scimitar where

it carelessly caresses the contours of my collarbone.

Read more

Ohio already bans that surgery for anyone under 18, Aldaco had hers in Austin when she was 19, and the video clip SLF offers as proof of Brown’s “admission” shows him saying that a child’s health care decisions belong to families and doctors, “not politicians.”

SLF “is spending nearly $10 million while the ad runs,” according to the Washington Examiner, which got the ad first, and SLF’s upload on YouTube showed nearly 6 million views by Monday. In the press release, SLF’s communications director, Chris Gustafson, accused Brown directly: “Children should never have to endure the trauma that Far-Left politicians like Sherrod Brown have inflicted.” On Monday, SLF released a second ad with Aldaco, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee posted it with the message that Brown “supports irreversible sex change surgeries on kids — like what happened to Soren.”

I’m not going to argue with Aldaco about her own life. By the Texas Supreme Court’s account, she had complications after her surgery that “required emergency medical care,” and she has every right to talk about what happened to her. But SLF has attached her story to a candidate who had nothing to do with it, in a state whose law would still allow her surgery today, to make a claim that PolitiFact rated Mostly False when SLF made it about Brown in 2024.

The Surgery Happened in Texas, When She Was 19

Neither ad says where or when Aldaco had her surgery. The Texas Supreme Court’s opinion in her lawsuit does. According to the court, “Aldaco contacted the Crane Clinic to schedule a double mastectomy” after struggling with her gender identity as a teenager, and she got the letter the clinic required from a therapist “with whom she’d been having telehealth sessions to talk about relationship issues.” The surgery took place on June 11, 2021. KERA, the public radio station in North Texas, reported that it happened at the Crane Clinic in Austin, when she was 19.

Her lawsuit says that she started testosterone at 17, prescribed by a nurse practitioner in Texas, so the ad’s “hormone shots” line does describe treatment that began while she was a minor. SLF’s attack on Brown, though, is about surgery, and she had her surgery at 19.

The second ad puts it this way, in Aldaco’s own words: “Hormone injections, then surgery, without my parents’ consent.” At 19, she was an adult, and she didn’t need her parents’ consent. When a different anti-trans campaign in Ohio made the same kind of claim in 2023, I wrote that “in no state is it legal for a child to have gender-affirming surgical procedures without the consent of their parents; such procedures for minors are also extremely rare.”

Aldaco sued several of the Texas providers involved in her care in 2023, in Tarrant County. In June, the Texas Supreme Court ruled unanimously that she had filed her claim against the therapist in time and sent it back to the trial court. The court decided when she sued, not whether the therapist did anything wrong.

Ohio Already Bans It

Ohio law has banned gender surgery for minors since April 24, 2024, when House Bill 68 took effect. The law bars doctors from performing “gender reassignment surgery on a minor individual,” and the lawsuit against HB 68 doesn’t challenge that part of it. When an Ohio appeals court ruled on HB 68 in 2025, it noted that “none of the appellants have raised a challenge to the law’s surgery provision.” The ban is limited to patients under 18, so the surgery at the center of SLF’s ad would be legal in Ohio today.

Even Gov. Mike DeWine, the Republican who vetoed HB 68 before legislators overrode him, said in his veto announcement that he “adamantly” agreed that “no surgery of this kind should ever be performed on those under the age of 18,” and he directed state agencies to write rules banning it.

The part of HB 68 that has changed life for our kids in Ohio is its ban on puberty blockers and hormones. Two trans girls and their families sued over it in 2024, when the girls were 12, and the Ohio Supreme Court has kept the ban in effect while it considers their case; the justices heard arguments in March and haven’t ruled. Those are the Ohio kids this law actually reaches, and SLF’s ads never mention them.

SLF’s Own Clip Shows What Brown Said

Both ads put the same citation on screen, “WSYX, 7/19/23.” In the first ad, it sits under the captions “Sherrod Brown supports sex change surgery for minors” and “Sherrod Brown admitted he would never ban child sex changes.” SLF’s press release links its “would never oppose” claim to a video file named “Sherrod-Brown-supports-sex-reassignment-surgeries-for-minors.mp4.” The file is a 22-second clip from a WSYX report in July 2023. In it, Brown, asked about a proposal from then-Sen. JD Vance, says a child’s health care decisions “are between them, their parents, their families, their doctors, not politicians,” and adds, “I will never agree with anybody that wants to bring politics into the family situation with health care, period.”

Vance’s bill, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, “sought to make it a felony for doctors to provide surgery or prescribe puberty blockers to anyone younger than 18,” according to PolitiFact. Brown told a reporter that politicians shouldn’t make those decisions for families. He doesn’t say the word “surgery” anywhere in SLF’s clip, and he doesn’t admit to anything. The phrase “sex change surgery,” which I described in 2023 as “an archaic label that Fox News and other outlets have increasingly substituted for gender-affirming care,” comes from SLF’s ad, not from Brown.

SLF made the same claim about Brown two years ago, when he ran for reelection, and PolitiFact rated it Mostly False, noting that “gender-affirming surgery is very rare among minors in the United States.” The same week, PolitiFact rated False an SLF ad claiming that Brown voted to let “transgender biological men” compete in girls’ sports. Brown lost that race to Bernie Moreno, and he’s now running against Sen. Jon Husted in a special election on November 3.

Six Days After Brown Said It’s Illegal, SLF Ran This Ad

Brown’s campaign had already answered the surgery attacks. On September 18, it put a spot on TV in which a voter from Richwood says, “In Ohio, it’s against the law to perform transgender surgeries on kids. That’s right, it’s illegal.” Six days later, SLF released an ad that never disputes that point. Instead, its story is about a surgery performed in another state, on an adult, where no Ohio law could have reached.

I understand why Brown’s campaign reached for the law. It’s true, it’s the quickest answer a candidate has, and many of us have made the same argument ourselves. But I don’t think any fact about Ohio law would have kept this ad off the air, because the ad never makes a claim about Ohio law. It tells one woman’s story without a date or a state, and it lets viewers fill in the rest.

If Democrats keep treating “it’s already illegal” as the end of the argument, SLF will keep finding stories from other states and older patients that no Ohio law covers. The answer that holds up is the one Brown gave in 2023, that these decisions belong to families and their doctors, and it’s the one Fred Wellman, a Democrat running for Congress in Missouri, gave on live TV on Sunday.

What Nearly $10 Million Buys

The Husted–Brown race had drawn $298 million in advertising by September 21, more than any other Senate race this cycle, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, and SLF and five other Republican-aligned super PACs spent $14 million in Ohio in a single week, Reuters reported, in ads that attacked Brown over issues “such as his positions on transgender rights and bank bailouts.” Google’s public political ad data shows SLF’s PAC adding nearly $1.2 million in Ohio ads on Google’s platforms in the week before September 28 alone, bringing its total there to about $3.2 million.

SLF also pays for a Facebook page called Ohio Pulse, which has run ads since September 22 written to look like news headlines, including one that reads, “Sounding the Alarm: A new revelation exposes Sherrod Brown’s extreme record supporting permanent sex change surgeries for Ohio children.” Meta’s ad library puts that single ad at 600,000 to 700,000 impressions.

It links to ohiopulse.org, a website that calls itself “Ohio’s #1 News Source,” says it’s “committed to accurate, timely, and impactful reporting,” and states at the bottom of its pages that it’s “Paid for by SLF PAC.” (Its September 16 story on Brown paraphrases his answer to Vance’s bill as saying families should decide “even for sex change surgery,” words he never says in SLF’s own clip.)

Ohio voters have heard this pitch before. In 2023, a multimillion-dollar campaign for Issue 1, an August ballot measure that would have made the state constitution harder to amend, warned that without it, “out-of-state special interest groups” would “abolish parental rights so someone can take your child to get an abortion or sex change operation without your consent,” and Ohio voters rejected it anyway. This year, even the right’s own strategists have doubts. The American Principles Project warned Republican candidates in a memo, as Erin in the Morning reported on September 18, that “pressing the advantage on these issues alone, while important, may not be sufficient.”

SLF’s allies are running the same attack in Texas. On September 24, the same day the Aldaco ad launched, PolitiFact rated False an ad from Texas PAC, a super PAC linked to SLF, claiming that James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, “supported using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children.” PolitiFact took about two weeks to get to that one.

When fact-checkers and Ohio reporters get to this ad, I’d ask them to start with the two facts it leaves out, where Aldaco had her surgery and how old she was, and then to read the sentence the Washington Examiner printed in its own exclusive story on the ad: “Ohio bans transgender surgeries and related medical treatments for minors.”

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At 2:31 p.m. Eastern on September 24, the Department’s official account on X shared a New York Post story with a message of its own: “NEW from @nypost: over 2,000 GOLD MEDALS stolen from women and girls across America. This needs to end.” Two minutes later, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, whom President Trump ordered last year to “facilitate the closure” of the department she runs, quoted the post and added, “It is unconscionable that even one gold medal meant for a woman was stolen by a man.”

The number came from the legislative arm of Concerned Women for America, a religious-right group dedicated, in its own words, to “promoting Biblical values” in public policy. On September 22, the day before a Senate hearing on trans athletes, the group announced that trans athletes had “stolen over 2,293 gold medals” from women and girls in the United States. Its press release credits the data to HeCheated, an anti-trans website that says it exists to “call out” the athletes it lists and describes itself as “an entirely volunteer effort.”

I’ve gone through HeCheated’s rules and the results it posts, and the number doesn’t measure what the Department of Education told its followers it measures. HeCheated counts first-place finishes at every level of sport. CWA took some share of them, using a rule it has never published, and called them stolen gold medals, which means nobody outside CWA can check the count. McMahon’s own post said even one medal would be too many, so they didn’t need 2,293 to make their argument. They needed it for the headline.

A “Gold Medal” Is Any First Place

HeCheated includes every level and age category of competition, “from grassroots to professional.” When critics pushed back on CWA’s number, the site’s account on X explained that a gold medal, as CWA used the term, means “a 1st place finish at any level of sport.” By the time the New York Post wrote it up, those first places had become “championship spots.”

CWA’s release claims that each of those medals pushed “each rightful champion down to second place.” HeCheated’s own About page undercuts that. The site says it exists alongside SheWon, an older database it says inspired it, because for “all team sports, single-elimination tournaments, and most awards,” it is “impossible to know who may have won.” HeCheated logs team-sport results anyway.

