Recently I watched a Majority Report interview with trans actress Laverne Cox; I'll probably share that here too once MR gets around to clipping the segment. In that discussion she talks about how the road to America's anti-trans pogrom was built built by shifting the focus off (then) unpopular bathroom ban bills, and towards the subject of trans (mostly) women competing in sports, after monstrous fundie think tanks like the Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF) actually focus tested which trans-related issues were most effective in riling up anti-trans sentiment and triggering the slippery slide towards trans eliminationism.

At the time, I honestly didn't think much of the fascist right's tactical shift; after all, there aren't that many trans women athletes, trans women are not dominating women's sports even when they do participate, and I didn't think America would have much sympathy for the petulant fit Riley Gaines (a woman who finished tied for fifth place with a trans woman athlete in an NCAA swim meet literally nobody would care about otherwise) was throwing. I'm going to have to take the "L" on that one; apparently I forgot that tears from a semi-attractive white woman are often part of the arcane spell eliminationist reactionaries use to conjure up support for fascist ideology and oppression - silly me.

Unless you've been in a coma, you already know the rest of the story; Gaines would appear on Fox News a staggering 29 times in the year after her race, trans sports bans would lead to the very same unpopular bathroom bills now passing, and today we live in a country where the President has made the erasure of trans people in public life (both figuratively, and literally) an official US government policy. In studying the aftermath of this anti-trans propaganda campaign, researchers have noted that the attacks on trans women in sport were an effective permission gate for the anti-trans pogrom because they triggered a sense of "unfairness" in cis-het people who were already inclined to think of trans people, particularly trans women, as an "otherized" and alien group in our society. Which is of course surreal, because as this article by Jules Boykoff and Satoko Itani notes, scientific evidence has repeatedly demonstrated that trans women who've been undergoing hormone replacement therapy for at least a year, literally do not have an advantage over cis-women athletes at all.

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trans-moral-panic-falsespor

The Spreaders of the Trans Athlete Moral Panic Live in a Fact-Free Fantasyland

"One in-depth review of existing scientific literature on transgender athlete participation in competitive sport published between 2011 and 2021 found that “trans women who have undergone testosterone suppression have no clear biological advantages over cis women in elite sport.”

Another study found that transgender women athletes could actually be disadvantaged: “Compared with cisgender women,” the study found, “transgender women have decreased lung function, increasing their work in breathing.” Douglas Oberlin, an exercise physiologist who reviewed the scientific evidence related to transgender athletes’ performance, notes that “the limited information available does not suggest that trans men and trans women have much, if any, athletic advantage post-transition.”

In other words, yes, Americans who don't know their ass from their elbow just empowered a real as fuck fascist regime that is now destroying their lives, at least in part because they're big mad about the presumed "unfairness" of trans women competing in sports they otherwise do not care about, despite the fact that said "unfairness" has been scientifically proven to not exist. And while that's a sort of tragic comedy moment on its face, the consequences for trans people and folks who don't like fascism, are no laughing matter.

"Let’s be absolutely clear: The stakes are sky-high. The endgame of this bipartisan, anti-trans witch hunt is twofold. On the practical side, it enables the bracing possibility of raving randos demanding genital checks from the sidelines of youth sports events for kids who don’t conform to their strict versions of gender. (In West Virginia, Republicans have already voted through legislation green-lighting healthcare providers’ ability to perform genital checks on children without parental consent). But more broadly, the endgame is trans banishment. As journalist Dave Zirin put it, “The ‘pro-trans in everything but sports’ position can metastasize into… a broader anti-trans stance, the forcible erasure of transgender people from society.”

The push to expel trans women from elite sport, aided and abetted by Democrats like Gavin Newsom, is stoked by what Judith Butler calls “fascist passions.” As M. Gessen recently wrote, “The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation.”