It Was Never About Sports: The Strategy Of The Anti-Trans Right

3 years ago, the first sports bans were proposed. At the time, it was the main focus of the anti-trans right. Now, transgender people are debating their right to exist. Here is how we go there.

Photo by Emilio Garcia on Unsplash

If you had a time machine and jumped from 2020 to 2023, you might be shocked at the debate over transgender rights in America. Just a few short years ago, transgender rights issues were not on many people’s radars. Transgender people were able to obtain hormone therapy and puberty blockers in every state legally. Drag shows happened with very little notice from local news, much less national media personalities. Parents of trans kids could exist even in places like Texas without official policies targeting them with child abuse investigations. Now, Texas is creating registries of transgender people, parents of trans youth are being targeted with child abuse investigations, states are considering forcing adults to medically detransition, and constitutional amendments erasing all transgender legal recognition are being proposed. I often get asked the question, “How did we get here?” After digging for the answer, it is clear that this was a coordinated strategy from the right to use sports and bathrooms to usher in a new era of anti-trans oppression. It was never about sports, it was never about bathrooms: elimination was always the end goal.

One of the most common questions that reporters ask me is “when do you think this all really started, what was the first time you noticed the modern wave of anti-trans legislation?” To understand the context of today’s anti-trans attacks, it is important to go back 7 years ago to one of the earliest modern attacks on trans rights. North Carolina had just passed a bathroom bill that banned transgender people from bathrooms of their gender identity. It was, at the time, the most controversial bill ever passed targeting transgender people.

The reaction to the North Carolina bill was swift and powerful. Multiple corporations pulled their business out of the state. Paypal pulled out of an expansion into North Carolina costing the state jobs. Deutsche Bank and many other companies followed. Dozens of states issued travel bans targeted at the state barring publicly funded travel there. Famously, the NBA all-star game was pulled - the final nail in the coffin for the bathroom ban. The final toll of this bill was $3.76 billion in economic losses to the state. In 2017 after the NCAA began to pull championship games, lawmakers passed a partial repeal of the law that pulled the bathroom access provisions. The law suffered a final defeat in 2019 at the hands of a federal judge.

The fallout of the anti-trans bathroom bills halted legislative attacks on transgender rights for 4 years. During the Trump presidency, there were a handful of executive actions targeting the transgender community, but things were relatively quiet at the state level. For anti-trans groups though, they were regrouping and building out their legislative strategy for the future - a strategy which we have seen play out for the last 3 years. In 2019, a conservative group called the American Principles Project, which refers to itself as the “NRA for families,” released its first anti-trans advertisement to ban transgender people from sports in Kentucky. This was the opening salvo of the modern attack on transgender rights:

At the same time, the Christian conservative organization Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization with founders such as anti-LGBTQ+ pastor D. James Kennedy and James Dobson, who also founded the anti-LGBTQ+ group Focus on the Family, begun a relentless series of legal attacks on the transgender community. The Alliance Defending Freedom took up a case in Connecticut of three cisgender girls suing to have two transgender girls banned from competition. This lawsuit met its final failure in December of 2022. These two organizations would become central to the reactionary push to curtail transgender rights in the following years, and we are finally feeling feeling the full effects of the strategy they developed during the attacks on transgender sports today.

In 2020, we saw the first anti-sports bills introduced following the Connecticut athlete lawsuit and the ads run by the American Principles Project. Idaho passed the first sports ban in 2020. It also passed a bill banning the changing of birth certificates to match a transgender person’s gender identity. Both of these bills were later blocked in court, but it represented the first victory for these anti-trans groups. Sports Illustrated reported at the time that the draft of this bill was provided by the Alliance Defending Freedom. Meanwhile, the American Principles Project started adding transgender healthcare in their advertisements with an ad targeted at Joe Biden for “endorsing gender change treatments for minors.” This was all part of a very deliberate strategy to expand the targeting of trans people to new arenas.

The following year, 2021, was the year that legislative attacks in the transgender community exploded. Tennessee enacted a bathroom sign law that made establishments post a warning if they allowed trans people in bathrooms. Montana banned updates to birth certificates without surgery. Seven states passed anti-trans sports bans. This was also the year that we saw our first healthcare ban passed. The Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Principles Project were working behind the scenes on all of this. The Washington Post reported that the language was drafted by conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Eagle Forum, and the Alliance Defending Freedom.

In 2022, we saw expansions of anti-transgender attacks led and promoted by the same organizations. The American Principles Project launched a $1M ad campaign telling Greg Abbott to “protect Texas kids” against gender affirming care. Three weeks later, Texas was investigating the parents of trans youth for child abuse. A total of 18 states banned transgender participation in sports - many of these bills were supported and drafted by the Alliance Defending Freedom as reported by the USA Today. The American Principles Project focused millions of dollars in campaign ads on those same sports bans going into the 2022 midterms. In Florida, Ron DeSantis used the Florida Board of Medicine to ban gender affirming care. The Alliance Defending Freedom sent members to develop evidence and witnesses to that hearing.

In an interview with CNN, the president of the American Principles Project drew out exactly how they enacted this series of anti-trans legislation that we are seeing continue to grow today. The “sports issue” was only ever meant as a way to make anti-trans policies more palatable to legislators. The president of the American Principles Project, Terry Schilling, detailed how this was the case, “The women's sports issue was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issues.”

CNN reported that Schilling next targeted explicitly business friendly states such as Florida and Texas because they would be difficult to boycott. CNN also reported that this organization has continued to work with legislators on anti-trans initiatives in other states. Three years after the American Principles Project launched the first part of its plan focused on women’s sports, it is now clear that their strategy has seen some success - Texas and Florida now see defacto bans on youth transition and both are pursuing even more harmful policies such as a Florida ban on social transition and Texas resolutions that seek to express support for ending gender affirming care entirely. The Alliance Defending Freedom has also been part of this in “providing legislative text to some state legislators.”

A ban on gender affirming care is not the endgame here. With attacks on gay people rising through book bans and Don’t Say Gay or Trans bills, all LGBTQ+ rights are in the crosshairs. Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project makes that clear when he claims that the debate over gay marriage was a sham and that “essentially we went from Obergefell and gay marriage to now sex changes for gay minors, hormone treatments, and puberty blockers.”

It is now widely believed that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade could be used to overturn Obergefell. The Alliance Defending Freedom was heavily involved in the fight to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Alliance Defending Freedom has likewise come out in opposition to the Respect for Marriage act codifying gay marriage as has the American Principles Project.

The tactics that were used against abortion are being used today in similar ways as well. The Alliance Defending Freedom has been behind several “gestational age” laws that would then shift the Overton window towards banning abortion entirely. This year, we are starting to see youth transition bans of up to 21 years old with Oklahoma targeting up to 26 years old. By shifting the age limits of gender affirming care, it is clear that they are working towards an outright ban entirely as the end game.

To the hypothetical time traveler who jumped from 2020 to 2023, it may seem that the anti-trans panic of the last few years came out of nowhere. To the people planning the attack, though, it was always meant to happen this way. The intent was to start with sports in order to shift the Overton window to the elimination of all transgender rights in America. They continue to push for just that in the strategy they have spelled out on multiple occasions. In 2023, we must acknowledge that Christian fundamentalist organizations are steering anti-trans policy towards the only goal that is compatible with their worldview - the end to all recognition and the terror that comes with being forced back into the closet.