The trans threat in Michigan high school athletics
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Several weeks ago the Trump campaign made the fateful decision to put trans issues — or more properly “issues” — at the center of its political advertising, rather than inflation or The Crisis at the Border ™, which are two issues that surveys suggest voters in general and swing voters in particular care about way more.
We’ll see how that works out, but anybody in a state like Michigan who watches TV has been bombarded by uncountable numbers of anti-trans ads, many of which suggest that boys pretending to be girls are going to destroy the integrity of girls’ high school sports.
About that:
Given how often the supposed threat of transgender athletes has been surfacing on your television screen, you might be wondering how massive the onslaught actually is.
I get paid to be curious for all of us, so I called the Michigan High School Athletic Association to ask: How many trans girls are swarming our state’s sidelines?
The answer:
Two.
That’s two out of 170,000 high school athletes in Michigan.
It gets better:
In 2021, legislating first and asking questions later, Michigan state Sen. Lana Theis, R-Brighton, introduced a bill that would require students to compete only within their biological sex at birth.
The bill was punted to a committee and then benched. Come to find out it would almost entirely impede girls who wanted to play with boys.
Some 440 girls are playing boys’ sports this year, Kimmerly said, often because their school doesn’t offer or can’t field a full team for things like lacrosse, hockey or tennis.
The highest turnout, 160 girls, is for football, followed by 87 for golf, 50 for soccer and 48 for swimming and diving. Wrestling would pummel the others, but since Michigan conducts a state championship for girls, the sport isn’t tallied even though girls routinely compete on boys’ teams.
It’s almost impossible to conjure up a purer moral panic than the “issue” of trans girls competing against cis girls in sports. Besides the fact that instances of this happening are very close to non-existent, even the one example that’s held up as an exemplar of the Trans Menace To Athletic Integrity and Fairness is itself 98.44% phony:
Lia Thomas, the 6-foot-1 University of Pennsylvania swimmer who switched from the men’s team to the women’s in 2022, was markedly slower after medically transitioning but still won the NCAA championship in the 500-yard freestyle.
She also failed to place in two other events at the meet and broke no NCAA records, while Olympian Kate Douglass broke 18. But she remains the poster child for the ruination of women’s sports, in some tellings almost a cyborg.
My guess — and it’s just a guess — is that the Trump campaign’s decision to hammer on the trans moral panic will prove to have been a big mistake, as the anti-trans ads are the kind of thing that make liberals and leftists panic over the potential effectiveness of this kind of propaganda, rather than actually being nearly as effective as merely intoning the price of eggs has doubled over and over again.
The real threat that democracy faces is this: For some mysterious reason, if over a three year stretch nominal prices and nominal incomes both go up 15%, that’s far far worse for incumbents than if nominal prices and nominal incomes both go up by 5%. It doesn’t make any sense, but what does any more?