This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 8 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
It felt impossible this election season to watch a single NFL game without seeing a barrage of ads about the “scourge” of trans people and their alleged domination of American culture thanks to Kamala Harris.
Republican moral panic has given most Americans a wildly incorrect notion of the scale of the trans rights movement.
Republicans have now run multiple campaigns playing up fears of trans women playing sports and trans youth seeking medical care or simply seeking to use a public restroom in privacy and dignity.
Given how much emphasis has been put on this, I think it is worth asking: What is the scale of the issue we are talking about? And why are we talking about it?
Well, Republicans certainly don’t have an answer to that first question. Take West Virginia’s governor and soon-to-be-senator, Jim Justice. In 2021, he signed a statewide ban on trans students in school sports.
At the time, my colleague Stephanie Ruhle asked Justice if he could name one example of a transgender child trying to gain an unfair competitive advantage at a school in his state. “No, I can’t really tell you one,” Justice replied.
This Republican moral panic has given most Americans a wildly incorrect notion of the scale of the trans rights movement. In 2022, YouGov polled a thousand Americans and found they tend to vastly overestimate the size of minority groups, including the proportion of people who are transgender. Respondents to the poll guessed more than a fifth of the country was trans. The true estimate is just 0.6 %, according to YouGov.
Another idea you may hear from this movement is that transgender athletes are taking over women’s sports. That’s an abject lie, as the head of the NCAA told the Senate last month.
Charlie Baker told the panel that out of the 510,000 athletes in the United States in NCAA schools, there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes he is aware of who currently compete in college sports. In other words, less than 0.002% of college athletes are trans.
Here is what is true: There are far, far fewer transgender Americans than the far right wants you to think there are. You may have also heard that thousands of American children are being brainwashed and altered with puberty blockers. However, according to research that looked at more than 5 million health insurance claims by adolescents, “[T]here were less than 1,000 [youth] that accessed puberty blockers and less than 2,000 that ever had access to hormones.” In other words, less than 0.1% of teenagers in the United States with private insurance are transgender and receive gender-related medicines. Here is what is true: There are far, far fewer transgender Americans than the far right wants you to think there are. They do that because they need the fuel of real, actual human beings to be fed into the engine of their cynical culture wars. The more Republicans obscure that truth, the more damage they do to a deeper truth: No matter their numbers, every transgender person is as worthy as anyone else of dignity and respect and equal rights under law. Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
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