The Trans Panic: How Conservatives Duped Their Phobic Base and Sacrificed a Vulnerable Minority

When you understand what motivates people, you can easily manipulate them.

Once you’ve figured out their vulnerabilities, all you need to do is apply consistent pressure, and you can lead them wherever you want. Right now, the Republican Party is performing a master class in such collective coercion.

Knowing that their white Evangelical base has been weaned since birth on a steady diet of fear, prejudice, and white supremacy, Conservative politicians and preachers have worked a remarkable con: they’ve convinced their phobia-prone rank and file that their most dire threat isn’t the astronomical cost of healthcare, the hoarding of wealth by a small minority, the erosion of civil rights, the rapidly heating planet, or the arrival of authoritarianism—it’s transgender athletes.

Seriously, talk about selling a shit ton of nothing burgers and empty calories.

Now, let’s forget the fact that men on the Right here have, by and large, been fully dismissive of women’s sports since the birth of this nation, mocking female athletes’ requests for equal funding, pay, and media coverage.

And we’ll put aside the fact that there is virtually no data supporting the idea that female athletes face greater injury danger or competitive disadvantage from transgender athletes.

We’ll also table the reality that, although transgender human beings have been playing sports for hundreds of years, no one gave half a damn until a couple of election cycles ago, when it looked like Republicans were in big trouble.

Let’s consider what we’re really talking about here with a little unscientific number-crunching.

According to a study by the Williams Institute, approximately 0.6% of adults in the United States identify as transgender, or roughly 1.4 million people.

Based on national averages, around 30 percent of those 1.4 million people are below the age of 23, and would comprise the bulk of prospective non-professional athletes, so roughly 420,000 people.

With statistics showing that approximately 57 percent of elementary, middle, and high school students (and 2 to 10 percent of college students) play organized sports, this would mean we’re talking about roughly 231,000 transgender athletes.

231,000 people in a population of 340 million.

That amounts to 0.068%, so less than three-quarters of one percent.

Do you see what’s happening here?

Republican political and religious leaders have managed to fabricate a nonexistent national danger involving an infinitesimal number of people who are already among the most vulnerable and at-risk communities in this nation.

By inundating Conservative white Evangelicals with fictional fear porn about Transgender human beings, they have convinced the former to so violently despise the latter, they’ve distracted them from true existential threats, actual Constitutional crises, and legitimate dangers.

The unconstitutional weaponization of ICE.
The annihilation of the Palestinian people.
The sabotaging of the economy.
The misuse of the National Guard.
The destruction of Ukraine.
The gutting of the Federal workforce.
The concealing of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The dismantling of the public school system.
The erasure of retirement benefits.

These all occupy very little intellectual or emotional bandwidth in the heads of phobic religious white people who’ve been fooled into believing that some bullied, battered high school kid in Tennessee who finds a bit of joy and solace in playing basketball for a few hours a week because it makes her feel like part of a community that has always excluded and threatened her—that she is a clear and present danger to them, and not the millionaires and billionaires who’ve been preying upon them for their entire lives.

How sad that this is where we are, with millions of supposed Christians who’ve had the empathy squeezed out of them by people who realized how easy that would be.

It’s disgusting that Republican politicians and Evangelical clergy are purposefully sacrificing Transgender people on the altar of their insatiable lust for power and wealth.

But it’s far worse seeing millions of fear-addled, religion-manipulated Americans be so easily fooled into becoming their willing accomplices.