Researching Misinformation and Outright Lies About Transgender Athletes Spread by the Media, Anti-Trans Activists and Conservative Politicians
A Multimedia Graduate Project by Dawn Ennis ‘24
And here are the posters I created as part of my multimedia project in pursuit of my Master’s Degree from the University of Hartford’s College of Arts and Sciences School of Communication:
INTRODUCTION TO THIS PROJECT
I feel it is important to begin with an explanation of basic concepts and figures of speech that will be helpful in better understanding the aim and conclusion of my research.
The word “transgender” is a term that was coined in the 1960s by John F. Oliven, a person who is not transgender, and it stems from the Latin prefix “trans,” loosely translated to mean “on the other side,” “across,” “opposite” or “beyond.” A person who is not transgender is called “cisgender.” “Cisgender” is a term that was coined in 1994 by biologist Dana Leland Defosse, a person who is cisgender, and it also stems from the Latin prefix, “cis,” which is loosely translated to mean “on this side” or “same as.”
“Cis” is not a slur. Transgender women are women. Transgender men are men.
It is important to note that those last three sentences are considered controversial. Those statements are not only disputed but flatly denied by many of the people who oppose transgender rights, the inclusion of transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports, and the availability of gender-affirming care. All of these have come under attack in more than two dozen states in the U.S. and in countries around the world. These legislative and societal efforts at oppression are commonly called “transphobia,” which is not to be confused with fear of transgender people, but bullying, hatred, discrimination and all too often violence that hurts or even kills trans people.
I will touch upon both trans rights and gender-affirming care in this paper, but the primary focus of my Graduate Project is on transgender athletes.
My research examines the misinformation and outright lies told about trans athletes by members of the news media — particularly those who appeal to politically conservative readers, viewers and listeners — by activists who oppose equality for trans people and claim they are only seeking to “protect” girls and women, and by religious conservatives and right wing politicians.
The transphobic fearmongering by those representing communities of faith and those in elected office is consistently perpetuated in the interest of gaining more followers, more funds and primarily more votes for political candidates who are aligned with conservative values, such as outlawing reproductive rights and marriage equality, eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as well as other issues appealing to mostly white conservative Christians who support Republican political candidates.
That said, opposition to allowing trans girls and trans women to compete with cis girls and women has grown to include some Jewish, Muslim and other faith communities, as well as liberals and Democrats and even gays and lesbians who find themselves allied on this single issue with groups with whom they do not have any other causes or beliefs in common.
There is also division among athletes, from the biggest names in sports to the backlot hustlers. While many celebrity athletes who fought to be the best at their sport have spoken in support of inclusion, there are also famous names who have turned activism against trans athletes into lucrative careers as public speakers and social media mavens.
All this will be explored in the pages to follow.
THREE QUESTIONS ADDRESSED BY MY RESEARCH
- How many state lawmakers and sports organizations are responding to an actual problem posed by inclusion of transgender athletes?
- Where are politicians who oppose inclusion getting the information about trans athletes that they use to feed their followers and media contacts?
- What does the science say about the fairness of trans inclusion in sports?
1: A Solution in Search of A Problem
As laws targeting LGBTQ+ people have proliferated in so-called “red states,” where Republicans are in control of both the legislature and the executive branch, a clear understanding of how many people will be directly affected is too often absent from policy decisions. Let’s begin with an understanding of the LGBTQ+ population, and how large or small it really is.
As the Associated Press has reported, there is relatively little data on the number of LGBTQ+ Americans, particularly intersex people — those born with physical traits that are different from typical definitions for males and females. That results in lawmakers writing laws without the same kind of reliable information they might have for other demographic groups.
“We can’t study the impact without knowing the population,” Christy Mallory, legal director of the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, told the Associated Press in July 2023. The Williams Institute is a Los Angeles-based think tank that researches sexual orientation and gender identity demographics to help educate the public and lawmakers making public policy decisions.
More than 13 million people ages 13 and older identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in the U.S., including about 300,000 young people and 1.3 million adults who specifically identify as transgender, according to the Williams Institute. Nearly half of them live in states without protections from discrimination at work, in school, in housing, public accommodations and applications for credit.
But because these are self-reports, these numbers fluctuate based on who’s doing the surveys. Polling by The Washington Post shows that there are nearly 2 million people nationwide who identify as transgender, representing less than one percent of all adults in the U.S. The poll found that most trans adults are younger than 35 years old, and the vast majority — nearly 8 in 10 — say that transitioning made them more satisfied with their life. Two-thirds of trans adults say they realized they were trans in childhood, and about one-third say they began to understand when they were 10 years old or younger.
The U.S. Census Bureau had no questions about sexual orientation and gender identity until 2021, although in the 2010 census, it did begin collecting data about households led by same-sex couples. The 2021 U.S. Census Household Pulse Survey — delayed one year due to the COVID-19 pandemic — found that 0.6 percent of responding adults described themselves as transgender and 1.7 percent described themselves as neither male, female nor trans. The term for people who fall into this category is nonbinary. Some nonbinary people identify as trans nonbinary, others insist they are not trans because they are not undergoing any medical intervention or because of personal preference to not identify as transgender.
The same U.S. Census survey in 2021 found that 4.4 percent of adult respondents thought of themselves as bisexual, 3.3 percent said they were gay or lesbian, and 88.3 percent said they were straight. Around 2 percent said they were “something else” or that they didn’t know. Intersex people are included in the plus sign in LGBTQ+, and some intersex people also identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer.
From their demographic studies in 2017 and 2022, The Williams Institute noted a slight increase in the number of young people identifying as transgender, but Mallory said additional research will give a more accurate picture.
“This kind of data collection on transgender status is very new for youth,” and some of the increase could be because more states are asking about transgender status during surveys of high school students, Mallory said. “But you know, some of it is probably youth feeling more comfortable identifying as trans.”
