Yesterday, our president signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. The systemic harm we need to brace ourselves for as a country is significant. The desire to dismantle the Department of Education isn’t innovative and has been a goal of the republican party since 1980, although the origins of the DOE began in 1867. The DOE has been responsible for feeding and providing services for our most vulnerable groups, particularly Black, Brown, disabled and special needs groups, for the past century. This is contrary to the holistic outcome of our current administration efforts to deny vulnerable communities subsidies that quite literally keep them alive and in order to win an election, our administration knew they could not overtly attack any one of those disproportionately marginalized communities, so a different enemy had to be targeted to win the culture war, and that put transgender men and women at the top of the discriminatory list. 

Our administration has spent the past eight years spreading misinformation and false data points about this oppressed sub-population to win this past election. I recall a previous republican backed local school board member in my community mentioning something to the effect that transgender women are absorbing “1,000’s” of cisgender female scholarships to play sports. But this isn’t the only argument, she also is making a claim that cisgender women are at risk of transgender women harassing them in public or school bathrooms.

I decided to do a little fact checking on this information to understand the republican’s true intention and outcomes. I’ve been watching disgruntled cisgender athletes and parents of not only college girls, but child athletes, voice their concerns all over social media. And living as a sexual abuse and assault survivor, and a mother of daughters, I equally do not want to risk losing my dignity once again by perpetrators (specifically, in the bathroom).

First, I will address the bathroom claim. While there is *no* empirical evidence to indicate that transgender people pose any kind of systemic threat to cisgender people in public bathrooms, the reverse is not true. That is to say, transgender people are routinely harassed and even assaulted by cis people in such settings. Here are a few studies that address this phenomenon:

Jody L. Herman, “Gendered restrooms and minority stress: The public regulation of gender and its impact on transgender people’s lives,” Journal of Public Management & Social Policy 19, no. 1 (2013), 65–80.

Sandy James, Jody Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet, and Ma’ayan Anafi, The report of the 2015 US transgender survey, (Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality, 2016).

Gabriel R. Murchison, Madina Agénor, Sari L. Reisner, and Ryan J. Watson, “School restroom and locker room restrictions and sexual assault risk among transgender youth,” Pediatrics 143, no. 6 (2019), e20182902.

In summary, there has been no systemic sexual harassment evidence from transgender individuals out of 258.3 million adults (US Census Bureau, 2021), 167.5 million are women, 74% of which use public restrooms. On the contrary, many cisgender women are sexually assaulted by cisgender hetero men in their lifetime. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center states that one in five women experience completed or attempted rape in their lifetime. And, one in three female victims of completed or attempted rape experienced it for the first time between the ages of 11 and 17. Statistically speaking, 20% of women, and 33% of teens experiencing sexual assault from that original population, is significant.

I’m not at all marginalizing any unpleasant experience in a bathroom, however there is no evidence to validate the significant concern with transgender women, particularly with the overwhelming articles that inundate my feeds by conservative leaders and lawmakers. In fact, harassment in restrooms is so insignificant in general, it was almost impossible to find a study backing systemic evidence of harassment regardless of gender orientation. I did find a few studies consolidated into one report here. 

With this evidence, it suggests that about 0.000003% of women who have been assaulted in a bathroom by men in the past 10-15 years, verses 1/3 of teens getting sexually assaulted and raped, unrelated to transgender bathroom assault, out of the general population of the sexual assault victims. Perhaps that number would be a little higher if we considered harassment over the course of history that women have used public restrooms, however, still does not compare to the systemic harm cisgender men have had on cisgender women. Such a low number of bathroom harassment instances with an overall high number of assault cases is an indicator that a sexual predator is not interested in using a bathroom to attack their victims.

After reviewing this information, I thought that I was clearly missing something within the transgender discussion given the amount of money, time and effort that is leveraged in this cultural war. It MUST be in the transgender scholarship argument. So, let’s take a look..

Women were welcomed to play collegiate level sports in 1941. The first openly transgender athlete to compete in college sports was 1975. A tennis player by the name of Renee Richards underwent gender reassignment and started playing in the women’s tournament a year later.

Before I go any further, it was tough to find exact numbers for this piece of my meta analysis, however, I decided to take the data I did find and give significantly low estimates to appease my antagonists.

Since the first transgender athlete to be recorded was 1975, I found estimates of all female college athletes since that year. I looked up numbers for every year to find the sum. Some I did not have solid numbers for; however, I would take the number from the previous year and estimate lower so not to sensationalize my findings or significantly change the confidence interval. 

I came up with 6,500,000-ish female college athletes since 1975. For my sports scientists, yes, this is grossly low, however, once again, I’d rather be conservative.

Since 1975, there have been 30 transgender athletes that have competed in college level sports. I didn’t take the time to determine if they were men or women transgender athletes as the number was so low. For the sake of skewing the study in favor of the anti-trans advocates, I’ll assume that all 30 were transgender women in the past 48 years that potentially absorbed monetary funds and opportunity to play college level sports.

Concluding this portion of the analysis, according to this data, a woman has 0.000462% chance (actually lower, if you divide the trans men and women athletes) of losing a scholarship to play collegiate level sports to a transgender woman.

After going over this data that seemed so insignificant, I decided to look up a few other statistics to compare that I knew would perhaps impact a larger audience.

I figured out I could get pregnant with triplets 217 times before I would lose a college scholarship to a trans woman.

I am two times as likely to die by a firework than lose a scholarship to a trans woman.

I could die in a car accident 1,473 times and die three times over from a bee sting than lose a scholarship to a transgender woman.

And there is a higher risk of me dying of an ectopic pregnancy than losing a scholarship to a trans woman, however, that conversation is for a different day.

