The Courage to Compete: When Being Yourself Becomes a Political Act

What We Get Wrong About Trans Athletes

There’s a photograph I keep thinking about—not because I’ve seen it, but because I can picture it so clearly. A young swimmer, maybe five years old, goggled and grinning at the edge of a pool, about to dive in for the first time. The water is blue and endless with possibility. She doesn’t yet know what the world will ask of her. What it will demand she prove just to exist in the lane she was born to swim in.

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To Democratic leaders: Stop throwing trans people under the bus to score wins that come at the cost of basic human dignity. If your idea of progress leaves part of your coalition behind, it’s not really progress at all.

I recently came across this interview with former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Aaron Parnas’s Substack Live. You may have seen it. He was asked to clarify his comments around the ‘fairness’ of transgender kids’ in sports. His answer (14:22) stood out for more of the same old, tired diplomacy, a missed opportunity for moral clarity from an LGBTQ leader in a moment that demands it.

“Well, again, I think we do need to lead with compassion on this, and we need to take everybody seriously. I see this issue being used to divide. I see it being used to hurt people. It's especially hurtful for trans people and people with transgender members of their family who witness themselves or people they love being used as a political football.

And look, there have always been attempts in politics to get ahead by demonizing or dismissing entire groups of people. And I see that that's one response, certainly the one that comes from this administration and from the right, towards a lot of people who are just trying to go about their lives. We're talking about one of the smallest groups. as well as one of the most vulnerable minorities in this country and in the world. I think in order to bring people together on this, we also have to take everybody seriously.

And parents who have questions or people who wonder what this means, if this comes up, for example, in the context of a sports league that they or a family member is playing in, it's extremely rare. But when it happens, they're going to have questions about how to make sure that that's fair.

And we should take those questions seriously and face those together. And above all, and this is what I said, expect that those questions should be handled by communities and by sports leagues and not by politicians.”

And it was that last paragraph that made me stop.

Here’s what’s striking: Buttigieg’s reply is measured, empathetic on the surface, and consistent with how he often handles sensitive topics. He acknowledges harm to trans people, calls out political scapegoating, but then pivots into a both sides lane (“take everybody seriously,” “parents who have questions”), and ends by essentially punting the decisions to “communities and sports leagues”.

The reality is, right now these questions are being answered by politicians—and they’re doing it without real input from the communities, parents, experts, or athletes they claim to be protecting. In state after state, laws are being passed not by communities or sports leagues, but by unqualified, misinformed legislators intent on stripping away the very local decision‑making Buttigieg points to.

So is this really about fairness?

Because if it were, I think the conversation, laws, and policies would sound different. We wouldn’t be obsessing over protecting the majority from the perceived threat of the few. We’d be asking: How do we build a system that protects and includes the minority—without sacrificing their dignity or safety?

But that’s not the narrative we hear.

Instead, transgender kids are often framed as a threat—to fairness, to tradition, to the way things have always been. This fear isn’t rooted in facts. It’s rooted in discomfort with difference and the unknown. It’s a fear of change, of seeing gender as something fluid rather than fixed.

And in that fear, we risk losing sight of the simple truth: these are children, just trying to live, to play, and to belong. The laws and rhetoric that claim to protect fairness actually mask a deeper agenda of exclusion and erasure rather than genuine concern for equity.

Photo by Nikolas Gannon on Unsplash

The Numbers Can’t Justify the Fear

I’m not telling you anything new. You’ve probably seen the statistics too—at least I hope you have. There are more than 500,000 college athletes, fewer than 10, that’s right, 10 are trans. That’s just 0.002%(SF.GOV). It’s a detail the headlines rarely mention. At the Olympic level, only two openly trans women have competed in the 20 years they’ve been allowed to participate, and neither won a medal.

Yet in 2025, there are over 700 anti-trans bills making their way through American legislative bodies. Texas leads with 134, Missouri with 67. This marks the fifth consecutive record-breaking year for such legislation.