So, How Many Are There?
My first research question was to understand how many trans youth are athletes. According to out nonbinary journalist Katie Barnes, writing for ESPN.com, there are approximately 15 million high school students in the United States, and approximately 8 million of them participate in high school sports. A CDC study published in 2019 estimated that 1.8 percent of high school students are transgender, meaning there are roughly 270,000 transgender students in U.S. high schools.
But a report by the Human Rights Campaign found that only 14 percent of transgender boys and 12 percent of transgender girls play sports. Given all of those numbers, it’s statistically possible that there are some 35,000 transgender student-athletes in high school, which would mean 0.44 percent of high school athletes are transgender.
Barnes reported in 2023 that 23 states have passed laws restricting transgender athletes’ ability to participate in school sports in accordance with their gender identity as of August 2023. Because those laws vary from state to state, transgender student-athletes who want to participate in school sports face a patchwork legal landscape from state to state, which can mean they can be banned from taking part in interscholastic competitions when they travel across state lines.
A Closer Look at State Laws
For example, in Connecticut, individual school districts determine the proper placement for each athlete, but they are bound by the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference and the state’s Constitution to make those decisions based on the gender identity reflected in school records and the students’ daily activities. There are no medical or legal requirements for a student-athlete to compete, but they are required to maintain their identity consistently.
But 1,210 miles away from the state capitol in Hartford, trans female student-athletes are banned from competing with other girls and women in Florida, ever since Governor Ron DeSantis signed “The Fairness In Women’s Sports Act” on June 1, 2021, the first day of Pride Month, as The Daily Beast reported.
Even Connecticut has towns where trans people face oppression. Teenage activist Kai Shappley and her family moved here from Texas in 2022, fleeing the state as laws grew more restrictive. But the Shappleys ran into transphobes in New Haven, too, and moved to an undisclosed Connecticut town in 2023.
Connecticut lawmakers passed a “safe harbor law” in 2022 to protect both families like the Shappleys who flee so-called “states of hate” like Texas, as well as those seeking abortions, as the Washington Post reported.
But how accepting is Connecticut, really?
In July 2023, the Hartford Courant published an analysis of board of education policies from 164 Connecticut school districts that serve nearly 500,000 students, and found that only 28 percent of districts had a specific policy addressing the needs of transgender and nonbinary students. GLSEN, otherwise known as the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network, conducted a survey of LGBTQ+ secondary school students in Connecticut, and found that 32 percent of trans students had been prevented from using their chosen name or pronouns at school. Another 39 percent were unable to use a bathroom that aligned with their gender. And 53 percent of students said they were verbally harassed, while seven percent reported being physically assaulted for their gender expression. Nearly 60 percent of students said they never reported incidents to school staff, for fear of retaliation or exclusion.
Behind these statistics is a cold, scary reality: In 2022, 53 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth in Connecticut said they seriously considered suicide, according to the Trevor Project, a nonprofit advocacy group for LGBTQ+ youth. That year, 13 percent of those young people actually attempted suicide. As a survivor of suicide and as a parent of an out trans teen, that’s especially worrisome to me.
It should be noted that ESPN’s report on the 50 states needs to be updated, as Ohio became the 24th state to ban trans student-athletes in January 2024. Injunctions are temporarily blocking some of these laws, including those in Arizona, Idaho and Utah, according to the Movement Advancement Project. As the Associated Press reported, the Republican-dominated Senate voted to override Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of legislation that not only bans trans student-athletes but also bans gender-affirming surgeries and hormone therapies and restricts mental health care for transgender individuals under 18. DeWine said he vetoed the legislation to protect parents and children from government overreach on medical decisions. Ohio’s new law bans transgender girls and women from girls and women’s sports teams at both the K-12 and collegiate level.
About 400,000 student-athletes play at the high school level in Ohio, according to the Ohio High School Athletic Association, which had since 2015 allowed transgender girls to join female teams if they’ve completed at least one year of hormone therapy. A grand total of seven trans girls participated in high school sports during the 2023-24 school year, while six took part during the 2022-23 school year, according to OHSAA.
In making the case for the ban, Republican State Rep. Jena Powell told WCMH-TV: “Millions of women and little girls in Ohio are looking to the Statehouse and saying, ‘Are you going to protect the integrity of women’s sports? Are you going to allow me, as a woman, to compete on a level playing field in Ohio?’”
Former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines also spoke in favor of the bill in January 2024, testifying about competing against Lia Thomas, an out trans swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania, in the 200-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA swimming championships. I was there in Atlanta, reporting for Forbes and the Los Angeles Blade, when Gaines and Thomas tied for fifth place. Ever since, Gaines has made appearances across the country and on FOX News and other outlets complaining that NCAA officials opted to award the one and only fifth place trophy to Thomas at the event, and they told Gaines hers would be mailed to her. Gaines is a paid spokesperson for the International Women’s Forum, a lobbying group that seeks to ban trans girls and women from competing in girls’ and women’s sports.
“The female athletes who objected to Thomas’ participation in women’s swimming were told to remain silent,” Gaines testified. “Lia Thomas was not a one-off. Across the country and across various sports, female athletes are losing not only titles and awards to males but also roster spots and opportunities to compete.”
In her testimony in Ohio in January 2024, Gaines also challenged OSHAA’s claim that only six trans high school students took part in athletics during the 2022-23 school year. “It’s underreported, the number is certainly more than six,” she told lawmakers in Ohio. “I’ve had more people in the state of Ohio reach out to me specifically who say they’re scared to speak out about this, because they don’t want to be reprimanded,” reported WCMH-TV.
That same month, Ohio Gov. DeWine signed an executive order banning gender-affirming surgeries for people under 18, despite medical professionals testifying that such surgeries aren’t even happening in the state. He also proposed new healthcare rules that would impact transgender Americans in a way no other state has: restricting care not just for transgender children, but also adults, which the Associated Press reported earned him harsh criticism from Democrats and LGBTQ+ advocates. The A.P. reported DeWine’s administration eventually backed off its plans to impose those rules that would have restricted gender-affirming medical treatment for adults.
