Frames & Fractures: the 0.002% Controversy
A debate about transgender athletes, and media strategies over athletic realities
In early February 2025, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports", effectively banning transgender women from participating in female's sports at federally funded institutions. The directive mandates that athletes compete according to their sex assigned at birth, threatening to withhold federal funding from schools that do not comply.
This has ignited a complex debate that intertwines politics, media narratives, and the fundamental values of sports. While the political implications are significant, I rather want to dig a bit deeper into how this decision reflects on the sport discourse, the role of media in shaping public perception, and the broader impact on the humans within.
A disproportionate Focus
Before sliding into the rhetoric, let’s establish some context. One of the most overlooked aspects of this debate is scale. Transgender athletes constitute a minuscule fraction of the athletic community. According to NCAA President Charlie Baker, fewer than ten transgender student-athletes are among the over 530,000 NCAA competitors, representing less than 0.002% of the total athlete population. Despite these negligible numbers, the topic has been thrust into the national spotlight, portrayed by some as a pressing crisis threatening the integrity of women's sports. This amplification often employs emotionally charged language, selective anecdotes, and strategic imagery, potentially aiming to divide rather than inform.
So, What’s Happening Here? How Big Is This “Issue,” Really?
To grasp the scale of this issue, it's essential to consider the actual numbers. In addition to the NCAA data, estimates suggest that fewer than 160 out of approximately 8 million US high school student-athletes nationwide are transgender. Even in professional sports, the number of openly transgender athletes remains exceedingly low.
Lately, portrayal of this topic in media contrasts sharply with such data, highlighting a discrepancy between perception and reality. The focus on this rare occurrence raises questions about the underlying motivations for such heightened attention. This disparity suggests that the debate may be less about the actual impact of transgender athletes in sports and more about leveraging the topic to bring attention on the underlying ideology behind it. The timing and intensity of this focus pushes us to analyze more deeply the broader agendas at play.
What’s missing in the surface-level headlines we are confronted with is the acknowledgement that this is an issue of rarity, not of widespread impact.
Even more importantly, what's lost in these narratives is the humanity behind the numbers—the deeply personal journeys, aspirations, and struggles of transgender athletes whose stories are being drowned out by political noise.
But let’s unpack it, how has this come to life in media?
The Media Playbook: How Narratives Are Built
It’s not just about what is being said, but how it’s being presented. The White House’s announcement of the ban wasn’t drafted as a common policy statement; it was far more performative than that. Several posts on the social media channels featuring photos and testimonies from female athletes, designed to evoke anger about the unfairness of such matter to date.
Real women, supposedly harmed by the presence of a transgender competitor.
This is a fairly classic political storytelling— built around individualizing an issue to make it feel personal, urgent, and emotionally charged.
How the Media Shapes Perception
Typography and Color Choices: Engineering a Crisis Narrative
Typography and color are far from neutral design elements; they shape how we feel about information before we even process it. The White House announcement of the transgender athlete ban used a classic crisis communication playbook:
Bold, capitalized headlines create a sense of immediacy, signaling urgency and high-stakes decision-making. This technique is historically used for emergency broadcasts, just to mention an example.
Red highlights, commonly associated with danger, alarm, or critical action, were prominently used. This evokes a subconscious association with an existential threat—something that must be addressed immediately as it touches all of us.
Strategic phrasing of subheadings to reinforce victimhood and danger. Terms like "saving women's sports" or "protecting fairness" prime the audience to believe something is under siege, requiring immediate intervention.
These tactics aren’t unique to this issue; they’ve been used across various political and marketing campaigns to create a psychological response that leans toward action—often before facts are even considered.
Imagery Selection: The Power of Visual Storytelling
Humans process images & videos faster and more emotionally than text, which is why strategic imagery is one of the most powerful tools in shaping perception. In coverage of this ban, the visual narrative has been meticulously curated:
Photos and short cuts of ‘defeated’ female athletes juxtaposed with transgender competitors. This constructs an immediate story of unfairness, regardless of whether the specific event depicted had any significant impact on competitive outcomes. The audience is led to a conclusion without needing statistical evidence.
Close-ups of disappointed or frustrated expressions on female athletes' faces subtly reinforce the idea of harm being done. This is a common tactic in political storytelling—focusing on the individual victim rather than broad statistical realities.
Minimal use of actual competition footage. Rather than showing nuanced, real-world examples of transgender athletes competing (where outcomes vary widely), carefully selected still images strip away context and leave room for interpretation skewed toward the intended message.
This visual engineering aligns with historical propaganda strategies where selective imagery drives emotional responses before logical reasoning can take place.