The release calls the athletes “trans-identifying males.” HeCheated’s category for them covers anyone it considers male who says they are a woman or “nonbinary,” so its lists sweep in nonbinary people too, and it decides who belongs on the list partly from “Visual Evidence,” meaning old photos and media coverage. (In other words, someone looked at pictures.) It also counts mixed events like mixed doubles when the athlete in question took the “female” spot on the team.

What the release never says is which of the site’s entries CWA counted. For its data, it links only to the site and to CWA’s July 2025 fact sheet, and neither one explains the filter. Even HeCheated’s account could only guess: “I believe the CWA report narrowed the scope to ’trans’ ID’d athletes only and only those from the USA.” Nobody outside CWA can tell you whether its 2,293 includes a mixed doubles match, a nonbinary athlete or a team sport.

Right-Wing Media Carried It to the Department of Education

CWA timed its release to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s September 23 hearing, “Standing Up for Women in Sports,” which I wrote about in my last piece. One witness, Kim Jones, a co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, submitted written testimony that cites two of HeCheated’s posts on X as sources, for claims about USA Ultimate and professional women’s soccer.

Right-wing media and Republican officials spent the next two days repeating the number. That evening, the New York Post reported that trans athletes had “bumped biological women out of championship spots 2,293 times since the mid-1980s,” though it did describe HeCheated as “a volunteer-run online database.” According to proprietary monitoring data from my firm, Pink and Blue Strategies, the Post’s post about the story on X was viewed about 2.7 million times, far more than any other post we tracked about the number that week.

About two hours after the Post’s story went up, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who in 2024 introduced a resolution to keep Sarah McBride out of the Capitol’s women’s restrooms, posted “2,293 gold medals. $501,498 in prize money,” along with an insult about trans people’s mental health that I’m not going to repeat. The next afternoon, the House Republican Study Committee told its followers that “new data” showed women and girls had lost out on nearly 2,300 gold medals. An hour and a half later, the Department of Education posted the number, and half an hour after that, Moms for Liberty used it to tell Sen. Dick Durbin that “this isn’t a ’non-issue.’”

CWA’s release ends by asking Congress to pass three bills, including the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. If Congress passes that bill, trans girls will be barred from girls’ teams at any school that takes federal money. As I wrote in 2024, this whole issue is a bit of a red herring, designed by right wing strategists as a way to paint trans people as “other” for their own cynical political gain. A number nobody can check serves that purpose as well as a real one.

This isn’t the first time. In August 2024, a United Nations Special Rapporteur, an independent expert who reports to the U.N., published a report repeating, “According to information received,” that more than 600 female athletes had lost more than 890 medals in 29 sports. A footnote credits submissions from outside groups, including the Women’s Liberation Front. Fox News turned that into “Biological females have lost nearly 900 medals to trans athletes: UN report,” and turned 890 medals into “nearly 900 biological females.”

On March 3, 2025, Senate Majority Leader John Thune read the paragraph on the Senate floor twice and called it “from a United Nations report.” The next month, s. baum reported for Erin in the Morning that the statistic “did not originate from a United Nations report” and that its real source was SheWon, the database HeCheated says “largely inspired” it. CWA’s first version of its own count came out that July and said 1,941. Each time, the people repeating a tally from an advocacy database gave it a more official name than the last: a U.N. report, then a study, and now a post from the Department of Education.

Where the Quick Rebuttals Went Wrong

I understand why so many of us reached for the fastest debunk we could find when this number was everywhere. Some of those rebuttals got the facts wrong, and HeCheated’s account answered them one by one.

The most widely shared rebuttal in my firm’s monitoring said CWA had counted every win by a trans woman in anything from darts to ultimate frisbee over 40 years. HeCheated does list ultimate frisbee results, but every darts result on the site comes from outside the United States. Other posts the account answered said the count included pageants and baking, or that it had been promoted as 2,000 Olympic gold medals. The site’s About page says non-athletic awards “are not included in the athletic totals,” and CWA never claimed Olympic medals.

When critics noted that only 94 of the medals came from the professional level, the account replied, “Yes that’s irrelevant.” To the self-described defenders of women’s sports behind this database, a Masters age-group race and a professional final count the same, and they’ll say so in public. I’d rather hold them to that answer than argue about darts.

The centrist version doesn’t work either. You’ll hear that the number might be inflated but is probably pointing in the right direction. Nobody outside CWA can reproduce it, so there’s no way to know which direction it points, and it stopped being a silly sports story when the Department of Education posted it. We don’t need to exaggerate what’s wrong with this number. The website’s own rules are enough.

The Reality: Masters Meets, Middle Schoolers and Races With One Entrant

HeCheated publishes its full results table on its website, and the Internet Archive saved a copy on September 25. I counted the entries that match CWA’s own description of its count, which is also the scope HeCheated’s account guessed: first-place finishes in the United States by athletes the site labels “trans-identified.” There are 3,798 of them, which is more than 2,293, and none of the simple filters I tried gets to CWA’s number. Dropping high school and middle school results leaves 2,865, and dropping Masters results leaves 2,758. CWA’s count is some part of this pool, chosen by a rule nobody outside CWA has seen.

More than a quarter of the pool, 1,040 entries, comes from Masters competition, where adults compete against others their own age. About a quarter, 933, comes from high school and middle school. Only 211, about one in 20, are professional, and 182 come from college sports. The pool does include real titles, with 147 entries from events the site files as national championships, but ten athletes account for 1,091 of the entries.

The pool also includes 393 entries marked “1st (of 1),” meaning the athlete was the only person in the event. I checked two of them against the events’ own results pages, and each had one entrant. I don’t know whether CWA counted any of them, but a site that files a field of one under first place isn’t counting champions who were pushed down to second.

By sport, track and field leads with 916 entries, followed by swimming with 439 and disc golf with 417. There are 132 from ultimate frisbee and 11 from oyster shucking. None come from the Olympic Games, and the site doesn’t even have an Olympic level. NCAA President Charlie Baker told the Senate in December 2024 that out of more than 500,000 college athletes, he knew of fewer than 10 who were trans. This list isn’t a record of trans women dominating anything. It’s a record of us showing up, at Masters meets, disc golf tournaments and middle school track meets, and of a website counting every time one of us finished first.

The Database Names Children

HeCheated’s About page says the site “seeks to call out these male athletes and expose the damage that they have each caused to women and girls in sports.” Its table lists 364 high school and middle school athletes in the United States by name, with a school or team on almost every entry and a grade on most, from sixth through twelfth. It labels 132 of them “trans-identified.” Those are our kids. The rest include boys it lists for playing on girls’ teams under rule exceptions.

When Erin in the Morning asked about the minors on the site in April 2025, the response it got was that “all results are already publicly available including those for minors.” I don’t think that answers the problem. A meet’s results page lists who won, while HeCheated’s list exists, in its own words, to “call out” the students on it. I’m not going to link to it or describe anyone on it.

Sports are about more than who gets a trophy. They teach you about teamwork, discipline and building healthy habits. HeCheated files middle schoolers’ first-place finishes under the word “cheated,” as if a trophy were the only thing a kid gets out of a season. At the hearing, Durbin warned against “categorically treating every trans athlete, no matter their age or level of competition, as a threat to women’s sports.” The site behind the Department of Education’s number lists children by name, school and grade.

McMahon said even one medal would be too many, and her department posted the number anyway. It got that number from a site whose About page states its rule this way: “Males are not ’female’ whether they are on an Olympic team or running a local 5k.”

If CWA wants the Department of Education to keep repeating its count, it should publish the results it counted. Until it does, I’d ask everyone else, including the reporters who wrote it up, to call 2,293 what it is: a number nobody outside CWA can check.

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Most of the committee’s Democrats stayed away. The top Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said the subject probably wouldn’t make Americans’ list of their top twenty priorities, and he said he wouldn’t ask the witnesses any questions.

Right-wing media spent years pushing “biological male” into the mainstream, and it worked. The phrase now turns up in Senate hearings, a CBS News standards memo, the Olympics’ eligibility rules, and a Democratic Senate campaign. It isn’t accurate, and here’s why.

The phrase is about me. I’m a trans woman, and I was born male, which I’ve never denied and which nobody I know denies either. What I object to is the word “biological.” It takes a fact about the day I was born and states it in the present tense, as though everything that has happened to my body since then didn’t count. I’ve been asking people to stop using it for years, including people on our own side. “Trans women generally do not like to be called biological men,” I wrote in 2024. “It erases the reality of our transition.”

There is a more accurate phrase, and the doctors who studied trans people used it for years: “natal male,” meaning a person who was observed to be male at birth. It says what’s true about where I started, and it makes no claim about what my body is now, which is exactly the claim people are making when they say “biological male.” Earlier this month a reader asked me whether it would be better to say “natal male,” because they’d seen trans women describe themselves that way. My answer is yes.

How it got into the mainstream

Since January 2024, I’ve logged about 46,000 social media posts that use the phrase, from more than 11,000 accounts, and nine out of ten of those posts came from accounts on the right. That’s a count of posts rather than people, and my tracking only goes back to 2024, but it shows who has been doing the pushing. Fox News and its affiliated accounts, including its sports site OutKick, used the phrase more than 900 times. The most widely shared posts came from right-wing accounts like End Wokeness, Oli London, and Collin Rugg. In a 2024 paper comparing how different outlets refer to trans women, two Stanford linguists found that “biological males” was one of the phrases most closely associated with the right-wing site Breitbart.

The phrase broke out during the Paris Olympics, and the busiest two weeks in my tracking weren’t about a trans woman at all. In August 2024, the Italian boxer Angela Carini quit her Olympic bout against Imane Khelif of Algeria after 46 seconds. Over the two weeks around that fight, I logged about 3,200 posts using the phrase, most of them about the boxing. “Angela Carini is forced to box against a biological male,” End Wokeness posted. Khelif isn’t trans. The president of the International Olympic Committee said she was born a woman, was raised as a woman, carries a woman’s passport, and had competed as a woman for years. The boxing federation that claimed she’d failed a sex test never officially released its results.

The phrase moved into the law, too. In 2016, North Carolina’s bathroom bill defined “biological sex” as whatever was “stated on a person’s birth certificate.” In 2022, two groups called Independent Women’s Voice and the Women’s Liberation Front wrote model legislation they named the Women’s Bill of Rights. In 2023, Kansas passed a version that defines a female as someone whose reproductive system is “developed to produce ova.” Kansas had heard that idea before. In 2002, its supreme court relied on a dictionary that defined the female sex as the one that “produces ova and bears offspring” when it ruled that a trans woman’s marriage was void. The executive order Donald Trump signed on his first day back in office used “biological” or “biologically” fourteen times, counting the title, to define who counts as a woman.