Do the math on human dignity: hundreds of bills in response to a handful of athletes. The disproportion is staggering and telling.

Meanwhile, trans people are over four times more likely to experience violent victimization than cisgender people(Williams Institute). Black transgender women face the highest rates of fatal violence. In 2023 alone, at least 350 trans and gender-diverse people were murdered worldwide(HRW).

These numbers reflect an actual crisis. But they’re not the ones fueling legislative sessions or campaign ads.

I can’t stop thinking about how such a small group inspires such an outsized wave of hate in legislation. It tells me this was never really about fairness at all. And here, I want to speak directly to my fellow progressives: we cannot and must not sacrifice any letter of the LGBTQIA+ collective in the name of political expedience. That is not a win. It is cruel, dishonest, and dangerous.

Just recently, the official descriptions of the Stonewall National Monument were reduced to LGB. It was a symbolic act of erasure aimed at shrinking our shared history of resistance. If we allow trans people to be erased today, we should not delude ourselves. Tomorrow, it may be someone else. I know this pain. You know this pain too, that feeling of being ostracized for not fitting society’s expectations of gender and sexuality. We can and must do better.

These laws do not attack fairness. They attack our humanity.

The Human Stories Behind the Statistics

Why am I talking about this? I know this isn’t new news to some, but right now we are bombarded with so much in media—the chaos, the distractions. It can feel overwhelming, and it’s easy to stay silent or let these issues slip away. But we must not. Not when real lives are at stake. We must continue to have the backs of our trans and gender-diverse brothers and sisters as they face unimaginable harm.

Alexander Wicken knows what it feels like to love a sport that doesn’t love you back. At thirteen, when he came out as trans, sports became his “reprieve” from a world suddenly filled with “transphobia and queerphobia.” But even sanctuary has rules.

"I spent multiple years in the closet while playing lacrosse, and, sadly, this pushed me to fall out of love with the sport a little bit."

When Alexander finally came out to his teammates and coaches, he found judgment instead of acceptance. He quit lacrosse his junior year.

These aren't stories about competitive advantage. They're stories about what happens when you have to fight for the right to exist in spaces where others simply show up.

Alexander’s story is one of many that reveal how trans athletes, regardless of gender identity, face exclusion, judgment, and fear. Yet public debates and political attacks disproportionately target trans women, making them the primary focus of this contentious conversation.

The truth is that transitioning isn't easy, quick, or casual. It often involves painful emotional journeys, years of therapy, medical costs, rejection by family, job insecurity, and in many cases, the threat of violence. Claiming womanhood, as a trans woman, is not a shortcut. It is an act of incredible courage. And the cost of that truth is brutally high.

That’s is why the question of “fairness” in sports deserves to be rooted in facts, not fear. When we set aside the slogans and look at what the research actually shows, the picture is far more complex than the political talking points suggest.

What the Evidence Really Says

When we move past political rhetoric and look at the research, what emerges is complexity, not simple answers. Many studies find that after about two years of gender-affirming hormone therapy, measurable differences in cardiovascular fitness between trans women and cisgender women shrink or disappear(Trans Research Australia). Some measures of strength may persist in certain individuals, but when performance is adjusted for body mass and other factors, differences are often much smaller, or vanish in many contexts.

Dr. Eric Vilain, a geneticist at UC Irvine, captures the uncertainty plainly: “We simply don’t know” whether there is a consistent, disproportionate competitive advantage between trans and cis athletes. He adds that athletic performance reflects many variables—genetics, metabolism, height, training, nutrition, and access to coaching and equipment—making simple causal claims unreliable.

Perhaps most telling: despite decades of trans participation at many levels of sport, we haven’t seen the systematic domination of women’s athletics that critics predict. The empirical record does not support the fear of trans women “overwhelming” women’s sports.