In addition, off the top of my head, I also know that almost HALF of the children in the city I live are struggling with poverty and are eating free and reduced lunches in elementary schools. My city has a one-star rating (out of five) for graduation rates. Not to mention I’ve already shared that one in five women are sexually assaulted in their lifetime and 33% of those are teens.

To state the data one more time that 0.000003% of women who have been assaulted in a bathroom in the past 15 years and a woman has 0.000462% chance of losing a scholarship to a transgender woman since 1975. These are estimates. You could give or take away a zero.

All of this data had me scratching my head. There are political and religious leaders that won an election by leveraging this argument, so much so, in the president’s inaugural speech, he made the statement that only acknowledging two genders would now be the law of the land. They are dehumanizing and demoralizing this entire (tiny) population of people and threatening law changes for something so insignificant it is challenging to find concrete data to validate. In fact, many grossly underfunded red states are willing to forgo public education subsidies, and risk law enforcement auditing their daughters gentiles so that they don’t risk that 0.000003% chance for harassment in a bathroom. 

Why? 

1954 brought the integration of the public school system and with it brought very disgruntled White Americans. The response there after resulted in the development of private schools, or segregation academies. By 1970, over three hundred segregation academies were created with some 500,000 White students attending. With declining White enrollments in public schools, many schools were forced to discontinue extracurricular activities and enrichment. In addition, their schools declined with an inadequate teacher-to-student ratio and overcrowding became an issue. In many instances, schools were forced to close together due to a lack of funding.

 It was not until the Runyon v. McCrary case in 1976 that the McCrary and Gonzalez families sued Bobbe’s school and Fairfax Brewster School, White-only private schools, for discrimination based on race. The Supreme Court Ruled in their favor and private schools were forced to integrate children of color thereafter or lose tax-exempt status. This, however, did not come without its own set of challenges for families of color not only finding transportation to private schools but affording the many other amenities within private schools as well as maintaining the same academic requirements with limited resources available.

What on earth does this have to do with transgender rights?

Once this technicality was exposed in the 1970’s, evangelical leader Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University and Lynchburg Christian Academy, and his counterpart Paul Weyrich, were desperate to continue upholding White supremacy in the U.S. and proactively sought an alternative to control the moral narrative. The White flight had been successful up until that point and the finality of segregation academies led to a modern means of its continuation through the political front. Conservative leaders intrinsically understood the lesson that Dr. Martin Luther King had imparted in an interview 11 months before his death: “Caucasians were committed to desegregation as long as it didn’t cost them anything”. Falwell realized that to successfully gain popularity from his evangelical audience as a voter base, his efforts had to be cheap and require as little effort from his conservative counterparts as possible. Therefore, after a few failed attempts to gain the attention of the masses through a few seemingly popular altruistic causes, Falwell and his counterparts found their holy grail with the abortion argument. Protestants did not have a stake in the subject of abortion one way or another at the time; however, Falwell knew the power of manipulating egoistic altruism in social groups. By pulling together a grassroots movement to circulate photographs of mutilated fetuses and misinterpreting biblical scripture, an anti-abortion movement began. The “moral majority” was born, allowing White evangelicals to continue to maintain political control without having to lift a finger in favor of marginalized or impoverished groups.

Jerry Falwell knew the importance for conservative evangelicals to maintain an image of “morality” which would continue the White flight. So, what does the White flight and Jerry Falwell have to do with the transgender argument?

In 2020, a politician named Christopher Rufo saw an opportunity to monopolize on racially motivated voters by pressing a new Critical Race Theory argument making false claims about schools’ curriculums in order to gain control of literacy. His narrative caught on and became a widespread means of the GOP attempting to dissolve the public-school sector, piece by piece, and replace it with private schools for the elite where they controlled the curriculum and racially segregated attendance.  

Unfortunately for extremist conservative leaders, those narratives were not enough to gain enough voter traction for the GOP to continue to deny state and federal money to force public schools to bleed out until they close. They needed at least one more “other” target to bring forth their harmful plan.

Conservative evangelical politicians had to find a battle to exploit that not only spoke to the conservative evangelical voter, but also the secular voter. They needed a scapegoat that would be personal, threatening and stir fear to pull them into their conservative sector to continue the White flight, allowing the White straight cisgender straight typical males to continue their power and keep their generational wealth.

Abortion was their ticket to success in the 1980’s with the boomer generation, and has continued with Gen X voters with a small trickle to the Millennial Gen, but here is a new trend of concern. The Millennials and Gen Z populations were not buying the abortion, CRT, or SEL (Social Emotional Learning) arguments. They knew it would be detrimental if the GOP did not find another target to exploit that caters to all voters, similar to creating a false abortion argument.

And instead of focusing on the data point that their daughters have a 20% getting sexually assaulted, or that half of the children are starving and living in deplorable conditions, not to mention the 355,000 children that are living in foster care, or the child trafficking that is mainstream within many private adoption agencies, they are focusing on the 0.000462% chance their family may lose money because there is a statistically insignificant possibility their daughter might not get a college sports scholarship.

Like the abortion argument, it was brilliantly executed, and it worked. We all watched people in a rage on social media posting to “Save Women’s Sports!” as if there is a true significant threat. Even if any of my numbers increase, perhaps if there was 100 trans athletes, or, if it’s 8,000,000 female athletes since 1975, it doesn’t not change the confidence interval of the argument. In other words, my argument is sound.  

Yesterday our president signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education after falsely claiming that children receive gender reassignment surgeries in public schools during his campaign. If successful, the amount of systemic harm this will create is dire for millions of children. Creating a nefarious culture war encouraged half of the country to vote against not only their best interest, but all of America. At least our daughters longer have a 0.000462% chance of losing a sports scholarship to a trans athlete. I hope the sacrifice of our country was worth it.