Laws Restricting Bathrooms and Locker Rooms
Like many activists who oppose inclusion, Gaines consistently refers to trans girls and women as “males” and “biological males,” a nonsense term coined in the 2016 “bathroom bill battle” to describe transgender women who were briefly outlawed from using public restrooms in North Carolina. While that law was repealed, the phrase has since become widely-used, even by advocates for trans rights, despite attempts by the A.P. to discourage such terms. So there has been no repeat of the celebrity, corporate and major sports league backlash that made headlines in 2016, as Utah and nine other states have since passed bathroom bill legislation similar to North Carolina’s H.B.2, including Florida, Tennessee and Kentucky — states that are not coincidentally, among the 25 states where reproductive rights have been limited since the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. The high court has so far refused to intervene on bathroom bans. In January 2024, the justices allowed a lower court ruling to stand which allows trans students in Indiana to access school bathrooms and locker rooms according to their gender identity.
That stands in sharp contrast to Florida, which Equality Florida advised LGBTQ+ and especially transgender travelers to avoid for fear of draconian new laws, including one that regulates public bathrooms.
As out nonbinary journalist and author Nico Lang reported in The Daily Beast, Florida’s anti-transgender bathroom law is the strictest restriction on trans public restroom use ever to be enacted in the United States.
Signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in May 2023, the “Safety in Private Spaces Act,” more commonly known as H.B. 1521, prohibits trans people from using the bathroom or locker room in facilities owned by the state government that most closely aligns with their gender identities. This includes state colleges, state prisons, airports, beaches, city parks, and public schools. In October 2023, the Florida Board of Education voted to expand the rule to include private colleges.
Compared to the nine other states that currently have bathroom bans on the books, Florida’s is the only one that levies criminal penalties for violators. Breaking this law could result in a misdemeanor trespassing offense, which carries a maximum sentence of a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.
While H.B. 1521 does not apply to private businesses like bars, cafés, grocery stores, restaurants, and shopping malls, Lang reported there is much confusion among the general public about the law and its enforcement.
According to sources who spoke with The Daily Beast, that lack of information has resulted in vigilante behavior, in which civilians have attempted to enforce the statute in venues where it does not actually apply. Lang spoke to trans Floridians who say they have been stopped and questioned while using the locker room at the gym and the bathroom at the gas station, among other places.
New Laws and the Rise in Hate Crimes
The Washington Post reported in March 2024 that in states like Florida, with restrictive anti-LGBTQ+ laws, the number of hate crimes on school campuses from kindergarten through 12th grade has more than quadrupled in the last nine years. At the same time, calls to LGBTQ+ youth crisis hotlines have exploded, with some advocates drawing a connection between the political climate and the spike in bullying and hate crimes.
Hate crimes serious enough to report to police more than doubled nationwide between 2015-2019 and 2021-2022, according to the Post. The report notes that rise is even steeper in the 28 states that have passed laws curbing the rights of transgender students at school and restricting how teachers can talk about issues of gender and sexuality.
When the data is limited to K-12 campuses, the Post reported that increase is even more marked. In states that have enacted restrictive laws, there were more than four times the number of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes on average, per year, in 2021 to 2022 compared with the years 2015 to 2019 across elementary, middle and high schools.
In January 2024, the father of a cisgender female student-athlete in Utah made headlines in the Salt Lake Tribune, for insisting that officials ban a transgender girl from playing in a Canyons School District girl’s junior varsity basketball game. But as the Tribune reported, the girl in question is cisgender, not transgender, and the father has since been banned from attending future games. This scenario is likely to be repeated across the nation, as internet trolls have spread this kind of misinformation about famous cisgender college and professional women athletes, including Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers and Brittney Griner.
What About Intersex Athletes?
One other wrinkle: Legislative efforts to ban transgender women and girls from playing school sports with other women and girls often fail to consider the impact on intersex students, as NBC News reported. Most advocacy groups estimate that 1.7 percent of people are born intersex — the equivalent of about 5.6 million U.S. residents. That estimate is based on a review published in the American Journal of Human Biology that looked at four decades of medical literature from 1955 to 1998. The estimate includes people with extra or missing sex-linked chromosomes, and those born with other physical variations that don’t fit into categories of “male” or “female.”
Intersex people are born with at least one of about 40 naturally occurring variations relating to their genitalia, internal reproductive organs, chromosome patterns or hormones. Not all intersex people are identified as such at birth, and those who are may still be listed as either “male” or “female” on their birth certificate. That’s because only about 16 states, including Connecticut, currently allow a gender marker designation other than “male” or “female” on birth certificates, and not all hospitals have intersex-affirming policies. The unresolved question looms: Will intersex student-athletes be exempt from anti-trans sports bans, or be swept up in the hysteria to “protect girls and women’s sports”? According to a policy statement issued by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in October 2021, “federal civil rights laws protect all students, including intersex students, from discrimination.”
Changes to Title IX
In April 2024, the federal government released new legally binding rules that include treatment based on gender identity within the scope of sex discrimination, among many other changes to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, as ESPN.com reported. Title IX was instrumental in giving women athletes the right to equal opportunity in sports in educational institutions that receive federal funds, from elementary schools to colleges and universities.
The regulations, a draft version of which the Biden administration proposed in June 2022, are scheduled to go into effect Aug. 1, 2024. The new rules also will prevent colleges and coaches from suspending athletes accused of sexual misconduct while school officials investigate complaints against them, as ESPN.com reported.