Then institutions that had rejected the phrase started using it. In June 2024, before the Paris Olympics, the IOC gave reporters a list of phrases to avoid, including “biologically male,” because they could be “dehumanising and inaccurate,” according to Fox News. In March of this year, the IOC limited the women’s category at future Olympics to “biological females,” and its president, Kirsty Coventry, said that “it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.” CBS News had already told its staff in January that it would say “biological sex at birth” in its coverage of the Supreme Court’s sports cases, with “no quotes needed.”

My tracking shows the same shift. Right-leaning accounts still post most of it, but a smaller share every year: 95 percent in 2024, 92 percent in 2025, and 83 percent so far this year. Mainstream news outlets used the phrase about 50 times in 2024 and more than 130 times so far this year, sometimes in their own words and sometimes quoting someone else.

Some Democrats have started saying it too. Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Iowa, told The Gazette in July that he doesn’t “believe that biological men should compete against females in sports.” On September 15, I wrote that “biological men” is Ken Paxton’s word and Elon Musk’s, and that we should wait for Turek’s votes in the Senate before deciding he has abandoned us. I still believe that. I’ll also admit what I said the same week: “I personally would have trouble pulling the lever for someone who called me a biological male.” Plenty of trans people online said the same thing more angrily, and I understand why.

The word choices really are different, even among Democrats who’ve taken roughly the same position. When a Fox News anchor asked James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, about “biological men competing in women’s sports,” he answered about “trans athletes.” Amy Acton, running for governor of Ohio, said “boys.” The same split shows up in newsrooms. This month, news came out that Virginia’s governor, Abigail Spanberger, had quietly withdrawn a proposed rule that would have kept trans girls off girls’ teams. The public radio station that broke the story wrote about “trans girls.” A Washington TV station owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group wrote, in its own words, that she had ended a rule that “would have prevented biological males from competing in girls’ sports.” Every campaign and newsroom that uses the phrase is choosing a description of us, whether it thinks about that or not.

Meanwhile, the people who pushed the phrase hardest have started dropping the adjective. Two weeks after his first-day order, Trump signed one on sports titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” and it never used the word “biological” in its own voice. In my tracking, right-wing accounts in the first three months of 2024 said some version of “biological male” more than four times as often as they said some version of “men in women’s sports.” By the three months when Trump signed the sports order, the two were close to even.

Why it isn’t accurate

It’s easy to assume the phrase is as old as biology, but it has a history, and the earliest use I could find in a trans woman’s case came in a ruling in her favor. In 1977, the tennis player Renée Richards sued to play in the U.S. Open. A New York judge wrote that he was “totally convinced that there are very few biological males, who are accomplished tennis players, who are also either preoperative or postoperative transsexuals,” and he ruled that the chromosome test used to keep her out was unfair and discriminatory.

By the 2010s, many of the doctors and researchers who studied trans people had settled on “natal male.” The standards of care that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, published in 2012 wrote about adolescents’ “natal sex.” The American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual said “natal male” until it switched to “individual assigned male at birth” in 2022. Kenneth Zucker and Ray Blanchard, two researchers whom critics of transition cite often, wrote about natal males and natal females in paper after paper.

The clearest example is the Endocrine Society, which writes the guidelines that doctors actually use for hormone therapy. Its 2009 guideline defined a trans woman as “a biological male who identifies as, or desires to be, a member of the female gender.” When the society rewrote the guideline in 2017, it reversed itself. It pointed out that the physical parts of being male or female don’t always line up in the same person, and it concluded that “the terms biological sex and biological male or female are imprecise and should be avoided.” The doctors dropped the phrase in the same years the legislators picked it up.

The people using it now show exactly what the Endocrine Society meant. In July, the WTA, which runs women’s professional tennis, wrote a definition into its new eligibility policy: “‘biological male’ means an individual who, regardless of their legal sex or gender identity, has an SRY gene.” The SRY gene usually sets off male development, but not always, and under that definition many women with XY chromosomes and female-appearing genitalia would count as biological males. That’s the exact example the Endocrine Society used in 2017 to explain why the phrase is imprecise.

The phrase also gets used on people it plainly doesn’t describe. Besides Imane Khelif, people have used it about France’s first lady, Brigitte Macron, who with her husband is suing the conservative commentator Candace Owens for defamation over Owens’s claim that she was born a man. They’ve used it about intersex women, too. Last year, when the conservative magazine City Journal called for genetic testing of female college athletes, I pointed out that it was describing intersex women as “biological men” so that it could ban them. None of these women is a man, and people call them biological males anyway, which tells me the phrase isn’t really a description of anybody’s biology. It’s a way of saying who doesn’t get to count as a woman.

It gets used on us most of all, and the people who use it are usually clear about the tense. In March 2025, Representative Mary Miller of Illinois posted that Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of Congress, “is a biological man and always will be,” under a name McBride hasn’t used in years. “Always will be” is the part of that sentence I object to, because it’s a claim about McBride’s body today and not about the day she was born.

What’s true about male puberty

It’s true that going through male puberty changes a body in ways that hormones don’t fully undo, and I don’t think our side does itself any favors by pretending otherwise. I wrote here in 2024 that testosterone suppression “does not fully remove the strength advantages gained in male puberty,” and the best research still says so. A 2021 review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that trans women’s strength and muscle “remain above those of cisgender women, even after 36 months of hormone therapy.” An Air Force study found that trans women still ran 12 percent faster than cisgender women after two years of hormones.

But the same research shows how much of the body does change. The review found that after four months of hormones, trans women’s hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood, matched cisgender women’s. The Endocrine Society’s goal for our treatment is to keep our hormone levels in the normal range for our gender. A 2024 study in the same journal found that trans women athletes had testosterone levels similar to cisgender women athletes, stronger grip, lower jump height for their weight, and lower aerobic capacity.

This is also why I think allowing doctors and families to make decisions about treatments like puberty blockers remains vital. The Endocrine Society’s guideline advises “starting suppression in early puberty to prevent the irreversible development of undesirable secondary sex characteristics,” which are the same changes the people saying “biological male” keep pointing to. In that 2024 piece, I wrote that if the self-described defenders of women’s sports “were genuinely worried by the threat of athletes who’d gone through male puberty, they’d be working to help trans people get the care they need before puberty begins.” Instead, 26 states have passed laws banning that care for trans kids, according to the Movement Advancement Project, and 48 percent of trans teenagers live in one of them. Those decisions belong with doctors and families, not with politicians who made male puberty the center of their argument and then passed laws ensuring that more trans girls will go through it.

So by the Endocrine Society’s own standard, “biological male” is the wrong description of a trans woman who has been on hormones for a few years. She was born male, and she may have gone through some or all of a male puberty. She now has a female hormone profile and a body that is partly one thing and partly the other. “Natal male” says the first part without denying the rest, and “biological male” only works if you deny it. The same is true in the other direction for trans men, who get called “biological women,” and for nonbinary people, who get called one or the other.

Why not “assigned male at birth”

I know a lot of people in our community would rather say “assigned male at birth,” and I understand why. It’s the phrase our advocates have pushed for years, and most style guides recommend it now. The American Psychological Association’s style guide goes further and says “natal sex” is “considered disparaging” by researchers and by many trans people, because it and “birth sex” “imply that sex is an immutable characteristic without sociocultural influence.” The diagnostic manual made the same switch in 2022, and the LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD asks reporters to avoid “biologically male” and “born a man” alike.

But I think “assigned” asks a reader who has never met a trans person to accept something they don’t believe, which is that somebody made a decision about their sex when they were born. Most people think the doctor looked. When we ask them to accept that their sex was assigned, we lose them before we’ve made our argument, and the right is happy to offer them “biological male” instead, a phrase that sounds like plain science. “Natal male” asks them to accept only what they already know, and it doesn’t say anything false about what happened after.

I’m aware of who uses “natal male” today. In my tracking it shows up only about 230 times since 2024, and a lot of those posts come from clinicians and writers who are critical of gender medicine, like the group Genspect and the journalist Benjamin Ryan. I don’t think that makes it their word. It was WPATH’s word and the diagnostic manual’s word before it was theirs, and it means only what it says: the sex a person was observed to be at birth.

Say what’s true

The first judge I can find who used “biological males” in a trans woman’s case used it in a ruling that let her play. Forty-nine years later, after right-wing media spent years pushing it, the phrase is the premise of a Senate hearing. In between, the doctors who treat us decided it was the wrong word.

So if you’re a reporter or a candidate who wants to talk about sports and fairness, you can do it without calling us biological males. Say “trans athletes,” the way Talarico did, or say “natal males” if you mean something specific about puberty. It will cost you nothing except the Republicans’ word for us. And if you’re one of us, I’d ask you to consider that “natal male” is not an insult. It’s the most accurate thing anyone can say about where we started, and it leaves room for everything we’ve become since.

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Erin Reed read the memo as a sign that the ads are failing, and I think she’s right. But there’s more in it than a concession. The memo also exaggerates what these attacks have done for Republicans, the way APP has for seven years. And after admitting that the old message isn’t enough, it offers candidates a new one built around Charlie Kirk’s murder, even though the man charged with killing him isn’t transgender.

What APP Admitted

Let’s start with the concession, because it’s real. The memo opens by admitting that Republicans “face significant headwinds” this year. It still wants candidates to go after Democrats on trans issues and on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. But it warns that pressing those issues “alone, while important, may not be sufficient,” and that Republicans also need to show families how they’ll help them economically. A page later, it calls the Republican pitch on the economy “at best unclear.”

Terry Schilling, APP’s president, was blunter when he talked to the Washington Examiner. Republicans are “doing great” on the culture war, he said, but they’re “not appealing enough to working class families and young people.” David McIntosh of the conservative Club for Growth told the same reporter that voters had more energy for trans issues in 2024 than they do now, because they care more about the economy.

Even the memo’s best number isn’t about us. Its top-scoring message says Democrats’ DEI policies hurt young men, and APP says that message moved its Ohio governor’s race test by 10.6 points. That’s well above anything the memo reports about trans people. When the group that built its brand on attacking us puts its biggest number somewhere else and admits Republicans don’t have a clear economic message, I’m inclined to take it at its word.

What APP Exaggerated

The memo still insists the old message works. It says Trump’s 2024 win “showed definitively” that these attacks help Republicans. It says messages about “men in women’s sports and spaces” moved voters up to 6.6 points toward Republicans in its testing, that messages about tax dollars paying for “sex changes” moved them up to 4 points, and that an ad about James Talarico moved Texas voters 5.7 points toward Ken Paxton.