Language Framing: The Power of Word Choices
Words don’t describe reality; they shape it. The linguistic battle over this issue is deliberate, with different groups framing the same policy in dramatically different ways:
Pro-ban messaging: phrases like "the war on women’s sport", "keeping man out of women’s sports", and "restoring integrity" position the policy as necessary and righteous, subtly implying that transgender inclusion is an inherent threat.
Pro-trans inclusion messaging (or lack there of): imagine how the opposite framing would look like —"banning transgender athletes", "excluding athletes based on identity", or "violating human rights to compete". It would inevitably shift the focus from the fairness to female athletes to the implications towards transgender ones.
Strategic avoidance of neutral descriptors. Instead of stating something like "policy adjustments around eligibility" —which is how similar issues are discussed in other sporting rules— the messaging has leaned on battlefield rhetoric—words like "fight," "war," and "erasure of women’s rights", reinforcing conflict-driven engagement.
This isn’t accidental—it’s a proven media tactic. Research in political communication shows that framing effects can dramatically change public opinion, even when discussing the exact same facts. By controlling the terminology, one side of a debate can dictate how the conversation unfolds.
Symbolic Optics: Trump Signing the Order in a Room Full of Young Girls
Perhaps the most telling visual strategy wasn’t in the media coverage about the ban, but in the setting of its announcement. Trump signed the executive order surrounded by a group of young female athletes, or perhaps just kids—a deliberate, highly orchestrated image. What does this communicate?
It visually establishes "who" is being protected. By centering young girls in the imagery, the policy is positioned as an act of defense rather than exclusion. It reinforces the emotional appeal that this decision is for someone rather than against someone.
It weaponizes innocence. Children evoke purity, vulnerability, and the need for protection. By making them the symbolic centerpiece, it forces opponents of the policy to argue against a deeply sympathetic image—one that immediately tugs at parental instincts.
It bypasses nuance. The presence of children makes it difficult to have a rational, numbers-based conversation about athletic policy, because it shifts the debate from one of facts to one of morality. The message isn’t per se built around sports—it’s about identity and cultural preservation.
Again… with the risk of stating just the obvious, I’m trying here to put emphasis on the fact that these are tools designed to steer public perception in a calculated direction, ensuring that even before someone hears the full debate, they’ve already felt what they’re supposed to believe.
The Science behind it: What Does Research Actually Say?
Beyond politics and media framing, there’s an empirical question at the heart of this debate: do transgender athletes hold an unfair advantage? The answer isn’t as clear-cut as either side might want to believe. The scientific community presents nuanced perspectives on this issue, reflecting the complexity inherent in balancing fairness and inclusion.
Arguments for the Ban
Some researchers and athletic organizations argue that physiological advantages acquired during male puberty—such as increased bone density, muscle mass, and lung capacity—may not be fully mitigated by hormone therapy. Key findings supporting this perspective include:
Muscle Mass and Strength Retention: A systematic review indicated that while gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) in transgender women leads to decreases in muscle mass and strength, these reductions are modest. Even after 36 months of hormone therapy, transgender women may retain strength advantages over cisgender women.
Endurance Performance: A study examining athletic performance found that, prior to hormone therapy, transgender women performed 31% more push-ups and ran 1.5 miles 21% faster than cisgender women. After two years of hormone therapy, differences in muscle strength exercises dissipated; however, transgender women still ran 12% faster than their cisgender counterparts.
Arguments Against the Ban
Conversely, other studies and policies emphasize that athletic performance is multifaceted, influenced by factors beyond physiological attributes. Points supporting this view include:
Impact of Hormone Therapy on Performance: Research involving transgender women undergoing GAHT showed significant reductions in hemoglobin levels, muscle mass, and strength within the first year of treatment. These changes align more closely with typical female physiological ranges, suggesting a decrease in advantages previously held.
Policy Guidelines by Sports Organizations: The NCAA and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have implemented policies that set specific testosterone level requirements for transgender women athletes. For instance, the NCAA requires documented testosterone levels at the start of the season, six months after, and four weeks before championship selections, aiming to ensure fair competition.
Comprehensive Factors in Athletic Performance: Experts argue that attributes such as skill, training, strategy, and mental resilience play crucial roles in athletic success. Focusing solely on physiological factors may oversimplify the determinants of performance.
The Takeaway
The scientific discourse reveals that there is no definitive, one-size-fits-all answer to whether transgender women maintain unfair athletic advantages post-transition. While certain physiological aspects may persist, the extent to which they impact competitive fairness remains a subject of ongoing research and debate. This complexity underscores the importance of nuanced discussions and policies that consider both empirical evidence and the values of inclusion and fairness in sports.
