Is It Conservative Media's Fault that Trans Sports Became an Losing Issue for the Left?

This idea, especially as it relates to the whole issue of trans participation in sports, was rather quickly ridiculed by a number of people.

David Roberts is adamant that the only reason the issue of transgender girls playing in girls’ sports has any salience with the public is because right-wing media manufactured a moral panic about this. In Roberts’ view, no one became concerned about this issue organically. pic.twitter.com/gtR4gZIDQG

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) March 18, 2026

According to a 2023 HRC survey report, 19 percent of transgender and “gender expansive” youth played sports. While this rate is disproportionately low, the Williams Institute estimates based on a federal survey conducted that same year that some 724,000, or 3.3 percent, of 13 to…

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) March 18, 2026

According to a 2023 HRC survey report, 19 percent of transgender and “gender expansive” youth played sports. While this rate is disproportionately low, the Williams Institute estimates based on a federal survey conducted that same year that some 724,000, or 3.3 percent, of 13 to 17 year olds identify as transgender. This suggests that perhaps 135,000 such middle and high-school students engaged in athletics at that time. An estimated 8.3 million high schoolers participate in sports according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. Comparable figures for middle school sports participation are less clear.

That prompted an interesting thread by a lawyer named Dilan Esper:

I just wonder if Roberts has any kids or even likes sports.

Look-- right wing strategy is clearly PART of this. Like any movement, they looked for areas where their position had support, and sports was one of them. But that support was preexisting, from parents and sports fans. https://t.co/tHDneVMTlO

— Dilan Esper (@dilanesper) March 19, 2026

This caught my attention because I'm arguably part of the right-wing media takeover that David Roberts is talking about and yet I think where this issue first really captured my attention was because I have a son who was running track. That meant that, for a few years I was attending a lot of track meets.

One thing you don't realize if you've never had a kid run track is that some of those meets go on for hours. Why? Well, various high schools in a given area form leagues and the schools within those leagues have some meets that involve two or three schools getting together for a meet where kids run every conceivable event from two-mile distance runs to 300 meter hurdles to the 100 meter dash. 

That may not sound like a lot but what you have to realize is that for every event held there are multiple races. Usually it breaks down something like this:

• Girls freshman and sophomore (froshsoph) race
• Gils JV race
• Girls Varsity race
• Boys froshsoph race
• Boys JV race
• Boys Varsity race

So for many events, like the 100 or the mile, there may actually be a minimum of 6 races but often there are more kids running than the track can accomodate at once. So they you add in multiple heats. And then it looks like this:

• Girls freshman and sophomore (froshsoph) race
  • heat 1
  • heat 2
• Gils JV race
• Girls Varsity race
  • heat 1
  • heat 2
  • heat 3
• Boys froshsoph race
  • heat 1
  • heat 2
  • heat 3
• Boys JV race
  • heat 1
  • heat 2
• Boys Varsity race
  • heat 1
  • heat 2
  • heat 3

And don't even get me started on invitationals. These are bigger events where you might have 6-10 schools all competing on the same day. But there's still only one track so you get even more heats and more time to move all the bodies around the track between heats.

All that to say, I've spent a lot of hours at track meets often because my son was running a mile and then an 800 some two hours apart. And one of the most obvious things you quickly learn watching these races is that boys and girls are vastly different. The times for any race are just not comparable. The most elite girl runners, the ones who will be invited to CIS often run at about the same pace as the boys freshmen or maybe the JV. The same is true for the field events (high-jump, long-jump, shot put, etc). You quickly realize that sex makes a huge difference in high school track events. There's no way to fudge it and pretend there's a big overlap in each category because there's not. If you wind up at one of these events for 5-6 hours, the same reality will keep hitting you in the face: girls and boys are physically different.

So when you start allowing boys to compete on the girls team as "trans girls," the difference is pretty obvious. And that's what Dilan Esper is basically saying in his thread:

At every meet you go to, the boys are literally faster than the girls and jump longer and higher and throw longer than the girls do. At any level of competition.

And the second thing is track and field has dealt with how to police sex in women's competition for 90 years.

— Dilan Esper (@dilanesper) March 19, 2026

As for Roberts' claim that this is a right-wing media invention, there's plenty of evidence that's just not true. Track and Field has been dealing with these specific issues longer than any of us have been alive.

Track and field is one of the oldest women's sports. Women's track was introduced at the 1928 Olympics. There's a handful of older women's sports (women's tennis was already contested at Wimbledon in the 19th Century!), but 1928 is long long before most sports went co-ed.

— Dilan Esper (@dilanesper) March 19, 2026

There's a long, and somewhat sordid, history of how track and field DID sex verification over the years (yes, there were genital inspections, various tests, and eventually DNA swabs). But the point is, none of this was ginned up by the American right wing for political reasons.

— Dilan Esper (@dilanesper) March 19, 2026

The backlash to men in women's sports started now with the right but with women athletes.

Indeed, some of the biggest impetus for these measures came from women athletes themselves. Most women's athletes are not Megan Rapinoe. In 1996 (again, long before any right wingers got involved), a survey of women athletes on this issue was taken at the Atlanta Olympics.

— Dilan Esper (@dilanesper) March 19, 2026

The survey showed very strong support for sex testing and exclusion.

The point is, the Right didn't concoct this issue. They tapped into a vein that has existed almost as long as there has been women's competitive athletics. It was opportunistic, but they didn't create it.

— Dilan Esper (@dilanesper) March 19, 2026

So, yes, when this started showing up suddenly in high schools across the country, many people had an immediate and strong reaction that it was unfair. Megan McArdle jumped in on this point as someone who covered Lia Thomas a few years ago. The outrage wasn't political it was organic.

My experience reporting on this--in 2022, when there was a kind of omerta on suggesting you opposed it in most mainstream institutions--was that when I told people what I was writing about, in the most neutral terms possible, I got unprompted rants from extremely liberal women. https://t.co/8QHUOCzUMX

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) March 19, 2026

I think Dave Roberts did not hear those rants, because people were extremely afraid to expose verboten views to someone who would deem them transphobic. So when the vibe shifted, it seemed astroturfed rather than authentic. But it was not only extremely authentic; it was the…

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) March 19, 2026

Lia Thomas was definitely the moment a lot of people decided this wasn't okay because the unfairness was too obvious to ignore.

This photo is said to have animated concerns about fairness in sports among a lot of normie libs. https://t.co/NV6YuDY6tO pic.twitter.com/qQ3gndOrXW

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) March 19, 2026

It's been said 1,000 times but Thomas was a middling male swimmer and then a year later switched to the women's team and became a phenom. That's exactly the dynamic I described above at every track meet I've ever attended. A decently talented freshman boy if placed in the race with the girls varsity would either win or make it close. Ignoring that obvious difference is just a level of crazy that most normal people can't accept.

What really happened here is that progressives were convinced "trans women are women" would be a winning argument in every situation. That when combined with their penchant for viciously attacking anyone who disagreed seemed to work for a while. But ultimately it became clear this was deeply unfair to girls. Plus there were other, similar issues (trans women in prisons, gender affirming care for children) where the sloganeering couldn't obscure the reality. The idea that we should all just go along with this to be nice started to crumble.

But I really do think the backlash was inevitable and organic. There are a lot of parents sitting in the stands to watch their kids run track every weekend across the entire country. You were never going to convince them this was fair. At best you were going to shame them into silence in public.