But there are no new provisions regarding the eligibility of transgender athletes, which had been included in an earlier Department of Education proposal. Officials chose to separate that issue from the broader revisions to Title IX regulations, and they say those regulations will not be released until after November’s presidential election. Reporters asked Biden administration officials whether that delay was politically motivated, and a senior official instead blamed the process of writing the rules, which they said was several months behind schedule.
Whether that’s true doesn’t matter since there is already blowback by a number of “red states” that has set up a federal showdown likely to be decided in a courtroom in these six months remaining before the 2024 presidential election.
Although several courts have ruled that trans and queer students are already protected by the current Title IX regulations — including a decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in West Virginia in April —officials in at least four states have directed schools to ignore the new regulations, fearing it would usher in not only bathroom accommodations but also policies on pronouns. Those states are Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina, according to the Los Angeles Blade.
The U.S. Department of Education responded to complaints by those states’ attorneys general and school superintendents with a statement reminding them that federal funds are at risk if they do not comply.
“As a condition of receiving federal funds, all federally-funded schools are obligated to comply with these final regulations and we look forward to working with school communities all across the country to ensure the Title IX guarantee of nondiscrimination in school is every student’s experience.”
Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz has the support of Governor DeSantis in ignoring the Biden Administration’s threat. In a letter he wrote to schools in the Sunshine State, Diaz stated that the new Title IX regulations were tantamount to “gaslighting the country into believing that biological sex no longer has any meaning.”
In approving the letter, Governor DeSantis added that Florida “will not comply.” In addition to the law restricting trans people from using state-owned public bathrooms matching their gender identity, DeSantis and Florida’s Republican-led legislature have enacted some of the most viciously anti-queer and anti-trans legislation in recent history, including a 2023 law making it harder for trans adults to access gender-affirming care and a 2022 law derided by critics as “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” that was used to force an out transgender female teacher to go by “Mister.” Katie Wood won a temporary injunction in federal court in April 2024 by a judge who said the law violated her First Amendment rights, NBC News reported.
Oh, Oklahoma!
But it’s not just Florida that is leading the charge to make life harder for trans students and teachers in public schools. As the Washington Post has reported, Oklahoma State Education Superintendent Ryan Walters appointed a right-wing media figure, Chaya Raichik, whose social media account is called Libs of TikTok, to an advisory role “to improve school safety.” Raichik has been accused of instigating bomb threats at schools and hospitals across the country that have been tied to her incendiary posts about LGBTQ+ people in education and advocating against gender-affirming care for minors.
In February 2024, NBC News identified 33 instances when people or institutions singled out by Libs of TikTok later reported bomb threats or other violent intimidation. The threats, starting in November 2020, typically came several days after tweets from Libs of TikTok. They targeted schools, libraries, hospitals, small businesses and elected officials in 16 states, Washington, D.C., and the Canadian province of Ontario. Of the 33 threats, 21 were bomb threats, most often targeting schools and made via email.
Sports Bans Expand
The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics joined the bandwagon of sports organizations round the world that have banned transgender women from women’s competitions starting next school year, according to the Washington Post. The question now is whether the National Collegiate Athletic Association will follow suit.
At the NAIA’s national convention in April 2024, the Council of Presidents determined that beginning Aug. 1, 2024, only students “whose biological sex is female” may compete in women’s sports. That includes transgender men or nonbinary students who are not receiving masculinizing hormones. World Aquatics and World Athletics are among the groups that have also heavily restricted the eligibility of transgender girls and women, barring them from competition if they have experienced testosterone-driven puberty.
“I’m 110 percent disappointed,” said Mack Beggs, a transgender man and former NAIA wrestler for Life University in Marietta, Ga. Competing in college, he said, “meant the world. It not only made me grow as an athlete — it made me grow as a person.”
Marshi Smith, co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, a group opposed to transgender inclusion in sports that has funded a lawsuit against the NCAA over its transgender participation policy, called the NAIA’s decision “historic” and urged more groups to “follow the science to preserve the original intent of Title IX.”
“The NCAA needs to look to the NAIA now to do what is just and right,” she told the Post.
A group of more than 400 current and former Olympic, professional and collegiate athletes, over 300 academics and roughly 100 advocacy groups joined forces in April 2024 in urging the NCAA not to ban transgender women from competing in women’s college sports, according to NBC News. Among the signatories: former U.S. Women’s National Team soccer co-captain Megan Rapinoe, former WNBA and Olympic basketball star Sue Bird, and former NFL defensive end R.K. Russell.
2. Deep Pockets Fund Anti-Trans Organizations That Copy/Paste Bills
In March 2023, Axios investigated what it called “the sudden flood of state-level efforts to restrict transgender rights,” and found that it is being fueled by many of the same Christian and conservative groups behind the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade.
These groups include the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, the Liberty Counsel and the American Principles Project, whose combined multi-million dollar efforts target LGBTQ+ rights through what are called “parents’ rights” legislation.
Axios found the groups share templates for bills with right-wing lawmakers in states controlled by Republicans, and provide support for similarly-worded bills aimed at banning minors from attending drag shows, blocking gender-affirming care for transgender minors, and restricting their participation in school sports.
Spokespersons for these groups told Axios their goal is to shape policy based on their theological and conservative beliefs around sex, gender and family. It’s a winning argument for Republicans who are excited to embrace a political platform for 2024 whose agenda targets school policies that teach about gender orientation and identity, social emotional learning and the history of racism and injustice. It all falls under the umbrella of “protect the children,” meaning cisgender and white children, of course.
“These ideas are presented to their children without their consent,” said Travis Weber, the Family Research Council’s vice president for policy and government affairs. He told Axios Christian activists don’t seek to impose their beliefs on others, they’re simply fighting against others’ beliefs being imposed on them.
“Americans are reacting to what they are seeing,” he said, “and it’s being reflected in some of these laws moving.”