There’s no way for a reader to check those numbers. The memo names no pollster and gives no sample sizes or dates, and four of its six figures are “up to,” which means the best result out of however many tests APP ran.

Where we can check the memo, it doesn’t hold up well. It claims that nearly every major Democratic candidate this cycle has supported “sex-change procedures for minors.” Three weeks earlier, PolitiFact reported that Talarico and Josh Turek in Iowa both oppose gender-affirming surgeries for minors, and it had already rated an ad claiming otherwise about Turek False. The race where APP says its Talarico ad moved voters 5.7 points is also the race where the newest poll, from Texas Southern University, has Talarico ahead of Paxton 47 to 46.

APP has been overselling its product for a long time. In 2019, it ran its first trans-athlete ads against Andy Beshear in Kentucky, and Beshear won by 5,136 votes. Schilling later said APP’s own comparison showed the ads had “shifted 26,000 votes,” and he described what he told his donors afterward: “Listen, we came up short. It was very close. But this really works.”

In 2022, APP bragged about spending $15 million in 13 states to make “the transgender issue” a “litmus test,” and Mark Kelly, Catherine Cortez Masto and Tony Evers all won anyway. I wrote about it at Media Matters at the time.

Last October, the Daily Signal reported that APP’s polling found a message about insurance coverage for “sex changes” raised the Republican vote share in Virginia by 6.9 points, and that a message about “sex changes for minors” moved New Jersey voters by 8.2 points. APP’s memo that month said those issues had “the very real potential to deliver victory for the GOP.” Abigail Spanberger won Virginia by 15 points, and Mikie Sherrill won New Jersey by 14.

I don’t think that means APP’s tests are fake. A message test measures what one ad does to one group of people in one sitting, and an election measures everything at once. In the races where I can set APP’s numbers against a result, its side lost. In 2024, when its message looked like it was working, Donald Trump was at the top of the ticket, running his “Kamala is for they/them” ads during football games. After last November’s races, my colleagues and I argued that the right had taken the wrong lesson from those ads and mistaken the messenger for the message.

Last year’s memo told Republicans they could “overcome past trends” with the same strategy. This year’s says “the past need not be prologue.” Message testing that nobody can check is a sales pitch.

Why Charlie Kirk?

That brings us to the strangest paragraph in the memo:

“This cycle, APP also tested a new message, connecting Democrats’ opposition to true mental health treatment for gender dysphoria with the rise in violent acts being perpetrated by transgender-identified, mentally distressed individuals. These messages proved just as persuasive as those noted above, moving voters up to 6.5 points towards Republicans. Given the salience of this issue in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder and other similar attacks, GOP candidates would be well advised to go on offense against their Democrat opponents using this angle as well.”

After conceding that attacks on trans people may not carry Republicans through November, APP’s new idea is to tell voters that we’re violent, and the example it reaches for is Charlie Kirk. Kirk was killed a year and a week before the memo’s date, and the man charged with his murder isn’t transgender. Prosecutors say he was in a relationship with a roommate “who was considering transitioning [their] gender,” and that is the connection they have described.

The “true mental health treatment” the memo accuses Democrats of opposing is, as far as I can tell, talk therapy meant to make trans kids not trans. Colorado banned that practice for minors, and in March the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that applying the ban to talk therapy has to survive the strictest test the Constitution sets.

It’s also worth saying out loud that Kirk’s murder has become a meme. In the year since he was killed, the internet has turned him into a running joke, complete with an AI-generated tribute song, “We Are Charlie Kirk,” that hit No. 1 on Spotify’s Viral 50 as people passed it around to make fun of it. The Intercept’s Katherine Krueger argued this month that the right’s insistence on treating Kirk as a saint is what turned him into a punchline. The jokes are grim, and the right has fought them hard.

But APP is counting on Kirk’s murder to make its message feel urgent to voters, especially younger voters, who have spent a year watching his name turn into a joke. That’s a strange foundation for a closing argument.

APP says this message moved voters up to 6.5 points. A focus group isn’t a poll, and APP’s testing isn’t public either, so I can only tell you what I’ve seen. In the focus groups I’ve watched where the idea of trans killers has come up, it has gotten laughed out of the room.

The record doesn’t support the idea either. Some people who have committed mass shootings have been trans, and federal officials referred to the shooter who killed two children at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis in August 2025 as transgender. I don’t think we help ourselves by pretending otherwise. But a research center at Hamline University that tracks public shootings in which four or more people are killed found that men commit 98 percent of them, women 2 percent and transgender people less than 1 percent.

The Gun Violence Archive counted 5,748 mass shootings from January 2013 through mid-September 2025 and told fact-checkers that five had confirmed transgender shooters. Even the report on “gender ideology” and political violence that the Department of Health and Human Services released in August says in its own abstract that “experimental research is needed to determine causality.”

For years, one of the first rumors after a high-profile shooting has been that the shooter was trans, and it has been false again and again. APP has now written that rumor into a memo for candidates, attached a number to it, and told Republicans to “go on offense” with it. I don’t think a group that believed its sports ads were still winning elections would reach for a murder the evidence doesn’t tie to us.

What Democrats Should Take From It

Some of this memo is good news for us. The group that built the anti-trans attack ad has told its own candidates that the ad may not be enough and that their economic message is missing.

Look no further than Ohio. Sherrod Brown lost his Senate seat by less than four points in 2024 under this same attack. This year he’s running an ad that reportedly cost more than $200,000 in which Ohio voters ask, “With everything going on, that’s what they’re talking about?” before it moves on to groceries, gas and health care. Bowling Green State University’s September poll has him leading Jon Husted 48 to 45.

I know how that ad lands for some of us. One of its voters says, “In Ohio, it’s against the law to perform transgender surgeries on kids. That’s right, it’s illegal,” and the ad treats a ban on our care as settled. I would have liked him to say something else. But APP’s own memo explains the logic of that ad, and I’d rather see Democrats answer these attacks by changing the subject than by agreeing with them.

If Republicans do run the Charlie Kirk message in October, I don’t expect voters to take it any more seriously than the focus groups I’ve watched did. The man charged with killing Kirk isn’t trans, and five shooters out of 5,748 mass shootings is not a rise in violence.

APP just told its own candidates that attacking us may not be enough. I’d like Democrats to answer these attacks with a defense of us, and I’m going to keep asking for one. But between now and November 3, I’ll take the question about groceries.

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There is just one small issue.

You look like this…

Despite being your usual charming self during the interview, you can tell almost immediately that you aren’t getting much warmth back. A week later comes the perfunctory email: Thank you for interviewing. We had many excellent candidates. We’ll keep your application on file for future opportunities.

Of course, you’ll never know why you didn’t get the job. No prospective employer is going to write, We didn’t hire you because you’re trans. Or even because they thought you might be trans. There could easily have been a more qualified applicant, or any of dozens of intangible factors that influence a hiring decision.

You started medically transitioning two years ago. Hormones have helped. But, like many young trans women, you don’t have tens of thousands of dollars on hand for facial feminization surgery, surgery that might have helped you look more like this.

But you can’t help wondering whether things might have gone differently if your face hadn’t made your trans history so readily apparent. Or maybe you did pass: some women do have more masculine facial features. But maybe your interviewer decided to comb your social media, and found those posts where you openly talked about your transition journey.

While trans people in many Western countries are theoretically protected against discrimination in hiring and job loss on the basis of their trans identities, discrimination is rarely overt. No law can reliably detect the employer who decides not to interview or hire someone because she is perceived, or confirmed, to be trans, so long as the employer is sensible enough not to say so.

Trans people, and trans women in particular, have long suspected that this kind of covert discrimination occurs. We now have unusually direct empirical evidence that this phenomenon is real, and meaningful.

A newly released working paper by Taryn Eames, a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Toronto, shows how disclosing a trans history and not passing, separately and in combination, affect a trans woman’s chances of getting through the first stage of the hiring process.

Eames ran what economists call an audit study, the standard method for measuring hiring discrimination: send employers fictitious applications that are identical except for one detail, and count who gets called back. She sent 10,022 of them to real job postings in nine occupations across 27 German cities, some customer-facing and others behind the scenes. German job applications commonly include a photograph, giving her an unusual opportunity to manipulate how an applicant would be perceived depending on appearance, despite being otherwise equivalent on paper.

In half of the applications, she included one of thirty AI-generated images of a twenty-something woman designed to be read as cisgender. In the other half, the applications were accompanied by a masculinized version of the cis woman’s face. Examples of both are shown below.

Eames also independently varied whether the application revealed a trans history, through evidence that the applicant had previously had a male name. The result was essentially a four-way experiment: women who passed with no disclosed trans history; women who passed but whose trans history was revealed; women who did not pass but made no disclosure; and women who both did not pass and disclosed that history.

Presumed cisgender candidates received a positive response to 47.6 percent of their applications. When a more masculinized image was included, the positive response rate dropped to 43.0 percent. A similar decline, to 43.5 percent, was seen when someone’s trans status was revealed within the résumé but the accompanying photo was cisgender-passing. When the non-passing picture was accompanied by the revelation of a trans history, however, positive response rates dropped by fifteen points, to 32.4 percent, suggesting that the two penalties compound each other.

The disadvantage associated with a non-passing appearance was further magnified when the posting listed a contact person with a male name, when positions were customer-facing, and when the image was more strongly masculinized.

It is already well established that trans people experience substantial economic disadvantage compared with their cis counterparts, including higher levels of unemployment and lower earnings. There are numerous potential contributors to this, including concomitant mental health challenges that may affect educational achievement or contribute to disability.

Eames’s study isolates the discrimination itself. With otherwise identical applications, trans women, and in particular trans women who bear more obvious signs of masculinization, are more likely to be screened out early in the hiring process. Before a trans woman has even had the chance to demonstrate whether she is competent, personable, or good at her job, simply being perceived as trans can reduce her chances of getting through the door. While this paper looked solely at the impact of facial passability on receiving a callback, the effect would likely extend to other characteristics that reveal a trans history, such as a deeper voice, which may become evident during a phone or online interview.

This creates a profound and vicious economic cycle. A trans woman who is already struggling financially may be unable to afford the interventions that could make her trans history less immediately apparent. If being visibly trans then reduces her chances of obtaining better-paid employment, the very economic disadvantage that prevents her from accessing those interventions may help perpetuate that disadvantage. The stresses of downward economic mobility, combined with the challenges of navigating the world as a trans woman, can lead to worsening mental health, further decreasing competitiveness for employment and increasing the likelihood of long-term unemployment, deepening poverty, and increased dependency on the state.

