Trans Sports Bans Have Hurt Cis Girls: Here Are Some More Predictions
In Utah, a cisgender girl basketball player needed police protection after online rumors that she was trans led to threats and harassment. Who could have predicted this? Literally anyone who was paying attention.
by Evan Urquhart
It’s national We Told You So Day on Assigned Media, a day where we go through all the obvious, inevitable consequences of the anti-trans moral panic and discuss which ones have already come true and which ones are still just certain to come true in the future.
The occasion that has prompted this look back at some of our previous looks forward is the widely covered story of a basketball player in Utah who is reportedly under police protection after Natalie Cline, a Republican state school board member, posted her photo online, falsely suggesting she was a transgender athlete. The story has made national news with a report by the Washington Post yesterday evening describing calls for Cline to resign as well as sharing quotes from local news by the family of the girl in question.
screenshot from the Washington Post
WE TOLD YOU SO!
While much of the pushback against bans on trans girls in sports has focused on the specific hypothetical of genital examinations, the overall point was always that widespread paranoia and suspicion over trans girls participating in sports would, inevitably, wind up falling more on cisgender athletes than trans ones. This is down to simple numbers: In Utah, the number of transgender girls attempting to play girls’ sports can be counted on one hand with at least one finger left over. In an environment of suspicion that some girl athletes are secretly trans, the chances that the target of any particular witch hunt will be cisgender is extremely high, meaning that while transgender girls remain the most vulnerable targets, cisgender girls will always be the most commonly hit ones.
So, what else have we told you?
Bans on medical transition aren’t about protecting kids, and won’t stop at banning treatment for minors.
In 2023 (and continuing into early 2024) Republicans instituted a wave of bans on gender-affirming care for youth, claiming that these treatments were experimental and dangerous and therefore it was safer to have children wait until adulthood to pursue transition. However, the medical evidence for youth transition is similar to medical evidence for other treatments and is recognized by every mainstream medical organization. Also, the people pushing these bans in the name of protecting children were extreme conservative Christians who opposed gay marriage and all forms of LGBTQ+ acceptance.
WE TOLD YOU SO!
Recently, Republican legislators were caught openly discussing their “endgame” for transition bans: Banning all medical transition, for everyone. It wasn’t about protecting children, it certainly wasn’t about science, but when the transgender community warned that allowing red states to ban evidence-based treatments would open the door for banning any treatment for any group of people for any reason, these concerns weren’t taken seriously.
Transphobia will lead to violence
People with bigoted opinions are entitled to hold them, write about them, even form nasty little clubs of like-minded transphobes, but society isn’t obligated to show respect or tolerance for ugly, dehumanizing rhetoric. The mainstream conversation over free speech confused this issue badly, leading apparently well-meaning people to conclude that trans people who disagreed publicly and vehemently with transphobic nonsense were somehow engaged in censorship.
The transgender community warned that the increased coddling of bigots would only embolden them, leading them to turn their violent rhetoric into violent actions.
WE TOLD YOU SO!
From inspiring a mass shooting at an LGBTQ+ club to the wave of bomb threats incited by anti-trans social media accounts like Libs of Tik Tok, to the street violence by fascists, the claims that transphobic rhetoric would lead to violence weren’t hyperbole. Subsequent events have shown these predictions to be all too real, and violence against the transgender community continues to escalate.
Cisgender women and the gay and lesbian communities are next
The effort to turn reactionary sentiments about the transgender community into a mass political movement was about hurting trans people, but it was never just about hurting trans people. This prediction is a little mushier, as attacks on cisgender women, lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, and transgender people have co-existed from the beginning. These attacks are being led by the same people, and the ultimate goal is a return to traditional conservative gender roles, by force of law.
This has been demonstrated in the 2025 project, a roadmap promulgated by the Heritage Foundation that calls for imprisoning publishers of lesbian or gay novels, and of not only banning abortion but coercing pregnant women into marriage with the father of their forced-birth children.
Anti-transgender politics are not an island apart from the extreme conservative agenda, they are the thin end of the wedge for a whole raft of much wider-ranging (but no more extreme) policies.