Beyond statistics, physiology, and debates about competitive advantage, there's another crucial dimension often sidelined: the human experience. Athletes aren't just data points on a performance chart; they’re individuals navigating deeply personal journeys, often marked by immense challenges and courage. When discussions around fairness in sport are reduced solely to physiological metrics, we risk losing sight of sport’s deeper purpose—to celebrate perseverance, empathy, and the pursuit of excellence. Meaningful conversations about inclusion and fairness require us to acknowledge not just bodies, but the stories, aspirations, and dignity of the athletes themselves.
Occam’s Razor: Simplifying the Complex
When faced with a convoluted debate like this, the Occam’s Razor is in my opinion a reductive yet useful tool—as it suggests that the simplest explanation is often the correct one. So, let’s apply it here.
We’ve examined the numbers: transgender athletes represent an exceedingly small fraction of competitors. We've explored the science and the human within: while physiological differences may exist, they are neither universally definitive nor easily reducible to a single advantage or disadvantage. And we've dissected the media strategy: the selective imagery, the linguistic framing, and the deliberate emotional cues designed to stoke outrage rather than foster informed discussion.
So, when we strip away the layers of political posturing, media sensationalism, and societal fears, we’re left with a fundamental question: why has the participation of a fraction of a fraction of athletes become a national topic?
The simplest answer? Because it was never really about sports at all.
This issue has been strategically elevated—not because of its impact on competition, but because of its utility in the broader cultural debate. It’s a wedge, carefully placed to rally certain voter bases, manufacture outrage, and keep the conversation locked in binary terms that resist nuances. The debate is not fundamentally about fairness in athletics; it’s about control, division, and leveraging identity politics as a political instrument.
And perhaps the most telling part? While policies like these are framed as safeguarding women’s sports, they rarely come with broader commitments to gender equity—no significant increases in funding, no enhanced protections for female athletes, no efforts to rectify longstanding disparities in sponsorship, media coverage, or pay. The selective urgency itself reveals the play.
As we reflected on in my previous article on Game Theory — once you recognize the game, you don’t have to play along.
The conceptual artwork "One and Three Chairs" by Joseph Kosuth presents a single chair in three forms: an actual chair, a photograph of the chair, and a printed definition of the word "chair." Through such stark simplicity, Kosuth provocatively explores the difference between reality, depiction and perception. It challenges us to consider how reality can be simplified, and sometimes perhaps distorted, through different forms of representing it.
I like to think about a connection between Kosuth's artwork and the debate about transgender athletes. Claiming authenticity and fairness, yet overly simplifying it neglecting the nuanced truths beneath. I believe we should question which "chair"—or which version of the truth—we are being presented with and why.
Sport as a Uniting Force, Not a Divisive One
Throughout history, sport has acted as a powerful emotional canvas—capable of amplifying collective pride and identity. From Jesse Owens challenging racial ideologies at the 1936 Olympics to South Sudan’s basketball team (I wrote about that here…) symbolizing national resilience, sport has consistently been at the intersection of culture, identity, and – yes – also politics.
Today, with this debate around transgender athletes, we stand at an unsettling juncture, witnessing sport transformed into a stage for political and ideological maneuvering. This calculated media emphasis on transgender athletes reveals more about the nature of modern media strategy and political discourse than about any authentic crisis in sports.
Instead of advocating a genuine discussion, this issue has been deliberately magnified to stir controversy, provoke outrage, and mobilize particular demographics. The human beings at the heart of this debate—those who compete, strive, and navigate their identities publicly—are overshadowed, their experiences weaponized to serve agendas that reach far beyond athletic fairness.
So, how do we responsibly engage in this charged environment?
Question the Framing. Headlines, imagery, and rhetoric shape perception before facts can even be considered. When confronted by provocative stories, pause to question the intent: What emotional responses are being engineered, and why?
Recognize selective attention. Why does an issue affecting fewer than 0.5% of athletes receive disproportionately extensive media coverage? Always question what might be overlooked—systemic gender inequities, financial disparities, or genuine threats to athletic integrity—that are ignored in favor of sensationalized controversies.
Prioritize critical engagement. Emotional reactions drive clicks but cloud judgment. Choosing to engage critically rather than emotionally dismantles the potency of division, allowing genuine, evidence-based conversations about inclusion, fairness, and athletic integrity.
Ultimately, the prominence of this debate has less to do with a true concern for sport or fairness, and more with sport’s exposure as a stage for broader agendas. Rather than becoming passive recipients of manufactured outrage, we can consciously challenge narratives designed not to enlighten, but to divide.
The next time headlines flare and emotions surge, pause and reflect:
Whose narrative are you consuming—and what are they hoping you'll miss?