The Supreme Court has taken a giant constitutional swipe at the tiny minority of transgender girls and women who want to play school sports. Its end-of-term ruling upheld laws in Idaho and West Virginia that ban these students from playing on female athletic teams at their schools, no matter the students’ age or sport, or even if the only puberty they have experienced is female.
Whatever your views on transgender athletes and sports, it is important to see the bigger picture here: These bans are about far more than athletics. In this moment, a campaign against transgender people in the United States has produced hundreds of anti-transgender laws and policies across the nation. These measures aim to restrict transgender people in nearly every corner of civic life, including restrooms, passports, drivers’ licenses, military service and school activities.
Taken together, these laws convey that transgender people are a threat to public safety, education and national security — and that government must act to contain them.
This is what legal scapegoating looks like. These kinds of laws divert public attention away from real problems, like the persistent underfunding of girls’ and women’s school sports and pervasiveness of sexual abuse in sports, by directing fear and anger toward a minority group and then deploying that fear and anger to justify more restrictions. To focus on athletics in a vacuum is to miss this emotional bait-and-switch.
Had the Supreme Court taken off its blinders when reviewing the athletics bans, it would have seen that the bans did not stand alone. Each was part of a bundle of recent restrictions on transgender people in Idaho and West Virginia covering areas as diverse as identity documents, healthcare, restrooms, prisons, shelters and more. In the 2026 legislative session alone, West Virginia had 39 proposed or enacted restrictions on transgender people and Idaho had 11, including one of the most criminally punitive restroom laws in the nation.
With that context, the court could have taken seriously the argument that these laws, which say they are about fairness and safety, may be more about manipulating distress and targeting transgender students for exclusion altogether.
This playbook takes its lessons from neuroscience 101. When we feel threatened, our brains seize on information that confirms the threat and dismiss facts that challenge it.
In normal times, governments pass laws to solve real problems. But the blizzard of restrictions on transgender people is not normal and does not solve real problems. Instead, these measures come largely from the same networks that sought to overturn Roe v. Wade and depend on distorted stories of isolated athletic successes, mischaracterized incidents and manufactured outrage like President Donald Trump’s false claim that kids were undergoing transition surgery at school. The result is an engineered sense of national crisis that demands our attention and our lawmakers’ action.
This playbook takes its lessons from neuroscience 101. When we feel threatened, our brains seize on information that confirms the threat and dismiss facts that challenge it. By stoking fears of unfair and dangerous athletic competitions, sexual violence in restrooms and other wide-ranging perils, this is precisely what restrictions on transgender people achieve.
Through law after law targeting transgender people, these threats repeat themselves. Their sheer volume amplifies our distress and distracts us from how government resources are being used.
This explains why restroom bans keep coming when no credible evidence shows transgender women are likely to endanger other women in restrooms. And why, when the head of the National Collegiate Athletic Association told Congress in 2024 that “less than ten” of 510,000 NCAA college athletes were transgender, claims that transgender women were taking over women’s sports kept coming — and so did the bans, adding up to 27 states in all, plus a categorical ban from the NCAA after Trump took office.
But if the point of the athletics bans, in particular, is to ensure fair competition and protection from sports-related injuries, questions do arise. Does banning transgender seventh graders from no-cut teams and transgender college students from intramurals really serve the goal of fair competition? Is excluding transgender girls and women who have never gone through male puberty really protecting other female student-athletes from sports-related injuries?
Promoters of athletic bans don’t want us to ask these questions because that would mean seeing transgender students as individual human beings rather than a looming threat and returning from the extremes to a nuanced conversation about when and how transgender students can participate fairly with their peers. With its newest ruling upholding the categorical bans, the Supreme Court majority obliged them.
This, again, is how scapegoating does its work — by leading us to accept the demonization of others, including laws and policies that seek to write people out of existence.
Recognizing that lawmakers are scapegoating transgender people does not mean that everyone has to love or even like transgender people or share the same views about which athletics rules make the most sense. But it does mean that when we see a mass of laws targeting the same group, we should pause and ask what’s really going on.
It may be still tempting to see anti-transgender restrictions as a niche issue, distant from unfair elections, media repression and other dangers to American democracy. But the use of law to target any group counts among those fundamental threats, whether it is transgender people, immigrants or the president’s opponents. It poses risks to us as individuals and it degrades us as a nation.
To paraphrase an old but still-relevant warning, if we allow our government to declare a group of people dangerous because of who they are, there may be no protection left when the government turns its legal venom toward the rest of us.
The post The Supreme Court’s ruling on trans athletes is legal scapegoating appeared first on MS NOW.
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