How youth sports supercharged the trans athlete debate

Travel teams were never about inclusion

Radicals lobbying for coed youth sports. (Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

It is tempting to look at the emotionally charged national debate about transgender athletes, who make up around 0.002% of NCAA participants, and conclude that this is not really about sports. Because how could such a polarizing issue, on which virtually any candidate running for prominent office must stake out a position, actually be about the millisecond advantage of one teenage track star over another?

Some have dismissed the trans athlete panic as a scapegoating strategy, a Republican wedge issue that is about sports only insofar as athletic competition offers a concrete site for diffuse and misinformed anxieties about trans people.

But what if it really is about sports — at least for an electorally valuable demographic of parents who have poured time and money into youth sports and for whom competitive fairness feels intensely personal?

To be clear, partisan identity, religious conviction, and philosophical disagreement about the relationship between sex and gender still contribute to this issue resonating so widely. I am not arguing that youth sports explains all of the opposition. But its centrality in American culture helps illuminate something specific: why this issue has such traction among a suburban, middle-class demographic that might otherwise be open to trans rights and why the framing of “protecting our daughters” lands so effectively.

The professionalization of youth sports

I have never seen much value in entertaining technical discussions about the bone density and hormone levels of teenagers.

Then again, I have also never felt invested in my own (or anyone’s) athletic performance. Except for a brief manic period when I was six during the 2008 European Football Championship, I cannot recall being emotionally attached to a single sporting outcome. And as for my personal adolescent soccer career, well, I was just happy to be there.

It has been brought to my attention, however, that my blasé attitude toward sports makes me an outlier. Especially among the soccer moms and baseball dads most exposed to the pressures of a youth sports industry that has learned to profit from their D1 dreams. If you, in fact, care a great deal about which child wins next weekend’s U15 400m race — preferably your own — then thinking in milliseconds is standard. And so is obsessing about the competitive edge of children’s bodies.

Since the 1970s, youth sports have grown more and more professionalized in the United States, crowding out recreational leagues and pickup games. By now, the consequences of this shift are well documented: increased injuries and burnout among children, priced-out low-income households, and strained family relationships.

To this list, I want to add another possible consequence: It has also cultivated a parental psychology unusually primed for the Right’s moralizing campaign against trans individuals.

For many parents, this debate actually is about sports. Not because their child has ever competed against a trans athlete (the chances of that remain very low), but because the slim margins, steep cost, and high stakes of youth sports have created clear incentives for them to prioritize competitive fairness over principles like inclusion, well-being, and fun.

A youth sports culture that values competition above all else creates downstream harms that extend well beyond trans kids. When sports become increasingly about identifying and honing an elite handful of top athletes, that means anyone below the 99th percentile suffers, and the stakes for clawing your kid into that top bracket incentivize exclusion.

But physical activity is foundational to a healthy and happy childhood. Not just for the tiny population who have what it takes to go pro.

The trans athlete panic

Sports didn’t used to be at the center of the trans inclusion debate. No one knows this better than Joanna Harper, who researches transgender athletic performance at Western University. She is a long-distance runner herself and is also trans.

Before 2019, she told me, the focus of the anti-trans movement was almost entirely on bathroom bills. “Then they switched to trans women in sports and that has caught on like gangbusters,” Harper said.

The number of states banning transgender youth from participating in school sports consistent with their gender identity has risen from zero to 27 since then.

Harper described the momentum on the issue as a “visceral reaction” — specifically to the idea that men are trying to get ahead in women’s sports. Trump’s prompt presidential action last February “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” showed just how much political purchase this narrative has — especially, it seems, among parents, who tend to lean more restrictive on trans inclusion than the general public. As Harper put it, “you hear a lot of ‘I wouldn’t want to see boys playing against my little girl.’”

To me, self-identified NARP¹ and skeptic of arguments made by grown men about little girls, the Seth Moultons of the world publicly concerned about their young daughters getting “run over” by a “formerly male athlete” has always read as adults using trans kids to score political points.

As my colleague Jerusalem Demsas recently pointed out, arguments about testosterone and muscle mass have little bearing on prepubescent children. At the elementary school age of Moulton’s daughters, athletic sex advantages are minimal to nearly nonexistent.

It also seems bizarre to focus a debate about competitive integrity on children. Even to the extent that biological differences exist among grade schoolers, what does it matter when the stakes of their physical activities are so low?