My research shows that these conservative and Christian groups have built a network of lobbyists and lawyers that owe their existence to both the “Moral Majority” movement of the 1970s and 1980s as well as the bipartisan “religious freedom” movement of the 1990s.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 was signed into law by President Bill Clinton after Democrats and Republicans, evangelicals, Jews, Muslims, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the A.C.L.U. and many, other groups put aside their political and religious differences to strengthen legal protections for people of faith.
Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah were its shepherds, and more than 30 years later, the seed planted in November 1993 has sprouted a forest that led to Supreme Court decisions such as 2023’s 303 Creative v. Elenis, in which the justices ruled a businessperson could not be compelled to create art that violates their religious beliefs — specifically, a wedding website for a same-sex couple, even though no such order was ever made or even requested.
An October 2023 investigation by HuffPost revealed another conservative advocacy group that initially concentrated on fighting diversity efforts in medicine has won the backing of Joseph Edeman, a billionaire hedge fund CEO and biotech investor, as it shifts to pushing anti-trans legislation in states across the country.
The group calls itself, “Do No Harm,” after the first line of the Hippocratic oath medical schools have asked their graduates to swear by for generations.
Edelman and his wife provided a $1 million donation to help launch the group of doctors who say they are concerned about ideology influencing the medical profession. The organization has not disclosed its donors or fundraising, but HuffPost obtained tax filings for the Edelman Family Foundation, which Edelman founded and chairs with his wife, Susan Lebovitz-Edelman. The report says those records show that the foundation approved a $1 million donation to “Do No Harm” in 2022, the same year the activist group was founded.
In the year since, “Do No Harm” has hired lobbyists, paid doctors to provide expert testimony and sent advocates to half a dozen statehouses and supplied the model language for at least two bills restricting gender-affirming care that have become law. The group has also filed a handful of lawsuits against efforts to promote diversity in medicine.
In a note describing the donation on its tax filings, HuffPost found that the foundation said it was “to provide support to protect healthcare from a radical, divisive and discriminatory ideology.”
The foundation previously gave large donations to one organization one would consider liberal, the Center for Reproductive Rights, but those gifts stopped after 2021, one year before the historic Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. “The Edelman Family Foundation no longer supports the Center for Reproductive Rights because of their adoption of gender ideology,” a spokesman for the foundation told HuffPost. The Edelmans declined to answer any other questions asked by HuffPost.
Although a state judge blocked one bill enacted with the support of “Do No Harm” from taking effect in Montana, State Rep. Zooey Zephyr — her state’s first transgender legislator — told HuffPost the damage is already done.
“The harm comes before a bill like this bans any particular medication for trans people,” she said. “The harm comes when trans people in Montana see our lives debated.”
3. So Far, the Science is Inconclusive
In August 2023, out trans man, trailblazing athlete and activist Chris Mosier penned a Q&A for Self Magazine. His answer to the first question, “Do trans kids have inherent, unfair advantages in sports?” was “no.”
“Transgender kids, like all kids, vary in athletic ability, size, strength, and speed. There are a lot of factors that go into determining if someone will be a good athlete, including coaching, access to camps and skill development, proper nutrition and rest, high-quality equipment, mental toughness and resilience, and support and encouragement from family, as well as basic capabilities like agility and coordination.”
Mosier noted that Joshua D. Safer, M.D., a staff physician in the endocrinology division of the Department of Medicine at the Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, provided expert testimony about transgender athletes in 2020, in which he stated that a person’s genetic makeup and internal and external reproductive anatomy are not useful indicators of athletic performance.
Mosier also cited a study commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, which looked at all relevant studies about trans women in elite sports from 2011 through 2021. Researchers found that the existing scientific findings do not support banning trans women and girls from women’s sports, wrote Mosier, the first out transgender man to earn a spot on a men’s U.S. national team, a seven–time member of Team U.S.A., a three-time national champion and All-American duathlete and he was the first transgender person to compete in Olympic trials.
To ensure my research is sound, I followed the old journalists’ adage — “If your mother tells you she loves you, get a second source” — and also spoke with a researcher who has been studying transgender athletes for more than a decade, and is herself an out transgender woman and an avid runner: Dr. Joanna Harper, who was a visiting fellow for transgender athletic performance and a PhD researcher at Loughborough University in England.
Dr. Harper co-authored a systematic review of hormone-based changes in non-athletic transgender women published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine and published the first peer-reviewed study on the performance of transgender athletes. She is also the author of the book Sporting Gender: The History, Science, and Stories of Transgender and Intersex Athletes. Harper has worked with several major sports-governing bodies concerning eligibility policy for transgender and intersex athletes and is currently a medical physicist at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. She spends most of her time in radiation oncology, working out how to detect cancer with CTs and MRIs, and on the side, she continues to research the science of trans athletes, which as of this date is unpublished.
What we do know right now is that trans women will maintain some strength advantage over cis women, even after beginning hormone therapy. What we do not know is the magnitude of this strength advantage and whether it is “unfair.”
I asked Dr. Harper about the groundbreaking study that was sponsored by the International Olympic Committee, released in April 2024, that compared a range of athletic abilities between trans athletes and their cisgender counterparts. As out trans journalist Katelyn Burns reported for MSNBC, researchers found that trans women athletes are at a relative disadvantage in many key physical areas relating to athletic ability and perform worse on cardiovascular tests than their cisgender women athletes.
“The University of Brighton published a cross-sectional study, looking at athletic trans people, both trans men and trans women and cis men, cis women,” she said. “And in terms of exercise tests, they did a handgrip test, they did a counter movement jump and VO2, on a treadmill.” VO2 refers to maximal oxygen consumption, the maximum amount of oxygen that an individual can utilize during intense or maximal exercise.
All the participants in this study participated in competitive sports or took part in physical training at least three times a week. The 35 trans athletes had to have completed at least one consecutive year of hormone replacement therapy.
