Conservative donors have spent at least $65 million on anti-trans advertising in the 2024 election cycle, according to the New York Times (see story here).
They’re spending this money to elect Republican candidates, of course, but let’s pretend it’s being spent to keep trans athletes out of sports.
To figure out how much they’re spending per trans athlete, you need to know how many trans athletes there are. A firm number is impossible to come by, due to privacy laws, so we have to work with estimates.
As of April 2023, a researcher estimated there were fewer than 100 trans athletes competing in public school sports (see story here). In 2022 this source put the number of college-level trans athletes (trans male and trans female) over the last decade at three dozen, which translates to about 12 at any given time.
Let’s call it 110, mostly in high school sports. Republicans want to kick them out of sports. To elect politicians who will pursue policies to do that, their donors are spending, on average, $591,000 per trans athlete, most of them high school kids. This is very rough back-of-envelope figuring, of course, but it does illustrate the trans athlete issue has been blow way out of proportion.
Like Haitian workers eating pets. So far, no pets have been eaten. One cat went missing, but was found by its owner, alive, in her basement. But if a storyline gives Republicans a campaign issue that resonates with voters, they’ll run with it. Same with the trans-athlete bogeyman.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we have two political parties to choose from, competing against each other on issues that actually matter to us? I guess we can dream, can’t we? And yes, some people have more money than they know what to constructively do with.