In their book released this January, Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports, authors Ellie Roscher and Anna Baeth offer a distressing encapsulation of the extent to which recent laws and policies have severely limited and even denied transgender athletes access to sports. “When we started this project in 2023, we interviewed twenty transgender people … about their experiences playing sports across a range of ages and playing levels. At that time all twenty of those athletes were able to play and compete,” they write. Three years later, “Only five of our interviewees are still legally able to participate in sports. Every athlete in our study under the age of thirty-two has been banned from participating.”
The swiftness and scope of these bans is breathtaking. While the legal and organizational moves to push trans athletes out of sports are only one part of a larger project to curtail trans people’s ability to live their lives as they want and need, or even to eradicate them from public life altogether, sports play an important role because so many Americans need little evidence or convincing to believe that trans athletes do not belong.