“The trans women didn’t score any better on the VO2 or the counter movement jump. They did score higher on the handgrip than cis women. But the relative strength, or strength per body mass, even in the handgrip study, was not higher. And that’s an important finding, and it’s something that our currently non-published data would back up,” said Harper.
One thing she said she wants people to know is that much of the research that is touted by anti-trans activists and often cited by lawmakers and sports organizations to support bans on trans athletes are not scientifically sound and approach the issue with a not-so hidden agenda. Harper said she has often been rejected as a researcher because she won’t skew results.
“It was very clear that they sought out someone who would give them the answer that they thought,” said Harper of the controversial 2021 report by SCEG — the U.K.-based Sports Councils Equality Group. Titled, “Review into Transgender Inclusion in Domestic Sport in the U.K.,” the SCEG claimed that “inclusion of transgender people, fairness and safety cannot co-exist in a single competitive model” across all sports.
“Our group would not have come out with that report,” said Harper.
Likewise, Britain’s National Health Service commissioned a review of research into transgender science, and tapped Dr. Hillary Cass, a pediatrician whose social media contacts include leading anti-trans activists. Among her controversial conclusions is that being transgender is “contagious” and that it may be caused by depression, anxiety and autism, claims that have been debunked by dozens of medical organizations, including the American Psychological Association.
Harper’s goal is to bring to light a fairer system for transgender athletes to compete on the world athletic stage. As she wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2015: “I hope the mounting evidence, coupled with exposure to trans women athletes, will go some way toward changing hearts and minds. The rules established by different leagues are unnecessarily inconsistent, and prejudice persists at all levels of sport — from elite leagues down to high school teams.”
Harper has encountered both opposition and support in her move to Portland, including in the running group she joined.
“There was one incident where I was out on a group run, and there was a guy who wasn’t very happy. The president of the club was out with us, and the president of the club took this other guy off somewhere, and I’ve never seen this other guy again. I’m sure he’s still alive,” she laughed. “I would like to assert that those of us who don’t fit easily into the standard notion of male and female are just one more variety of human, and there is nothing to be feared or hated,” she said. “We just want to live and breathe and play sports like any other human being.”
HOW COMMUNICATION AND JOURNALISM FACTOR INTO MY RESEARCH
As a journalist as well as a graduate student and part-time college professor, my obligation is to the truth, and to avoid allowing either my own identity or my beliefs to override, shade or distill the facts that I have found on this topic or anything I report, study or teach. However, I am first a human being, and while I do not consider myself an activist, I am an advocate for civil rights, which I maintain are human rights.
So, I started my examination with the understanding that trans women are women and trans men are men, and that trans rights are human rights, even though I am fully aware that these beliefs are not universally-held. In communicating with people outside the transgender and even beyond the LGBTQ+ communities, and with those whose religion or political beliefs put us at odds, I do not hide my identity or my beliefs. However, I use all my communication skills to engage with those who have either formed an opinion or are still questioning, providing a counter to anti-trans propaganda.
When the Alliance Defending Freedom launched its lawsuit against Connecticut’s policy allowing trans girls to compete in 2022, a case that after many twists and turns is still being decided in federal court, I confronted their attorney outside the state capitol at their news conference with the fact that the cisgender girls she represent actually defeated the two Black trans girls at the center of their case, and that the plaintiffs won scholarships to college, and were not denied any opportunity because of the trans girls, who chose to not pursue sports after high school. The mainstream media took the ADF at its word that the trans athletes had an “unfair advantage.”
SEVEN PERSPECTIVES SUPPORTING MY RESEARCH
Karleigh Chardonnay Webb: 52, Out trans journalist, athlete, Peer Support Specialist and Training Coordinator at Trans Lifeline, podcaster, former reporter and ESPN producer, living in New Britain, CT, from Nebraska.
ON CISGENDER PEOPLE: “I think this is something this cisgender society has got to come to grips with. And we’ve got to talk about it. You’re uncomfortable. Cisgender America, I’m talking to you. You are uncomfortable with trans people. And it’s not just in sports. It’s when you’re sitting on the bus. It’s when you’re at the mall. It’s when you’re in school. It’s when you’re at your job. You are uncomfortable and you need to just own that. And you need to sit with it and you need to process it. We need to talk about it.”
ON THE MEDIA: First off, we need more people who are trans and who are LGBTQ+ and who are Black, and who are women and who are brown, and who wear hijabs in newsrooms. That’s why you’re getting what you’re getting. If your newsroom is pale and male, that’s what your coverage is going to look like. Let’s just go. We got to go there. Mainstream media doesn’t want to cover the story. And when they do cover the story, The last thing they want to do is talk to actual trans people.”
FINDING JOY: “What brings me joy in the face of hate is, for starters, people like you, Dawn. Seeing what you’ve done. Seeing what you’ve done as a broadcast professional, as a parent, as a citizen, as a friend, as a mentor. People like Maia Monet, that gives me joy. Seeing [out trans boxer] Patrcio Manuel in a boxing ring, that brings me joy. Seeing [out trans NCAA champion sprinter] CeCé Telfer, whose book is coming out soon, by the way. That brings me joy. Seeing young trans kids out there, living their lives, and seeing trans adults out there, affecting the world and doing great things, and seeing cis allies standing in the gap, like my new teammates with the Connecticut Ambush. And no, to allies, it doesn’t take much to stand in the gap. Standing in the gap simply means that you’re just there.”
Melody Maia Monet: 53, Out trans activist, athlete, photographer, singer, YouTube personality, Princeton graduate, living in Orlando, FL, from Texas and Long Island, N.Y.
ON SPORTS: “It was incredibly validating. I wasn’t necessarily worried about my trans identity because I didn’t really stand out in terms of my athletic performance. I wasn’t even the best player on my [women’s softball] team. And so, it has been great to find kind of a community of women who accept me for who I am, and have never made an issue of me being transgender when I play with them, and it’s incredibly validating. It reminds me it’s in a different arena. But when I joined the Orlando Gay forum, you know, they gave me an option of singing with the altos and singing with the tenors, and I decided to sing with the altos because I wanted that experience of being with other women. And universally, I have found acceptance.”