This uncertainty in the science should demand humility and a willingness to adapt policy as evidence evolves. If fairness were truly the goal, we would be crafting nuanced rules that reflect the data, not passing blanket bans that erase athletes before they even reach the starting line. Consider Idaho. It was the first state to enact an all out ban on any trans person’s participation in athletics from kindergarten through college(ACLU).

That’s what happened to Alexander Wicken, in spirit if not in statute, losing the sport he loved not because of an overwhelming advantage, but because of fear and assumption. And yet, that same fear now drives sweeping laws across the country, the doors slammed shut before a young athlete’s dream ever had a chance to begin.

While We Argue, Trans Lives Are Being Erased

We’ve been told the science is unsettled, so the “safe” choice is to ban first and think later. But those bans don’t stop at the edge of a playing field. They spill into every corner of life, reshaping laws in ways that have nothing to do with athletics.

While the sports debate rages over a tiny population, the legislative response has been massive and devastating. The 969 anti-trans bills in 2025 don’t just target sports, they attack every aspect of trans existence: healthcare access, bathroom use, educational participation, and basic civil rights protections.

Iowa became the first state to completely rescind nondiscrimination protections for trans people, stripping away rights that had been in place since 2007. Florida has criminalized trans people using bathrooms that match their gender identity. The scope extends far beyond athletics into the fundamental right to exist in public spaces.

This is fear and assumption written into law. The same fear that pushed Alexander out of lacrosse, now scaled into policies that erase entire communities.

Consider this: while we debate the “fairness” of trans participation in sports, trans people are being denied access to healthcare, kicked out of schools, fired from jobs, and attacked in public spaces. Which issue actually affects more lives? Which deserves our urgent attention?

Beyond Fairness: Toward Compassion

Too often, the debate treats trans people as puzzles to be solved rather than humans to be valued. When high school runner Chelsea Mitchell wrote about losing a state championship to trans athletes, her disappointment was real. But the girls she raced against were also teenagers trying to figure out who they were while doing something they loved.

The tragedy isn’t that one group won and another lost. It’s that we’ve built a culture where children’s identities are turned into campaign slogans, where showing up to practice becomes a referendum on your right to exist.

Fairness, in its truest sense, would reach beyond the rulebook. It would see the handful of trans athletes not as exceptions to manage, but as young people who have already overcome enormous barriers just to step onto the field. It would protect for them what it promises to everyone else: the health, joy, belonging, and opportunity that sports can give.

As athlete and advocate Eli Lurie Sobel says:

“Sports are one of the greatest blessings in my life. Being a trans person has given me empathy and joy that words cannot describe. Being a trans athlete has made me who I am.”

And that little girl at the pool’s edge? She swam faster than almost anyone else ever had at her college. She won—becoming the first openly trans NCAA champion in Division I. But with every win, she was met with headlines that questioned her right to compete, jeers from the stands, and petitions to rewrite the rules. Her joy in the water became a political lightning rod. The very lane that once shimmered with possibility was suddenly crowded with scrutiny, suspicion, and, for many, outright rejection.

Her story isn’t just about winning or losing. It’s about what happens when a child, who once grinned at the edge of a pool, full of hope, grows up and learns that simply being herself will be judged as an act of defiance. Her victories were accompanied not by applause, but by relentless, organized attempts to erase her place in the sport she loves.

The Heart of the Matter

We’re not being flooded with trans athletes. But we are drowning in a flood of legislation aimed at erasing trans people from public life entirely. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe this isn’t about fairness at all. Maybe it’s fear, fear of change, fear of difference, fear of a world where gender isn’t so simple or certain anymore.

The debate over trans athletes isn’t really about sports. It’s about whether we believe trans people deserve dignity, respect, and a place in society. It’s about whether we can move beyond fear and suspicion to find compassion. It’s about seeing the human beings behind every political talking point, people who deserve far better than to be used as pawns in a game they never asked to play.

