In the past week two events have garnered national attention. In California a transgender girl is competing in the state qualifying meets in the triple jump, high jump, and long jump. Her participation has sparked protests, letters from high school principals, and national news stories. Similarly, in the Chicago suburb of Naperville a junior high transgender girl has participated in local track meets, again sparking protests and a highly contentious school board meeting. There are lots of things being said on both sides of the issue. How are we as Christians to respond? First of all, I would argue we need to get our facts straight.
Before we dive in I have one caveat: I am focusing on the issue as it pertains to youth sports, namely junior high and high school athletics. I am doing this because I believe the issues for elite athletes (Division I college athletes, olympic athletes, and professional athletes) are different in some significant ways, and those issues are not what is sparking the present debate.
How many transgender athletes are there?
Exact numbers are hard to pin down because most states and sports associations do not track transgender athletes specifically. Privacy laws also limit data collection, especially concerning minors. However, we can do some digging to get some general idea on the answer to this question.
A 2023 report from the Williams Institute at UCLA estimated that about 1.4% of U.S. youth aged 13–17 (roughly 300,000) identify as transgender. Of these, only a fraction participate in sports. A 2021 Human Rights Campaign report noted that just 12% of transgender girls and 14% of transgender boys play sports, implying around 35,000 transgender high school athletes nationwide, or about 0.44% of the 8 million high school athletes.
(Yes – transgender boys do participate in boys sports. But no one seems to care much about this and it rarely attracts the same attention as transgender girls do when they participate in girls sports. We will examine why this might be the case below.)
More specifically, a 2023 Newsweek article cited the American Civil Liberties Union, which reported that Save Women’s Sports, an organization advocating against transgender participation in girls’ sports, identified only five transgender athletes competing on girls’ teams in K–12 sports across the U.S. North Carolina reported 15 transgender athletes in high school sports, but only two were transgender girls.
Overall, these figures likely indicate that the total number of transgender athletes who are participating in organized high school sports is likely fewer than 100 at any given time. We can speculate that the number is fairly similar for junior high athletes.
While we are not focusing on college athletics, it is relevant to note that in December of 2024 NCAA President Charlie Baker testified that out of more than 500,000 college student athletes, he believed that fewer than 10 were transgender men or women.
So how many transgender athletes are there? Not many. Are transgender girls taking over and dominating girls sports? Not at all.
If there are so few transgender athletes, then why is this issue garnering so much attention?
There is no doubt that transgender issues, and specifically the issue of transgender athletes, has become an intense political focus. During the national and local campaigns of 2024 many candidates on the right used this issue to rally support and spark fear. Soon after his election President Trump signed an executive order banning transgender athletes from participation in girls’ and women’s sports.
Utah is a perfect example of how politics has made a “mountain out of a molehill.” Bill HB11 was passed which in effect banned transgender athletes from participation in all sports. Although it was vetoed by the governor, that veto was later overridden by the state legislature. All this happened because, out of the approximately 75,000 kids participating in high school sports in Utah, four were transgender kids. (And only one was a trans girl.) Four.
I am fairly confident that the political attention this issue has garnered has greatly complicated and magnified what should be an intensely local and personal issue.
Finally, do transgender athletes have a competitive advantage?
This is really at the heart of the issue, isn’t it? (And this is why no one seems to care about trans boys participation, while they care deeply about trans girls participation.) The perception is that trans girls have a competitive advantage over cisgender girls. But is that really the case? Surprisingly, there is no simple answer.
There are no scientific and comprehensive studies that give us data either way. The closest we have is a 2023 study that was done on transgender soldiers in the Army and Air Force. These soldiers (and their cisgender counterparts) take annual fitness evaluations. They are timed running 1.5 miles, and they do as many sit-ups and push-ups as they can in one minute. The study followed transgender soldiers who had begun gender-affirming hormone therapy, tracking their results over a period of years.
They found that it took two years for trans women’s running times to “normalize” with those of women assigned female at birth. It took four years for the sit-up scores to normalize, and their push-up scores never normalized. Clearly, at least in the case of these adults and in these particular athletic activities, the amount of time on hormones and the type of activity were relevant. In some cases there was a competitive advantage that persisted. In other cases time and the type of activity removed that competitive advantage.
Most medical experts also agree that if and when a person has gone through puberty matters. Personally this was true for me. I was highly competitive with my peers in fourth and fifth grade, starting on most school teams. By eighth grade I was riding the bench a lot, as many of my peers entered puberty before I did. Later in high school I caught up.
This phenomenon is amplified if a trans kid is taking medication to delay puberty, or has begun hormone replacement therapy during puberty. There can be no doubt that some trans kids will exhibit a competitive advantage and some will not. Each case is different, and will be affected by the sport involved as well.
So to get our facts straight, we cannot claim that all trans girls have a competitive advantage over cisgender girls. It’s simply not the case. In one national news story a trans girl playing on the girls high school softball team was asked if she was any good. She laughed and replied, “I stink. I’m the third string catcher.”
We can also not claim that it is an equal playing field for trans and cis kids. Some trans girls clearly have a competitive advantage. In one of the present news stories the trans girl participating in the triple jump out jumped her nearest competitor by over four feet. Clearly the issue is complicated.
As Christians, when we speak up about issues in the public sphere we have a responsibility to speak from a position of facts and truth. Saying things out of ignorance or quoting “facts” that are untrue (but helpful to our point of view) only undermines our witness to the world around us.
So should transgender kids compete in junior high and high school sports? In our next post we will examine the values that are in play when we voice our opinion on that!