The state has a well-established interest in providing assistance to people who face modifiable barriers to obtaining employment, helping them become more employable so they can re-enter the workforce. Governments already make considerable investments in physical rehabilitation, mental health support, vocational retraining, wage subsidies, and employment-support programs. Non-passing trans women may face an unconventional barrier to employment, but, as Eames demonstrates, it is both real and consequential. It is also a barrier that is modifiable, most notably through interventions like facial feminization surgery and voice training.

We know that FFS is highly effective at helping non-passing women be perceived as female. A 2020 study in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal found that FFS raised the share of viewers who identified a trans woman’s face as female from 57 percent before surgery to 94 percent after. While facial feminization surgery is often framed as cosmetic, given Eames’s findings, it may have economic benefits as well. A 2026 cost-effectiveness analysis in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery estimated that FFS costs approximately US$44,000 per quality-adjusted life-year gained, the standard unit health economists use to compare treatments, which is well within conventional U.S. thresholds for cost-effective health care. The same analysis notes that FFS is the most commonly denied gender-affirming procedure. The cost-effectiveness may be even more pronounced when considering the indirect benefits of improving employability.

A number of U.S. states currently cover FFS under their Medicaid programs, and many private insurers have extended this coverage as well. But coverage for FFS lags behind coverage of hormone therapy and bottom surgery. Collecting the economic data necessary to demonstrate the impact of FFS on subsequent employment and earnings may help build support for broader coverage in jurisdictions where it is not currently insured.

Eames suggests in her paper that among the solutions to this discrimination is to help potential employers recognize “a broader range of appearances as compatible with womanhood”; in other words, to overcome their prejudices against trans women, and to hope their customers are willing to do the same. While this is a reasonable aspiration, eliminating appearance-based biases against trans women would seem to be a long-term project.

More importantly, Eames acknowledges in the paper that “timely access to hormone therapy, voice therapy, surgery, and, where clinically appropriate, puberty suppression may reduce characteristics that make passing difficult.” Targeted interventions to improve passability and presentability should not be seen as merely cosmetic, but as practical and pragmatic interventions to improve the economic outlook of trans women.

Laura Targownik is a gastroenterologist and professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. She writes Data Driven Transsexual on Substack. Taryn Eames reviewed a draft of this essay for accuracy and supplied the images, which are drawn from StyleGAN2’s pre-generated headshots (license) and altered for the study. The author used AI tools for background research, copy editing, and checking references; the text is her own.

Markey had earned those words. He spent the summer saying that Seth Moulton threw trans kids under the bus, said it to his face in August, and won 65 to 35 on September 1. Moulton had blamed us for a presidential election in the New York Times. Talarico had said “trans athletes” and “safe and fair” on Fox News. I don’t think those two men did the same thing, and I don’t think we should be using the same words for both of them.

I’ve said it too. In July 2024 I tweeted that David Leonhardt of the New York Times “says Kamala Harris should throw trans kids under the bus just for political points.” Fourteen months later I was tweeting that I was “tired of hearing assertions that Democrats ‘threw trans people under the bus’ in 2024 from people whose primary interest in the trans community is as cannon fodder for their revolutionary pipe dreams.” I still believe both of those things, and I think the gap between them is the problem: we now use the same six words whether or not the person we’re talking about has actually done anything to us. So I went back through five years of people saying it and wrote down who said it, about whom, what Democrats were actually doing at the time, and what the voters did next. The full record is in the clickable timeline, with a source for every entry; the year-by-year version runs through this piece.

Who was saying it first

Let’s start with who was saying it before we were. It’s easy to forget that until November 2024, the people accusing someone of throwing someone else under the bus were mostly on the right, and the person they said had been thrown was almost always a woman. Martina Navratilova said it about Gymnastics Australia, the British magazine spiked said it about Rosie Duffield, and a line about women “not impressed at being thrown under a bus” got copied from account to account all spring. When Anheuser-Busch dropped Dylan Mulvaney, Not the Bee celebrated in the same words. That is who was using the phrase for most of 2023, and they were using it against us.

On our side, hardly anyone said it. Hillary Clinton told the Financial Times in 2022 that whatever doesn’t help you win shouldn’t be a priority, and a YouTube channel titled its episode “Clinton Throws Trans Americans Under The Bus.” After the 2022 midterms, Jeet Heer wrote that Matt Yglesias had urged Democrats to do it. When the Biden administration proposed a sports rule in 2023 that would bar blanket bans but let schools set limits for fairness and safety, a TikTok announced that Biden had done it too. None of those accusations went anywhere, and I think the reason is simple: Clinton wasn’t running for anything, and the Biden rule would have barred the blanket bans that the states were passing.

It’s also easy to forget what that administration actually did. It signed an order against gender identity discrimination on its first day, lifted the military ban five days later, confirmed Rachel Levine with every Democratic vote, and put an X marker on our passports. When Republican legislatures in Kentucky, Kansas, and North Carolina passed bans, the Democratic governors vetoed them and were overridden. Whatever else you want to say about those years, the Democrats who had the power to protect us mostly used it.

November 2024

Two days after the election, with Republicans having spent nearly $215 million on network television ads about us, Moulton told the New York Times: “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

I understand why so many of us started saying it that week. Here was a Democrat blaming us for the loss two days after the polls closed, and George Takei wrote what a lot of us felt: don’t trust any Democrat who would throw our trans family under the bus. Noah Smith asked, not unreasonably, what the phrase was supposed to mean. Nobody really answered him, and looking back, I think that week is when the phrase stopped describing something Moulton had done and started being what we say whenever a Democrat disappoints us.

The same week, people started saying it about Sarah McBride, who told reporters she wasn’t there to fight about bathrooms and would follow the Speaker’s rules even though she disagreed with them. The Advocate’s headline was “A betrayal.”

I wrote then that none of us are obligated to die on the first hill they come across, that sometimes there’s better terrain nearby, and reinforcements waiting, and I still believe it. John Fetterman wrote the same day that there was no job he was afraid to lose if it required him to degrade anyone. She didn’t need to fight about a bathroom to keep her allies, and two months later she voted against the national sports ban along with every House Democrat but two.

2025

In 2025, Democrats started making it a promise. When Gavin Newsom told Charlie Kirk that trans girls in girls’ sports was “deeply unfair,” Erin Reed said he’d thrown us under the bus. Two months later Tim Walz stood up at the California Democratic convention, in Newsom’s home state, and said, “Shame on any of us who throws a trans child under the bus for thinking they’re going to get elected.”

By fall, the argument on the left about why we lost in 2024 was happening in the same words. Emma Vigeland wrote that Democrats had thrown trans people and immigrants under the bus and lost to a fascist, and Briahna Joy Gray wrote that anyone arguing we’d be safer if they had was “sick and dark sided.” That was the week I wrote my cannon-fodder tweet, because both sides of that argument were describing a party that had, in fact, spent the year voting with us.

Look at what that party was actually doing that year. In January the House passed a national sports ban with two Democratic votes, and in March it died in the Senate with every Democrat voting no. Fifteen Democratic attorneys general answered Trump’s order on our care within a week.

In June, McBride told Ezra Klein that what we’d been doing wasn’t working, and she was accused of throwing us under the bus for saying so. Erin Reed conceded the point I keep coming back to: “Democrats have largely held solid on transgender rights in recent years in terms of actual votes taken.” Two weeks later she warned that some Democrats were privately preparing to capitulate on our health care. The Medicaid ban fell out of the tax bill that same month, after McBride and Senator Tammy Baldwin led the challenge that got it ruled out of order, and the capitulation never came.

In November, Abigail Spanberger, who had been attacked all fall in ads about bathrooms and locker rooms, won Virginia by more than fifteen points. Charlotte Clymer’s summary on inauguration day was that Spanberger had been told to throw trans youth under the bus, refused, and won in a landslide.

In December, when Marjorie Taylor Greene brought a bill to the floor that would make our care a felony, McBride told reporters it “would have imprisoned my parents if I had come out just a little bit earlier,” and then worked the Republican side as a member of the whip team. Four Republicans voted no. The bill passed 216 to 211, and nine months later it has not become law. I don’t know what else we could have asked her to do.

2026

The Democrats who actually turned on us have started losing. In March, state Representative Nasif Majeed, the only Democrat who voted to override Governor Josh Stein’s veto of an anti-trans bill, lost his North Carolina primary 69 to 27. Michael Wray, who had voted with Republicans to override the sports and care bans in 2023, lost 64 to 36. Moulton carried his November interview into a Senate primary, apologized for it repeatedly, and lost by thirty points to a man who said those words all summer. A UMass Amherst poll found that 67 percent of Massachusetts Democratic primary voters were less likely to support a candidate who opposed transgender rights.

Colin Allred said “I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports” in the last Texas Senate race, wouldn’t say the word “transgender” at all, and lost to Ted Cruz by more than eight points. In the two years since Moulton’s interview, every Democrat I can find who lost over trans politics is one who turned on us.

Meanwhile Democrats in Congress have blocked every federal anti-trans bill from the minority. The January funding package went through with dozens of riders stripped, which McBride’s office credited her with working relentlessly with her colleagues to ensure. The Senate blocked a trans-athlete amendment 49 to 41 in March, and in July every House Democrat present voted against writing the military ban into law.

McBride said it herself in April: “not a single anti-trans bill or provision has become law. That’s not by coincidence, it’s by hard work and a strategic approach.”

Three Democrats will test all of this in November. Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, told the Toledo Blade in June that she doesn’t support “boys playing in girls sports.” Talarico, who voted against Texas’s ban on our care in 2023, said “safe and fair” last Wednesday, which is close to what the Biden administration proposed in 2023 and quietly withdrew after the election without anybody organizing against Joe Biden over it.

Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Iowa, is the harder case. He won his primary in June by 25 points, and in July he told The Gazette that the question should be left to “the sports governing bodies” rather than Congress, “but I can tell you, as someone that spent a lot of my life in high-level sports, I don’t believe that biological men should compete against females in sports.” It bought him nothing. Elon Musk’s super PAC began running an ad in Iowa last week saying he “voted to spend our tax dollars on sex change surgeries for children,” a claim PolitiFact had rated False in June, and the next day his spokeswoman said that “Josh opposes taxpayer-funded sex changes, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.” By Thursday the phrase was aimed at him too.

