Rubin: How many trans girl athletes does it take to spark campaign ads?

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.

Contrast that to the number of commercials you’ve seen, thundering on about Kamala Harris or some other heathen Democrat who wants to force your teen daughters to share locker rooms with musclebound intruders who look like they could toss Hulk Hogan across an arena.

In our battleground state, much of the war has been fought lately with ad buys. Divide the millions of dollars’ worth of air time by the number of actual trans athletes, and it would be …

Well, a lot. Probably enough to make sure some beleaguered districts had a full staff of counselors, and maybe better food.

Instead, we get a candidate claiming that kids are undergoing gender-reassignment surgery at school, never mind the lack of surgeons and operating rooms and the fact that most schools can’t hand out an Advil without parental permission. Meantime, exactly two trans girls in Michigan are in uniform, competing in sports that MHSAA communications director Geoff Kimmerly opted not to specify.

“It’s still felt that that would be too much of an identifier,” he said, in a world where 0.0011765% of the 170,000 current Michigan high school athletes could find themselves being used as political footballs.

A legislative airball

With only the mildest exaggeration, Kimmerly said he caught the most prominent of the commercials 20 times as he flipped through football games Saturday.

A less visible ad from U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers has also been in rotation, but the inescapable message comes courtesy of Donald J. Trump for President 2024, part of a national push that had churned through a reported $21 million in the first two weeks of October. “Kamala's agenda is they/them, not you," it said.

Giving credit where it’s due, that’s clever. Good phrasing matters; nobody much cared about the inheritance tax until someone started calling it the death tax a few decades ago, and then it became a campaign issue for a bunch of voters whose net worth was measured in pizza coupons.

Repetition matters, too.

“Where it becomes frustrating,” Kimmerly said, is not just in the suggestion of rampant unfairness, but in the implication that any random Harry can declare himself a Heather and suit up.

The reality is that the few applications for participation waivers every year are considered by a committee, individually and carefully.

“We examine their documentation,” he said, including medical and psychological records, health reports and pre-participation physicals.

“We ask if there’s been any sort of testosterone suppression therapy begun. Any sort of gender surgery begun. Then we go from there,” he said.

The numbers remain tiny, year after year — two or three athletes, often the same kids coming back as they enjoy the competition and camaraderie of team sports.

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.

Wins, forfeits and testosterone

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.

The girls don't need MHSAA permission to compete, so if some are trans, there's no record of it.

When a trans girl or woman succeeds, it's a headline — often inaccurate or incomplete.

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.

More recently, five Mountain West conference teams have forfeited volleyball matches to San Jose State University, rather than take the court against a team with a trans player, or at least an alleged one; the school and athlete haven't confirmed specifics.

The forfeits have helped the Spartans ascend in the league standings, though they lost to Colorado State, which opted to play rather than concede. And while a San Jose State player has joined a lawsuit against the NCAA for allowing transgender women to compete — and said her trans teammate hits the ball with dangerous force — it's their second season together, and until recently she didn't know the woman in question is trans.

The NCAA has strict protocols regarding testosterone levels. There's much discussion about how much advantage trans athletes have; their diminished muscles, some point out, have to power larger frames. Among the factors that weigh in is when a transition occurs relative to the onset of puberty.

It's complicated and contentious. And in Michigan, two trans girls just want to play games.

We don't know anything about them beyond that — but you have to wonder if they're old enough to vote.

Reach Neal Rubin at [email protected].

This story was updated to add a video.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Despite tiny number of trans athletes, they're a Michigan campaign issue