FLORIDA ANTI-TRANS LAWS: “Well, it’s better in Central Florida than it is in a lot of other places in Florida. From what I can see, despite the new law that makes it necessary to get a prescription from an M.D. for our hormone replacement therapy. We do have several options to go to for doctors, however, from what I’ve seen in other places in Central Florida, like, Tampa, Saint Pete, there are much more limited options. In fact, sometimes people come here to Orlando because they can’t find anything in those areas.”
FINDING JOY: “I find joy on stage when I’m singing. It feels like home and one of the few places where the sadness and stress of the world just falls away. It’s the one place where I feel like I have a superpower that I can share with other people in a kind of feedback loop of community and feeling. I also love things that take me out of the everyday. I definitely wasn’t built for a 9-to-5 rote life and there are two people in my life who expand it to other venues, stages, and experiences. I lost the joy of family life years ago due to my transition, but these special moments remind me that it wasn’t all loss.”
Dr. Joanna Harper: Prefers to not disclose her age, Out trans researcher and avid runner, living and working in Portland, OR, formerly worked in U.K., from Canada.
SCIENCE OF SPORTS: “Certainly, when it comes to analyzing data, every scientist is, to a certain extent, affected by their viewpoint. But there are going to be four to six other authors on the papers that I come out with. And these are all physiologists at one of the top sports science universities in the world. So, you know, it is a group effort, and it’s not just what Joanna Harper thinks.”
ON THE MEDIA: “There’s a lot right-wing media that, in terms of percentage of major media outlets, it’s skewed more conservative than liberal in the U.K. There are certainly some right-wing media outlets in the U.S. who have been pretty nasty towards trans people, but there were several in the U.K. as well… Every day there’s something negative about trans people, not necessarily trans athletes, but there’s negativity, every single day, about trans people. And it’s certainly discouraging and tiring to see, all that negativity both in the U.K. and in the U.S.”
FINDING JOY: “I’m an athlete. I run every day, especially around here. There are amazing trails up in the mountains and it’s something that’s extremely important in my life to get out and run.”
Kai (and her mother Kimberly) Shappley: 13, Out trans student and activist, moved with her mother and teenage brother from Texas to CT.
ON THE MEDIA: “I’ve seen a lot of media talking about how we’re apparently pedophiles and liars and such.” I asked, “How does that make you feel?” Kai said, “Angry.”
Kimberly added: “ABC news had done a very brief little clip of what Idaho passed, a trans health care ban. And then just said this is a healthcare ban against minors. And that was the whole story. They didn’t talk to any people who are transgender. They didn’t talk to any doctors. They didn’t try to say that this is bad. They didn’t try to sound the alarm. They didn’t show a big ol’ map to scare people. It just was like a blip on the radar. And it pisses me off because people don’t know what the story really is. They don’t understand the gravity of it. Mainstream media just continues to either try to tell both sides of a story, or they just try to gloss over it lightly so that neither side is offended by how they cover it. Well, I’m offended by how they don’t cover it!”
ON LAWS BANNING TRANS ATHLETES: “It’s bullcrap. It’s ignorant, and they’re like, ‘Well, since, they were born with a penis, they’re obviously stronger,’ and all that. And like, I am a prime example, like, that’s not true because I am the most unathletic person!”
Kimberly added: “There are a lot of states passing bans on trans youth playing sport, that there are literally no trans youth even trying to play sports. And it just kind of furthers the stigma and the hatred for the trans community when it’s not even something that was an issue. The other thing is the data and the science, it really does back up what trans people are saying, that you are the gender that you identify with, especially when you’re in your transition. For me, schools constantly are saying sports is so that you learn camaraderie and teamwork. And it’s not about who wins or loses, but how you play the game. And then they’re making laws that say, ‘No, really, it is not about winning or losing, it’s really about — let’s just be honest — it’s really about white cis girls not having to be around people that their parents don’t want them to be around.”
WHAT BRINGS HER JOY: “My mama.”
Kimberly added, “We’ve been taking trips out of Connecticut to go see other displaced trans families that we knew from back home. And the joy that my entire family feels being around other people that we don’t have to explain our trauma to, being around people who just get us, and know where we’ve been. And it has been life-giving for our whole family, and that’s really important.”
ANONYMOUS TEEN: 17, Out trans University of Hartford student from Massachusetts
ON SPORTS: “I don’t know anything about sports, really. I feel if a trans woman wants to be able to play sports\, that should be cool for them. I feel like it’s not cool to decide things for people. That’s what our country does.”
ON BEING TRANS: “I think people don’t understand what actually being trans means to cis people. For example, I don’t think people that are in class with us know the extent that someone needs to go through to even get hormones. That was really hard for me because I was a minor. I don’t think a lot of people even understand that. And then when it comes to gender-affirming surgery is for me, even though I’ve been on hormones for a while, it’s still impossible to even have done right now because my doctors all consider me too young to even give me a referral.”
FINDING JOY: “I have a really good support system between my friends and my boyfriend, and I feel like I can always confide in them about things. Even my family is accepting, and I can confide in them.”
Maddie Cowdell: 36, Out trans journalist, curler, Assistant News Director, FOX61 WTIC-TV, Hartford, CT, formerly a resident of N.Y., Michigan and California, from Canada.