Turek’s record in the Iowa House is a record of voting with us. He voted against the 2023 law that requires schools to tell parents when a student asks to use a different name, and against the 2025 budget that barred Medicaid from paying for our care. But “biological men” is Ken Paxton’s word and Elon Musk’s, not the one Talarico used, and a promise to oppose “taxpayer-funded sex changes” is a promise about our health care, not about who plays on a team. I don’t think Turek has thrown us under the bus yet, because he hasn’t cast a vote in the Senate. He has told us what he thinks we are, though, and what he is willing to give up, and that is more than Talarico did. Acton said “boys,” Turek said “biological men,” and Talarico said “trans athletes,” and I think those differences will matter more than any of the three campaigns expects. Ohio, Iowa, and Texas all vote on November 3, and I’d rather wait for the voters than decide now that all three of them have abandoned us.

Ask what they actually did

I know that not everyone in our community will want to hear this, and I understand why the phrase feels good to say. It’s short, it’s vivid, and the last two years have given us plenty of reasons to expect the worst from our allies. But it’s only true when a Democrat has actually done something to us. Moulton blamed us for a presidential loss, Majeed and Wray voted to override vetoes that protected us, and Allred would not say the word “transgender” at all. Those are real acts, and when we called them out, the voters backed us up.

It’s false when all it means is that a Democrat didn’t say what we wanted on Fox News. By that standard Biden, Clinton, McBride, and Talarico all threw us under the bus, and the phrase no longer tells us anything about any of them. Rhetorical softening is not the same thing as abandonment, and if we keep telling Democrats that it is, we should expect some of them to decide that they’ve already lost us and vote accordingly.

So the next time you see those words aimed at a Democrat, ask what they actually did. If they blamed us for a loss, voted to take something from us, or refused to say who we are, then say it, and say it loudly, because the record now says the voters will back you up. If they said “safe and fair” to a Fox News anchor while the other name on the ballot was the man who once asked the state for a list of us, then I’d save it. If they said “biological men” and let their campaign promise to oppose “taxpayer-funded sex changes,” as Turek did last week, then wait for the vote, because that is where the phrase will either become true or not. Ed Markey used those words against a man who had blamed trans kids for a presidential election, and Massachusetts Democrats agreed with him by thirty points. There will be another Seth Moulton, probably soon, and when he shows up we will want those words to still mean something. Let’s save them for him.

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The backlash was immediate. Brad Pritchett, the CEO of Equality Texas, asked, “When did people of moral standing decide to use Texas children as a political football?” The podcaster June Sternbach warned that “first, it’s Democrats needing to disavow trans women in sports to get elected, next it’ll be agreeing to ban access to HRT.” The Texas Tribune called it a reversal, and by Thursday a lot of trans people online had reached for the phrase we always reach for: he’s throwing us under the bus.

I understand why people are frightened. Many trans people have already had to flee their homes for blue states and cities — the Williams Institute found last year that nearly half of trans adults had moved or were considering it — and the streamer class has conditioned the rest of us to expect that more discrimination is always coming. But things do not always get worse. They sometimes get better. To protect trans people as they are in blue cities, Democrats need to build and hold power. To do that, we need to allow our allies some rhetorical flexibility. This is what that looks like. Because the alternative on the ballot is Ken Paxton, and there is no comparison between these two men.

What Paxton has actually done

It’s easy to lose track of Paxton’s record on trans people, because there is so much of it. Let’s start in February 2022, when he issued a legal opinion declaring that puberty blockers and hormones for trans kids “can legally constitute child abuse.” The opinion was nonbinding — I wrote at the time, at Media Matters, that it did not change Texas law — but it didn’t need to. Within the week, Governor Greg Abbott cited it to order the state’s child-welfare agency to investigate the parents of trans children, with “criminal penalties” for the doctors, nurses, and teachers who failed to turn them in.

Four months later, Paxton’s office asked the Department of Public Safety for the number of Texans who had changed the sex on their driver’s licenses — “male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month” — and said it might later need “DL/ID numbers” and “a list.” DPS employees counted 16,466 changes before the agency decided the data “neither exists nor could be accurately produced.”

In November 2023, he demanded the medical records of Texas kids from Seattle Children’s Hospital and from QueerMed, a telehealth clinic in Georgia — providers in states where that care is legal and where a Texas attorney general has no business. (Seattle Children’s sued, and he dropped the demand the following April.) In February 2024, his office served PFLAG, the support group for families of LGBTQ kids, with a demand for its communications with Texas families; this March, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that he can have them. In August 2024, at his prompting, DPS stopped honoring court orders that change the sex on a license, and the head of the driver’s license division told staff to email “the names and identification numbers of people seeking to change their sex on their license” to a designated inbox.

He has sued doctors under the state’s 2023 ban on transition care for minors; this February, he went after Children’s Health System of Texas and a Dallas pediatric gynecologist over nineteen patients, calling the doctor a “criminal extremist.” He has petitioned to put Dallas school officials under oath over trans athletes, promising that “ISD officials who have participated in this madness will be held accountable.” In June, he sued the city of Denton to stop a Pride swim day at a community pool, because “cities cannot disregard Texas law by allowing men to change with young kids.” And on the night he won the Republican nomination, from a stage in Plano, he introduced his opponent to Texas as “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”

I can’t think of another elected official in the country who has used the machinery of a state — its child-welfare agency, its driver’s license files, its subpoena power — against trans people this relentlessly, simply for existing. If he wins in November, he will bring that same energy to the body that writes federal law.

What Talarico has actually done

Talarico’s record is the opposite. In 2021, when the Texas House debated a bill banning trans kids from school sports at every age, he said the state was trying to “police people’s private parts” and compared the exclusion to the arguments once used to keep Black athletes off the field. He voted against the 2023 law banning transition care for minors — the same law Paxton is now using to sue doctors. That November, arguing against a bill to hang the Ten Commandments in every classroom, he asked a Republican colleague why “having a rainbow in a classroom is indoctrination and not having the Ten Commandments in a classroom.” When he launched this campaign last September, he refused the premise of the whole fight: “Trans people are one percent of the population… Trans people aren’t taking away our health care.”

In January, I wrote that his conversation with Ezra Klein — where he said the Republican sports ban’s goal “was not to solve a problem” but “to score political points off the backs of a vulnerable community” — was a model for how Democrats should engage these attacks instead of fleeing them. The Human Rights Campaign endorsed him in June.

After Paxton won the runoff, Talarico started giving up the sound bites. Within two days, he called the “God is nonbinary” and “six sexes” lines “cringey” on CBS, while accusing Paxton of “clipping my cringey comments to distract from his career of corruption.” In June, he told a podcast that he opposes gender surgeries for minors, which has been the position of trans advocates for as long as I can remember. And on Wednesday, he said he would oppose trans athletes in girls’ sports if it endangered “safety or fairness.”

Rhetorical softening is not the same thing as abandonment. Look at what Talarico actually said. Asked about “biological men,” he answered about “trans athletes.” He said “safety or fairness.” He said, of his votes, that “I supported amendments that would have given the power to make these decisions to local communities — like conservatives used to believe.” That is effectively the position of the Biden administration.

In April 2023, the Department of Education proposed a rule that would have barred schools from imposing blanket bans on trans athletes while allowing them to set limits that were “substantially related to … fairness in competition or prevention of sports-related injury,” with more room to restrict in high school and college than in elementary school. (The rule would have been issued under Title IX, the law banning sex discrimination in schools.) No categorical bans, decisions made close to the field, safety and fairness as the test: that is Talarico’s answer on federal letterhead. The Biden administration then sat on the rule for twenty months and withdrew it on December 20, 2024, after the election, a walk-back I noted without much enthusiasm when I wrote about why I was voting for Kamala Harris anyway. Nobody spent a week accusing Joe Biden of throwing trans people under the bus.

Compare Talarico to Colin Allred, the last Democrat to run for this seat. Allred answered the same attack in 2024 by saying “I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports,” and he wouldn’t say the word “transgender” at all. The journalist Erin Reed called it the first time a major Democratic candidate had “acquiesce[d] to anti-trans messaging,” and Allred went on to lose by more than eight points. Paxton’s own response to Talarico this week was that he “voted against TWO bills that would have prevented men from playing in women’s sports.” Allred said “boys.” Paxton says “men.” Talarico said “trans athletes,” and I think that shows a lot more respect and thoughtfulness than either. A politician who reaches for “boys” or “men” has told you what he thinks we are. One who says “trans athletes” and “safe and fair” would rather argue about the rule than about whether we exist, and in Texas that is close to the most a Democrat will be able to afford.

Politics is about hard choices

In 1996, running for the Illinois state Senate, Barack Obama filled out a questionnaire for a Chicago gay newspaper: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.” By 2004, he was “not a supporter of gay marriage.” Running for president in 2008, he told a church forum, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian … it is also a sacred union.” In 2010, his views were “evolving,” and in May 2012, six months before his reelection, he told ABC that same-sex couples should be able to marry. His strategist David Axelrod later wrote that the shift off the 1996 position was political, noting that “opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church,” and that after one more event defending the man-and-a-woman line, Obama complained to him, “I’m just not very good at bullshitting.”

On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, and same-sex marriage became the law of the land — with Obama’s own solicitor general, the administration’s top lawyer at the Court, having argued for it. The people who were furious at Obama in 2008 were right about what he said. They were wrong about what it meant. Politics is about hard choices, and the hard choice is rarely whether you’d like a candidate to say the perfect thing. It’s whether you’d rather have someone who says the imperfect thing and votes with you, or someone who says the perfect thing about you to a crowd in Plano and means every word.

Democrats are holding the line

For the last twenty months, the thing standing between Donald Trump and a federal anti-trans law has not been the courts. I wrote in July that the Supreme Court has shut that door. It certainly hasn’t been the executive branch, which is currently searching the military’s electronic health records for anyone “with a current diagnosis or history of or exhibit symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria.” It has been Democrats in Congress, and they’ve done it from the minority.

On January 14, 2025, the House passed a national ban on trans girls in girls’ sports, 218 to 206, with two Democrats (both from Texas) voting yes. On March 3, it reached the Senate and died, 51 to 45, with every Democrat voting no. Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, who is up for reelection in a state Trump carried, called it “overreach” that would subject “the bodies of adolescent student athletes — children — to intrusive investigation by the federal government.”