Complicating this second point, though, is the very young age at which children today enter competitive youth sports and the growing number of parents who pay thousands of dollars for them to do so.

Overly competitive youth sports are good for business but bad for kids

“Especially in the U.S.,” Harper told me, “there is a feeling that ‘my son or daughter is going to become a professional athlete, and they have to become full-time invested in sport by the time they’re eight or nine years old.’”

Linda Flanagan, journalist and former cross-country coach, has written an entire book on this phenomenon. In Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports, she asked how the more casual leagues of the 20th century morphed into the preteen travel teams of today.

A lot of it has to do with business incentives, she explained to me over the phone. “Investors have recognized that there’s money to be made from anxious parents.”

Today, the youth sports industry in America generates approximately $40 billion revenue annually, nearly 75% more than that of the NFL. Polling suggests that a disproportionate number of parents expect their kids to get an athletic scholarship, become Division I athletes, play professionally, or even go to the Olympics.

Yet the NCAA reported that around 2% of high school athletes actually receive a scholarship offer. The gulf between expectation and reality captures something important about the psychology of parents: Many have convinced themselves that there will be returns to their investment in their student athletes, and they therefore have strong incentives to police anything they perceive as threatening those returns.

According to the Aspen Institute, the average family with kids who play sports spent $1,016 on their child’s primary sport in 2024, almost half again what they spent in 2019. For parents who opt into extra training services and out-of-state tournaments, that number is more likely in the $3,000 to $5,000 range. In the most expensive sports, such as ice hockey or tennis, some families reported paying upward of $20,000 a year.

Elite universities haven’t helped either. With college admissions growing more competitive, the advantages granted to top athletes have, in Flanagan’s words, created “an incentive to go overboard with sports.” Hence the normalization of early childhood specialization and year-round competition.

One of Flanagan’s central critiques of the industry is that more relaxed, less demanding forms of youth sport have disappeared. An all or nothing mentality has taken hold, where the goal of getting recruited as a college athlete or going pro looms larger than other objectives, such as physical fitness or social development.

In light of the high dropout rate among youth athletes today — 70% quit organized sports by the age of 13, with diminishing enjoyment being the primary reason — she argued that ramping up competitive stakes so early is counterproductive even on its own terms: it isn’t producing better athletes; it’s producing fewer of them.

Things could be different

Flanagan has advocated for the U.S. to take its cues from Norway, where children are protected from the most intense forms of competition until the age of 13.

“It’s not that competition and intensity are bad, but there’s a time and a place for it, and it’s not when they’re in elementary school,” she said.

The country regularly produces some of the world’s top athletes, yet the guiding principle of Norwegian youth sports is enjoyment, not competition. The Ministry of Culture’s stated policy objective is quite literally “Joy of Sport for All” (or Idrettsglede for alle).

In practice, this means that rankings and champions are prohibited among preteens, unlike in the United States where the AAU offers national titles to children aged eight and under.

Another example closer to home comes from Canada. With elite hockey as an important cultural exception, Canadian youth sports culture is more recreation-oriented, less tied to the college scholarship pipeline, and less dominated by privatized travel teams.

Particularly notable is the country’s high rates of recreational soccer participation, countering the declining American trend. On its website, Canada Soccer, the country’s governing body of the sport, explicitly cites “flexible pathways for athletes of all abilities” and “lower financial barriers” as cornerstones of the youth soccer experience.

The debate about whether trans girls and women should be allowed to compete against female athletes exists in these countries too. The challenges that the rigid biological categories of sports pose to trans individuals do not suddenly go away when we make participation free and competition less intense.

But a culture that, from the outset, is committed to participation rather than competition is more likely to condition parents to value the inclusion of trans children — even when that inclusion comes at the hypothetical cost of their own child’s competitive outcomes.

During my own humbling years as a recreational soccer player, I often played against girls younger than me. I was a tall child, and at 13, I towered over many of my 12-year-old opponents. This was entirely uncontroversial. Maybe that’s because I wasn’t very good. Or maybe it’s because nobody cared who won and excluding me would have made any parent look like a jerk.

There will always be elite, professional sports. There may even be elite, professional sports for teenagers. Among the very small population of trans individuals in the United States, some will want to participate in these. I leave how we adjudicate the rules of their participation up to experts like Joanna Harper.

Those rules, however, ought to be separated from the conversation about who gets to play recreational sports as a child.

By default, this category should include all children. Defending its existence is in the interest of everyone.

More on trans rights:

1. Non-Athletic Regular Person