BEING A TRANS TRAILBLAZER AS THE ONE AND MAYBE ONLY OUT TRANS NEWS MANAGER IN AMERICA, PERHAPS THE WORLD: “You know, that thought never crossed my mind. I never really thought of myself as a trailblazer. I’m just doing my thing. I’m not the transgender assistant news director, I’m the assistant news director who happens to be trans. I think it’s really important to show that we can do anything. And that’s very cool to really think about, how far we’ve come as a society that you’ve been given this opportunity. I think it’ll help eliminate that stereotype of media bias. We need to raise more, uplift more marginalized communities, more communities that don’t always have their say, minority communities. So, having somebody who’s in a leadership position is able to do that a little bit, it shows the direction the business is going as far as removing some of the stereotypical leaders from media. I worked very hard to get to this position. Worked my way up. I’m not in this position simply because I’m trans. I have 16 years ‘experience in this business Some may say that I benefited from male privilege to get to where I am. I don’t know if I could make that argument, just because I was never a male manager or presenting as a male. I was passed over twice, while still presenting as male. I’ve never had to work as hard in my life since I’ve presented as female in a newsroom, than when I was working presenting as male.”
ON MEDIA BIAS: “it’s heartbreaking to see our community struggle. You know, I’ve lived it. I’ve been through some struggles myself. It’s still my job as a manager and my job as a journalist to report fairly. And so, you have to, with anything, remove that personal bias. You just have to report the facts. Research. I think you could use your trans experience as a benefit to get names and pronouns right, to make sure that we’re speaking to the family, speaking to somebody in the community, we kind of have that extra sensitivity. We know there’s certain questions you just don’t ask that maybe somebody who is cisgender may not necessarily think to not ask. But at the end of the day, we still have to report the facts, we still have to speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves. So, it’s a very delicate situation. I definitely take a deep breath, and pause before reviewing stories of that nature, covering a story of that nature. Treat it with a little extra sensitivity, but we just do our job like we always do.”
FINDING JOY: “Driving, my Mini Cooper rallies. I love my car! It’s my own personal space to just do my thing, blast, my music. I find joy in lots of different places. Reaching out on social media. I’ve got a great following on Instagram that’s very community-based. I’m gaining a following on Threads. I have a blog, that I write about my trans experience for everybody. I’m a little bit behind on it.”
AUTOETHNOGRAPHY: MY PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE
I am not an athlete, and never have been. Sure, I played baseball, basketball and soccer as a child, and as a child actor I once portrayed a quarterback who loved Campbell’s Soup after a game. I am a lifelong, die-hard fan of the always struggling New York Mets. But despite my uncoordinated body and lack of skill, I love sports, and always have. Sports is a tribute to our humanity, teaching us how to lose, how to work as a team and how to excel as an individual, beyond ourselves and our limitations. Sports gives us thrills and breaks out hearts and provides opportunities to feel as though we are part of something bigger than ourselves.
When I came out as transgender in 2013, it was the biggest challenge of my adult life. While I was briefly euphoric at the victory of living authentically, I am sad to say that I lost the love of my beloved, my home and precious time with my three children. Unwanted publicity in the tabloids caused me unbearable strife, and so I lost to paparazzi and shock jocks, and then lost my career in television news. I nearly lost my life in two failed suicide attempts.
With the help of mental health professionals and supportive friends, I won something bigger than a World Series or a Super Bowl: I found validation in myself. And today, hundreds of out transgender journalists are now working around the world, having avoided repeating my own downfall and blazing new trails in newsrooms that I started by stepping out of the closet and up to the plate and taking a swing at living an authentic life.
My own personal experience in dealing with the media is overwhelmingly negative: Having reporters hide in bushes outside my house, ambushing my wife and children by hiding in the shrubs, knocking on neighbors’ doors to ask, “Do you know the tranny who lives next door?”
Since then, I’ve turned the tables. I went one-on-one with Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham. When an ex-Marine turned NewsMax anchor asked me on live TV if I had “the surgery.” I told him and his blonde bimbo co-anchor, “There’s only one dick on this couch!” Fan mail from viewers poured-in, saying I made them laugh out loud.
CONCLUSION
Sports have never been fair, and there is no such thing as a “level playing field.”
Whether they were cavemen or naked Greek men competing in the first Olympics, there have always been athletes with biological advantages over their competitors: Athletes who are taller, faster, can jump higher, move more smoothly or throw harder than the second tallest, fastest, strongest athlete, and all the rest.
Why is it no swimmer ever complained it was “unfair” to have to compete against Olympic champion Michael Phelps? He won 23 gold medals and is also 6’4”, has a wingspan of 6’7” (a 1:1 ratio height to wingspan is typical) and double-jointed ankles that allow him to move his size 14 feet back and forth 15 degrees more than is typical.
Why is it no gymnast protests having to compete with Simone Biles, the unquestioned GOAT of American gymnastics — male or female — and the most decorated gymnast in human history? She is 4’8” — that’s 7.5” shorter than the average American woman — in a sport where being shorter makes it easier to pull off the most acrobatic of routines. And nothing Biles does looks easy. But no one says, “that’s unfair!”
Bigots only say that when they see a trans girl or a trans woman, or someone they suspect is trans. They ignore the fact that trans women do not always win. In fact, trans athletes lose competitions just as much as any cisgender athlete does, as we reported when I managed Outsports. Had my research revealed that trans girls and women have a clear physical advantage that allows them to always win in every sport in which they compete, I would have reported that information.
But they don’t. So why ban them from doing what they love without evidence? Why report the wins without the losses? Why spread misinformation and outright lies about trans people? Because of sloppiness in journalism, because of agenda-driven reporting and politicking, and because people fear the unknown, and in large swaths of America and the world, trans people are few and far between.
Among the worst offenders: out gay tennis icon Martina Navratilova, who sides with Fox News against trans women and transgender ally Billie Jean King.
“It’s impossible to hate anyone whose story you know,” said a woman to the person who came out as her transgender daughter. That daughter went on to become a college professor, a celebrated scholar, a best-selling author, the president of PEN and my friend, Jennifer Finney Boylan. Telling her story as she did in She’s Not There gave me the strength to own my truth, to tell my story, and to make it this far on my journey.
I am far from done.
Life After Dawn 