In June 2025, the big Republican tax-and-spending bill — written to pass the Senate with a bare majority — arrived carrying a ban on Medicaid paying for trans care at any age; the parliamentarian, who referees the Senate’s rules, ruled that it needed sixty votes, and Republicans stripped it out rather than lose the bill. In January, Democrats negotiated dozens of anti-trans riders out of the package that funds the government through this month, including provisions that would have cut off federal money for trans care at any age and threatened school funding over bathrooms. In March, the Senate blocked a trans-athlete amendment to the Republican voting bill, 49 to 41. In July, every House Democrat present voted against writing the trans military ban into statute, and with the help of four Republicans they defeated it, 212 to 217. The House did pass two narrower anti-trans amendments to the defense bill that same night, and five Democrats voted for one of them, but that bill has since stalled in the Senate.

In twenty months, not one of those bills has become law. But Democrats have held that line from the minority, relying on the sixty-vote rule, and if Republicans keep the Senate, it will hold only as long as they decide that trans kids aren’t worth scrapping the filibuster over. A majority decides what comes to the floor in the first place. A Democratic senator from Texas would be one more vote toward a Democratic majority, and in a Democratic Senate, anti-trans bills won’t need to be defeated 51 to 45, because they will never come up for a vote at all.

Eyes on the ball

The Texas Tribune’s polling average has had Talarico slightly ahead of Paxton since the runoff, better than Beto O’Rourke ever polled against Ted Cruz. Emerson’s August survey had it 47 to 46 for Paxton, with voters under fifty breaking for Talarico by fifteen points. Early voting starts October 19.

Winning in Texas is going to require taking positions that don’t sound great in Seattle. And ironically, the wave of people decrying Talarico for “throwing trans people under the bus” over a clause about safety and fairness is probably doing more than anybody to telegraph to moderate voters that he’s a sane alternative to Paxton. I’d rather they didn’t, but I notice that it works.

Ken Paxton asked the state of Texas for a list of everyone who had changed the sex on their driver’s license. James Talarico said that sports should be safe and fair. If you can’t yet bring yourself to trust Talarico, consider instead what Paxton has already done with the power he has, and what he would do with more. On November 3, Texas will pick one of them.

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What we’re looking for: essays and op-eds from trans and allied writers, roughly 800 to 1,500 words, on culture, media, and politics. Arguments, reported observations, first-person essays with a point. If cis people are learning their genders from us, this is a place where we do the teaching on our own terms.

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The point had a market. Cunningham — who gained more than 500,000 followers after a viral flagrant foul in 2025, and whose endorsement deals reportedly exceed $1 million a year — moved to sell merchandise of the meme until the players’ union barred it. “That moment last year, that was feisty,” she said on a podcast appearance this summer, of the foul that first made her famous. “It worked in my favor last year.” And: “I know that if you use this platform, you can, once the ball stops bouncing, you’re setting yourself up for success,” because “we don’t make enough money to retire and not do anything once we’re done.”

July

On July 21, ESPN published a profile of the newly famous Cunningham, in which she addressed the “MAGA Barbie” nickname: “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” The next day she stood by it: “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.” The U.S. Department of Education posted her meme with a crown photoshopped on: “Common sense prevails 👑.” Three days after the profile, Adidas released her player-exclusive colorway; it sold out within hours.

Then the question started traveling. Over the next two weeks it was put, at podium after podium, to Fever coach Stephanie White, to Golden State’s Natalie Nakase, to Minnesota’s Cheryl Reeve — and, repeatedly, to Caitlin Clark, whose refusal to answer it became its own national story. That two weeks — the rallies trailing the Fever’s road trip, the fined owner, the pile-on against Clark for answering nothing — is documented in Thursday’s column. By Monday, the conservative Christian advocacy group Concerned Women for America was demanding the WNBA adopt a policy “that establishes only biological women can play basketball in the league.” No publicly known transgender woman has ever played in the WNBA.

Toronto

This week the question jumped leagues. At the National Bank Open, tennis reporters began asking players where they stood — and the tour they play on had, quietly, already answered. Since July 1, the Women’s Tennis Association has required every player to submit to a one-time genetic sex test — an SRY gene screen, by cheek swab or blood sample, with a positive result ending a player’s eligibility unless she documents Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or another qualifying difference of sexual development. The WTA posted the policy to its website only after reporters obtained it, without a press release. Nor was tennis the first quiet mover: the National Women’s Soccer League — which confirms it has no transgender players — dropped its own trans-participation policy in early 2022 without announcement, and weathered an op-ed fight over “gender standards” last fall; World Boxing made genetic testing mandatory in May 2025, with Imane Khelif’s name in the announcement — apologizing later for the name, not the test.

Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1, backed the policy: “I think it’s really important to keep the fairness in our tour. It’s obvious that biologically the men are way stronger than women, so I feel like it would be not really fair for the woman to compete against biological men.” And: “If they want to test us all, I’m happy to do that, it’s pretty fair, and let’s keep it that way.” OutKick, the Fox-owned conservative sports site, posted the clip: “Thank you, Aryna Sabalenka, for standing up.”

Elena Rybakina, the world No. 2, said: “I don’t know what to comment. If we got to do it, we will do it. For me, I won’t say it’s unnecessary, but I think it was, without these tests, also fine.”

Coco Gauff answered at length: “I understand the reasoning behind it. I do think that this kind of conversation has created a lot of animosity towards the trans community, which I’m not really a big fan of. But I also understand the biological difference and the need to protect that and preserve that… I guess I kind of agree with trying to protect the fairness in women’s sports, but I also do not like the attack that it is creating. People who don’t really care but just want to use this as an excuse to attack the trans community — I’m not really a big fan of that either… I definitely support the trans community, but I also support the need of creating fairness in sport too.” Within hours, Jennifer Sey — founder of the anti-trans-inclusion apparel brand XX-XY Athletics — reposted the last sentence alone: “Translation: I don’t want men in women’s sports but I’m scared to say it outright… Pick a lane Coco.”

The mandatory test has an Olympic history. At the 1996 Atlanta Games, SRY screening of 3,387 women athletes flagged eight — all eight were cleared to compete. The International Olympic Committee abandoned universal sex testing in 1999, a step the American Medical Association and the IOC’s own Athletes’ Commission had urged. Jessica Pegula, the top-ranked American and a member of the WTA Players’ Council, said she thought the tour based its policy on what it had seen from other sporting organizations, and that testing is expected to begin at the Cincinnati Open.

August 5

Cunningham is now backpedalling — from the fight, if not the position. In late July, she told reporters the rallies and the argument did not concern her as a distraction. On August 5 she told USA Network: “It just makes me sad that all this kind of drama… is getting overshadowed, that the basketball is getting overshadowed.” And: “I think there’s room for absolutely everybody. We don’t always have to agree, but that respect and love definitely has to be there.” At practice the next day she said: “I know that people are not always going to align and agree … but I think the most important thing is having that respect, having that love, and pursuing peace in these conversations.” The WNBA’s press corps, she added the same week, should cover more basketball: “we got to keep the main thing the main thing.”

The question did not stop. On Thursday it reached Gabby Williams, the Golden State Valkyries forward and two-time Olympian. “I would welcome a trans athlete on my team or against my team, anytime,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a problem in the world.” Trans rights, she added, “right now, is our new battle.” By Thursday night, Jon Root, a sports commentator and contributor to the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, had called her answer “certifiably insane.”

Testing begins next week in Cincinnati.

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April

In April, Liberati filed a complaint challenging Whaley’s place on the ballot, arguing her election paperwork was invalid because she had not filed under her former name. Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett rejected the challenge: Whaley had legally changed her name and met every requirement to appear on the ballot as Joanna Whaley. The Michigan Legislative LGBTQ+ Caucus and LGBTQ+ organizations called the complaint “a transphobic political tactic rather than a legitimate election concern.” Whaley spent the months that followed campaigning on utility bills, health care costs, and medical debt.

Fifteen years

Whaley spent years as a pastor at evangelical megachurches. When she brought questions about her gender to church leaders, they directed her into conversion practices that continued for 15 years. She lost her job when her plans to transition became known. She went back to school, graduated from seminary, and now works as a clinical chaplain in Detroit-area emergency rooms, intensive care units, and hospice care.

“I’ve experienced financial hardship firsthand,” she has said of those years. “Coming out as transgender meant rebuilding my life and career. My Christian faith, family, and community supported me as I went back to college and became a spiritual care provider.”

Her campaign platform lists affordable health care, medical debt relief, lower utility bills, civil liberties, and the district’s roads. Asked by the Free Press about the office she is now favored to hold, she said: “I’ve been professionally trained to be the calmest in the room.”

July 30

On July 30, U.S. District Judge Jane Beckering permanently blocked Michigan from enforcing its 2023 ban on conversion therapy for minors, ruling in a lawsuit brought by a Catholic Charities affiliate and a licensed counselor that the law violates the First Amendment as applied to therapy “that consists exclusively of talking.” The state agreed to stop enforcing the ban — the first state to drop its ban after the Supreme Court’s ruling in March, in Chiles v. Salazar, that talk-therapy bans regulate speech. The Daily Signal described the order as “a ruling that protects children.”

Five days after Beckering’s order, the Democrats of House District 2 nominated Whaley.

2017

In November 2017, Danica Roem of Virginia defeated Bob Marshall — a 26-year incumbent and the author of the state’s bathroom bill — to become the first openly transgender person elected to and seated in an American statehouse. In 2020, Delaware’s Sarah McBride became the country’s first openly transgender state senator; in November 2024, its first openly transgender member of Congress. In 2023, Montana’s Republican House leadership barred Rep. Zooey Zephyr from the House floor for the remainder of the session; in 2024, her district re-elected her.

This cycle, four transgender women ran for the Michigan House. The chamber already includes Rep. Emily Dievendorf, who is openly nonbinary. Whaley would be the Legislature’s first transgender member.

November

Kokinda awaits in a district that has not been competitive for Republicans. Whaley has said she hopes her campaign makes it easier for future LGBTQ+ candidates to run without the same scrutiny. “It hits me when I’m talking to trans folks across the state,” she told the Free Press. “I understand in this moment in politics what it would mean to elect a trans woman could be monumental.”

Her name appears on the November ballot as Joanna Whaley.

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“Caitlin Clark might be the biggest coward in the history of sports,” Daily Wire host Matt Walsh wrote on Monday afternoon. “She punts on the trans question, which is the easiest question you could ever be asked. No spine.” Breitbart had already run its headline Sunday night: “Caitlin Clark Dodges Question on Protecting Women’s Sports.” OutKick, the Fox-owned sports site, scored her performance like a routine she’d botched: she “carefully avoids taking a side.”

