Outward
What the Fight Over Transgender Athletes Is Really About
So much of the “debate” over trans participation in sports is in bad faith. But a new book offers clear answers to everyone “just asking questions,” once and for all.
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Mediocre swimmer turned conservative activist Riley Gaines (who rose to fame after loudly complaining about competing against Lia Thomas, a trans athlete at the University of Pennsylvania) gave up a key page of the current anti-transgender-rights playbook in a 2025 interview with the New York Times. “The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” she said in August. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”
Indeed, in recent years, Gaines and other conservatives, with help from centrists and even some progressives, have turned gender eligibility in sports into a wedge issue designed to torpedo what modest forward momentum the movement for trans rights had gained in the past decade. The boogeyman of some hypothetical “biological male” showing up on the field to unfairly dominate, hurting cis women and taking their scholarships in the process, has proved an effective cudgel, despite the fact that there were 13 times more state anti-trans bans proposed than out trans athletes by 2025. Many trans athletes now face local, state, national, and international bans on their participation in sports, from the recreational level up through elite competitions.
In 2026, it’s fair for a well-meaning (and perhaps exhausted) trans ally to wonder how to best respond to these cynical tactics and arguments, particularly when it’s clear that the real goal is not “fairness” but rather the larger conservative project of eliminating trans people from public life. That’s exactly where the new book Fair Game: Trans Athletes and the Future of Sports comes in. Ellie Roscher, a writer and former two-sport college athlete, and Anna Baeth, the director of research at the advocacy group Athlete Ally, offer a clear-headed, easily digestible look at the escalating attacks on transgender athletes and, more usefully, how to respond productively when people trot out the most well-worn points of “debate.”
A book offering good-faith explanations to a country where most, if not all, of the people in positions of power “just asking questions” are doing so in bad faith—whether they are actually anti-trans bigots or just taking advantage of the scapegoat of the moment—might seem like a lost cause. But the average American is a different story: More than 86 percent of people surveyed couldn’t even name a single trans athlete when asked, Roscher and Baeth note. Reaching people on this issue and defanging it as such an effective political weapon, they want to believe—and I want to believe—is an attainable goal. Then, the hard work of improving women’s sports can actually begin: “A sporting culture that is safe, inclusive, and supportive of all athletes, including girls and women, is possible,” they write. “Creating smart, nuanced, and relevant policies that consider an athlete’s age, sport, and level of intensity while also creating pathways for trans athletes to play is possible.”
Fair Game is divided into four chapters, each devoted to painstakingly debunking a myth about trans-athlete participation. Trans athletes, the authors begin, are not coming in droves (plus, it’d be fine if they were). Nor are they stealing medals, doing harm, or flat-out ruining women’s sports. Each of these chapters is rich with statistics to bolster well-reasoned, logical arguments, making this a useful, enlightening read for anyone with actual good-faith questions about where transgender athletes fit into our sporting landscape at all levels of competition.
Throughout, the writers’ tone is patient and matter of fact. Done with less care, Roscher and Baeth’s work could’ve ended up dry, but they add magnificent color throughout via interviews with 20 recreational and elite trans athletes, ranging from youth athletes to middle-aged competitors. (All 20 of the athletes featured were eligible to compete in their sports in 2023, at the time they were interviewed. Today, the authors note, that number has plummeted to five—which only underscores the dire need for such a project chronicling their experiences.)
For example, Addison, a trans woman who competes in powerlifting, gave particularly thoughtful commentary on a misunderstanding many cisgender people hold: “When people are like, ‘Oh, you were born in the wrong body,’ it’s like, ‘No, the fuck I wasn’t. Look at what this body has done for me. Look at what I can do with this body.’ … I give the middle finger to [that] narrative.” Trans bodies are powerful, just like cis bodies; trans people need not hate their bodies nor feel ashamed of them. It’s firsthand experiences like Addison’s that make the ideas behind Fair Game feel tangible, approachable, and human.
It also helps that Fair Game starts with the basics for maximum clarity, with the authors explaining concepts such as “sex assigned at birth” and how doctors and other professionals go about determining sex. “Human physiology is complex,” Baeth and Roscher point out, “and sex, according to scientists, doctors, and researchers, is better thought of as a series of spectrums, a constellation, or a mosaic” than a black-and-white binary.
But they don’t talk down to the reader or breathe life into the very myths they are debunking by caveating their arguments or conceding that transphobic politicians and advocates may actually have a point. They take people seriously who have been misled to believe cis and trans kids can’t coexist in sports fairly, without ever legitimizing the misconception itself. After all, the authors understand the deeply flawed information ecosystem laypeople have to navigate to search for meaningful, accurate answers: “Cis men, who have historically held power and positions of influence in sports, science, and medicine,” the authors point out, “are also the ones who have asked questions, created studies, published papers, written policies, designed training programs, and come to conclusions. They have been the gatekeepers of sports and nearly all sports and adjacent research.”
For the genuinely curious, Fair Game is a perfect addition to a makeshift syllabus featuring a number of other recent books about gender-nonconforming athletes and where they can fit in. Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates by Katie Barnes, released in 2023, offers a rich history of how we got to this moment in time, with some of their personal experience and thoughts as a nonbinary sportswriter weaved in. Open Play: The Case for Feminist Sport by Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford, released in 2025, is a persuasive manifesto calling for an end to sex-segregated sports (a topic Fair Game touches on as well). And for the historical perspective, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters, released in 2024, chronicles sex testing in sports through the lens of several gender-nonconforming European athletes, against the backdrop of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
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Fair Game, along with these other titles, exhibits model behavior for how to engage in informed conversations about trans athletes. The authors frequently prompt readers to discuss actual concerns regarding inequity in sports. In one case, offering readers a script of sorts, Baeth and Roscher urge: “Let’s have a conversation about redistributing money in our national sports system so that no kid has to pay to play. We should all ask more interesting questions about fairness, learn more about testosterone and competitive advantage, and work to create policies that celebrate how nuanced and complex human bodies and sports are.”
The book also features a moving foreword from Chris Mosier, a Team USA duathlete who has been competing as an out trans athlete since 2010 (which feels like a lifetime ago). “Sports organizations in 2010 didn’t have clear policies in place to support transgender athletes,” Mosier wrote. “They didn’t know what inclusion could look like. In every case, when I spoke with the leadership of the various sports organizations I was a part of and asked them how I could compete with the men, I was the first trans athlete in each situation to ask this question.”
In short, Mosier was opening up new conversations that continue more than 15 years onward, more fraught and heated than ever. It may feel overwhelming for readers newer to the topic to consider, but helpfully, Roscher and Baeth are able to streamline what we’re really fighting about when we fight about including trans people—especially trans children—in sports: “What are we teaching our kids?” they ask. “How we stand up for them—or fail to—in this moment will define us.”
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