I keep coming back to that five-year-old at the pool’s edge, goggles gleaming, ready to dive into endless blue possibility. I think about the trans children watching this debate, wondering if there will ever be room for them in the sports—and the world—they love.

The question isn’t whether trans women have an advantage. The question is whether we have the courage to see them as whole human beings, worthy of fairness, inclusion, and basic respect.

And so I come back to that first image of a child at the pool’s edge, all promise and potential, not yet knowing what the world will demand of her. Lia Thomas was that child, and there are thousands more like her watching, wondering if there will ever be space for them to swim, to play, and to win free from controversy or shame.

The pool is still wide and blue, full of possibility. The question is whether we’ll make room for everyone brave enough to dive in. And to those in power, especially those who claim to stand with us, remember this: progress that leaves trans people behind isn’t progress. It’s betrayal.

And guess who’s next.

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Further Support and Resources

If this post resonates with you or someone you know, or if you want to support trans youth and the wider LGBTQ+ community, here are trusted organizations and resources to learn more or seek help:

• The Trevor Project – Crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth.

  thetrevorproject.org | 24/7 Lifeline: 1-866-488-7386

• Trans Lifeline – Peer support hotline run by and for trans people.

  translifeline.org | Hotline (U.S.): 1-877-565-8860

• Human Rights Campaign (HRC) – Advocacy and information for LGBTQ rights.

  hrc.org

• GLAAD – Resources for understanding trans issues and fighting misinformation.

  glaad.org

• National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) – Rights, policy, and legal info for trans people.

  transequality.org

• PFLAG – Support for LGBTQ people, families, and allies.

  pflag.org

You are not alone. Support and community are out there—for those who need a lifeline, a safe place, or a way to keep moving forward.

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My Queer ‘Friends, Loves, & Life’ Recommendations - Living List #2

(Updated August 2025)

New and past recommendation, so each update includes all the previous names plus the new ones I’ve found. Bookmark and revisit!

One of the most powerful ways to push back against disinformation, erasure, and hate is by amplifying the voices already doing the work. There are creators, journalists, artists, and activists who are informing, inspiring, and building community every day, often with little institutional support but a whole lot of grit.

If you want to stay informed and empowered, these are some of the folks and platforms worth having in your feed:

New This Update:
👉🏻 Ari Drennen - A writer, activist, and advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, transgender issues, and combating misinformation.
👉🏻 Chris Geidner - Award-winning journalist covering LGBTQ issues and criminal justice questions.
👉🏻 CLEAVAGE with Jenny Boylan - Writer, teacher, president of PEN America.

Full Living List:
Wild Lion*esses Pride by Jay
Lady Libertea
Lee Summers
Ben Greene 👉🏻 Good Queer News
Erin Reed 👉🏻 Erin In the Morning
Mr. Troy Ford 👉🏻 QStack LGBTQIA+ Substack Directory,
Clint Collide 👉🏻 Collide Press
Jerry Portwood 👉🏻 The Queer Love Project
Kay Vinson 👉🏻 Oh Kay! Lavender Stories
Charlotte Clymer 👉🏻 Charlotte’s Web Thoughts
Rich Dornisch 🏳️‍🌈 👉🏻 Kornerz: Your Social Network of the Future
Samantha Paige (she/they)

Follow them. Share their work. Boost their voices. Visibility isn’t just survival — it’s solidarity. Know others doing great work? Drop their names in the comments, or send me a note, and keep the circle growing.

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Your voice matters. Keep speaking your truth.

Be Bold. Be Free. Be You.

— David

A Queer POV: Friends, Loves, & Life with David
You can listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Substack, and YouTube. New episodes Wednesday.
And if you enjoy it, please leave a review—it helps more than you know.

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PS: When I’m not podcasting, I also make wedding, birthday, and anniversary cake toppers. (Yes, really.)
Take a peek at the shop: Taylor Street Favors