Clark did not defend transgender athletes. She did not criticize her teammate. She gave the same answer that commissioners, athletic directors, and Olympic committees have given for decades — eligibility belongs to the governing bodies — and then declined to give it twice.

No publicly known transgender woman has ever played in the WNBA. Not this season, not any season. The college pipeline runs the same way: NCAA president Charlie Baker testified to the Senate in 2024 that he knew of fewer than 10 transgender athletes out of 510,000 across every college sport in America — and the NCAA barred trans women from women’s sports entirely last year.

1931

The loyalty test is new. The apparatus running it is not — and it has never confined itself to trans women.

In 1931, a teenage minor-league pitcher named Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game in Chattanooga. Baseball’s commissioner responded by voiding her contract and declaring the game “too strenuous” for women. Historians still argue about whether the strikeouts were staged.

Caster Semenya — a cis woman and a two-time Olympic champion in the 800 meters — has spent seven years barred from her own event unless she medicates her natural testosterone down to a number World Athletics will accept. Europe’s top human-rights court has ruled in her favor twice, most recently in July 2025, finding Switzerland never gave her challenge a rigorous hearing. The regulations stand anyway.

And Imane Khelif — a cis woman — won Olympic welterweight gold in Paris while J.K. Rowling and half the English-speaking internet insisted she was secretly a man, on the strength of an unpublished test from a boxing federation the Olympics had already expelled. Her reward for the medal: the sport’s new governing body announced mandatory sex testing with her name in the announcement — it apologized later for the name, not the test — and the reigning Olympic champion sat out last September’s world championships while her appeal waited.

The profile

The campaign now aimed at Caitlin Clark began as a soft-focus feature about somebody else. On July 21, ESPN published a profile of Cunningham, the Fever’s enforcer and the league’s newest celebrity, in which she addressed the “MAGA Barbie” nickname her fans had given her: “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” The next day she stood by it: “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.”

The machinery arrived within hours. The U.S. Department of Education — the federal agency that enforces Title IX, the law banning sex discrimination in schools — posted a meme of Cunningham’s finger-point celebration with a crown photoshopped onto her head: “Common sense prevails 👑.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the president agreed with Cunningham and called the backlash “ludicrous.” Riley Gaines and Tomi Lahren praised her. Within a week, a veteran role player had become the White House’s favorite athlete.

The road trip

Then the Fever left home for three games — Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis — and the content machine traveled with them. At each stop, demonstrators rallied outside the arena to thank Cunningham; in Portland, the Women’s Liberation Front — a group that has spent a decade fighting trans recognition in the courts — organized a crowd of about 50. Crowds inside booed her. The Fever said in a statement that “neither our organization nor Sophie had any knowledge of this demonstration.”

In Seattle it curdled. Storm minority owner Celeste Keaton confronted two 16-year-old fans wearing shirts from XX-XY Athletics — the apparel brand former Levi’s executive Jennifer Sey founded to oppose trans inclusion in women’s sports — and the WNBA fined her and barred her from the Storm’s next five home games.

The coaches, meanwhile, did something almost old-fashioned: they answered the question. Cunningham’s own coach, Stephanie White, said “I don’t ever believe that exclusion is an answer. I just don’t.” Golden State’s Natalie Nakase said “Sports is about belonging. It’s about inclusivity. It’s about allowing everyone to be their authentic self.”

Minnesota’s Cheryl Reeve — a four-time champion as a head coach — spent the weekend reminding reporters what the panic keeps omitting: “It is not the case that we have ‘biological men’ in girls’ locker rooms.” On Sunday she coached the game in a shirt reading “Trans Kids Belong,” then declined to perform outrage about her pregame conversation with Cunningham: “Both of us understand that we have platforms and we both talked about wanting to, more than anything, educate.”

By Monday, Clay Travis, OutKick’s founder, was announcing that he stood ready to buy a WNBA expansion team in Nashville and stock it entirely with “men who identify as women,” a bit he spent the afternoon elaborating with a team name built on a genital joke — “the most inclusive team in history!” Walsh called the most bankable woman in American sports spineless. And Concerned Women for America, the conservative advocacy group, demanded the WNBA adopt a policy “that establishes only biological women can play basketball in the league.”

A movement that says it exists to protect women’s sports spent Monday mocking women’s sports as a punchline, attacking the sport’s biggest star, and demanding a league expel transgender women it does not have and has never had.

The escalation will not stop at Clark. Last month the offense was saying something objectionable about trans people. This week the offense is saying nothing at all — “no comment” now scores as opposition. Cheryl Reeve’s shirt left OutKick complaining publicly that the Lynx had denied its writer a credential to interrogate her about it. Nakase’s inclusion answer became a Fox News clip within hours. Coaches across the league now get the question at the podium, and every answer — including no answer — gets sorted into content. The machine Cunningham fed does not have an off switch, and it does not have a finish line.

Three weeks ago the Heritage Foundation — the organization behind Project 2025 — published a report by senior fellow Scott Yenor titled “Title IX’s Failed Experiment,” which calls the law’s equal-opportunity requirements for women’s athletics “part of a sustained social engineering effort” designed to produce women who are “more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational” — and recommends rolling the requirements back, steering women toward recreation instead of competition while preserving “major revenue producing male sports.” The report arrived the month after the Supreme Court let states ban trans athletes from school sports. The trans athletes went first. The plan for what’s left of women’s sports followed within weeks: less of it.

On Monday, Penny Nance, Concerned Women for America’s president, called on the league to “look in the mirror and do some soul-searching about what it stands for.” The number of transgender women her policy would remove from the WNBA is zero.

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The Times has heard versions of this accusation for years, and it has always had the same defense: name the article. Any single story can be defended on its own terms, the paper’s editors defend each one, and the argument resets the next morning. A shift in framing doesn’t live in any single article. It lives in the pattern across thousands of them, in the one place no reader — and no editor, honestly — can see from a day’s paper. So Caraballo read the thousands.

The method is what the paper will attack, so the method is built to be attacked. Caraballo pulled the corpus from the Times’ own public data feeds, including every article the paper’s own editors tagged as trans coverage — 2,266 pieces carrying the Times’ own subject labels, 3,242 after de-duplication. Her rubric never asks whether a story is good for trans people, only how it is framed: who carries it, what it treats as settled, what it treats as doubtful. Three language models from three different companies scored every article against that rubric independently, a word-counting sentiment pass with no AI in it ran as a control, and one of the three models is open-weights and runs on a home computer, so anyone can rerun the whole thing without her cooperation, her servers, or her permission — and every one of those measures, run by different code on the same twelve years, landed on the same year. 2022. The data is going up on GitHub.

She is candid about where she stands — “I don’t think the existence of transgender people should be up for debate,” she writes — and candid that the findings can’t lean on it. A neutral report on a pro-trans court ruling scores neutral under her rubric, not positive. “If you think I got it wrong, the data is right there,” she writes. “I’d rather be corrected with it than agreed with on faith.”

Three years ago I measured one narrow slice of the same question. In 2024, with Media Matters and GLAAD, I counted how often the Times quoted an actual trans person in its stories about anti-trans legislation, in the year after hundreds of the paper’s own contributors had publicly criticized its coverage. About a third of the stories did. Two-thirds carried no trans voice at all. For one three-week stretch in the spring of 2023, the paper covered anti-trans bills nine times — Florida, Texas, Louisiana — and quoted no trans person in any of them.

That study measured who got quoted. Caraballo’s measures who carries the story, what gets treated as settled, and how the tone moves — across twelve years instead of one — and the two instruments, built by different people and run on different data, found the same thing. Her charts show the trans-voice and anti-trans-voice lines converging year over year until, early this year, they crossed: in the paper’s coverage of trans people, the people arguing against trans rights now carry more of the story than trans people do.

Her data can also date the turn, which is something mine couldn’t do. It concentrates in 2022, and she lays the paper’s own personnel record beside it without claiming more than the record shows. Joseph Kahn became executive editor in June 2022. Jennifer Finney Boylan — for years the paper’s most prominent trans voice — lost her contributing-writer contract early that same year, and Pamela Paul, who became the opinion pages’ most reliable skeptic of trans rights, was given her column that March. A new reporter took over the gender-medicine beat and became its most persistent critic. None of that proves why the coverage turned — Caraballo says so herself — but it puts names and dates on the season the numbers moved.

The Times has responded, through senior communications executive Danielle Rhoades Ha: “We reject any suggestion that our coverage is biased or anti-trans; we report on gender identity and related issues fully and fairly and approach our coverage with curiosity and sensitivity, as we do with every story.” The analysis, she said, “shows a fundamental misunderstanding of our journalism and how it works,” and she noted that the newsroom publishes more than 2,000 pieces of journalism each week. The defense is a claim about framing — fully and fairly — and framing is the exact thing that 3,242 scored articles, three models, and a no-AI baseline all measured moving in one direction. The statement never touches the measurement. It restates the claim the measurement contradicts, and offers the paper’s own volume as the rebuttal to a study built from the paper’s own volume.

“I don’t misunderstand anything,” Caraballo told me when I sent her the paper’s statement. “I analyzed what they wrote, every word of it. If there’s extra context they want people to know, they should write about it, not just mention it in a request for comment.” The context she left out of the study, she said, cuts the other way: “how they put their criticized coverage up for a Pulitzer or how they put star reporters to push critical trans narratives in major pieces. That’s the context I left out so their words can speak for themselves.”

The method deserves scrutiny, and Caraballo built it to take some: the rubric is published, one model is downloadable, the corpus comes from the Times’ own feeds, and the full dataset is being released for anyone to break. Skepticism that stops at “an AI said so” without opening the dashboard is the single-article defense wearing a new coat. The honest critique would rerun her numbers and show where they fail. Nobody has yet. “To my knowledge,” she told me, “no one else has contradicted my results.”

I asked her what the dashboard would show if the paper actually changed. The line on skeptical and restrictive coverage would turn back around, she said; more trans voices would be centered in the coverage; the hyper-focus on trans youth care through a critical lens would end. “They would need to stop treating trans existence as exceptional and instead ordinary.”

Any of this matters beyond media-criticism scorekeeping because the Times still sets the boundaries of respectable opinion in this country. What it frames as settled, courts and statehouses treat as settled; what it frames as an open question turns up in attorneys general’s legal filings, in school-board meetings, and in the minds of parents deciding whether to believe their own kids. The 2023 open letters — one signed by more than 100 organizations and public figures, one by hundreds of the paper’s own contributors — warned that the framing had already escaped the page. The paper dismissed them and said nothing had changed.

Three years later, the critics came back with an instrument.

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