Let me ask you something before we get into the details. What does the Indiana secretary of state do? The office oversees elections. It registers businesses. It has nothing, literally nothing, to do with school sports policy. So when I read that the race for that office has erupted into a row about the state's 2022 transgender sports ban, my first reaction is not surprise. It is exhaustion. And then, almost immediately, it is anger on behalf of every trans kid in Indiana who has just watched themselves become a campaign prop for an office that cannot touch their lives.

What actually happened

Greg Ballard, the Lincoln Party candidate and former Republican mayor of Indianapolis, said on a radio show that he regarded Indiana's transgender sports ban as "unnecessary." He pointed out that in 2022 he had agreed with then-Governor Eric Holcomb's veto of the bill, on the grounds that the Indiana High School Athletic Association was already handling the issue and that there was, in his words, "no hue and cry around the state." He called that, fairly, a classically small-government Republican position.

Republican nominee Max Engling's campaign chairman, state Representative Andrew Ireland, posted to social media accusing Ballard of refusing to say "boys shouldn't compete in girls' sports" and calling it "woke nonsense." Engling appeared on the same radio show days later and said he did not need a poll to tell him "the right answer," which was, he said, that "boys should not be playing in girls' sports." He called it a commonsense question.

Ballard hit back, clarifying that he agreed boys do not belong in girls' sports, and described the whole thing as a "purity test" designed to distract voters from the fact that neither major party is addressing what people in Indiana actually care about.

And Democrat Beau Bayh? He told the Indiana Capital Chronicle he supports the ban, called the row a "nonissue," and then, in almost the same breath, said that no one should be discriminated against based on who they are, including transgender people. He named housing, voting, and jobs. He did not name sport. He seemed not to notice the tension.

The children the law affects are barely in this story

Read the original article and you will find that not one trans young person is quoted, named, or even gestured towards as a human being with something at stake. The law banning them from school sports is discussed entirely as a political object: something to attack someone with, something to defend yourself against, something to call a distraction. The actual effect of the law on actual children is mentioned in passing, if at all.

This is the thing I want to say plainly. When a law is passed that removes trans girls from the sports teams they belong to, that is not an abstraction. It is a real child who trains, who wants to compete, who has friends on a team, who is told she does not belong there. The law does not protect anyone. There was, as Ballard himself noted, no crisis in Indiana school sports that required legislative intervention. The Indiana High School Athletic Association was managing it. The "hue and cry" was manufactured, not felt.

What this row actually tells us

Politicians reach for trans people when they want to signal something about themselves without having to govern. It is cheaper than housing policy. It is simpler than infrastructure. It produces reliable heat and costs the politician nothing, because trans people, and especially trans children, have very little political power.

What is striking about this particular story is that even the candidates who are trying to moderate the temperature cannot help reproducing the harm. Ballard calls the ban unnecessary, which is accurate, and then immediately insists "boys don't belong in girls' sports," which is the same framing that makes the ban possible in the first place. Trans girls are not boys. The law treats them as if they are, and Ballard's rhetoric does the same, even while he tries to sound reasonable.

Bayh is no better. He invokes his grandfather's legacy on Title IX, a landmark law protecting women in sport, and uses it to justify a ban on trans girls. Birch Bayh's Title IX was about opening doors, and using it to close one is not a tribute to that work.

A secretary of state cannot change any of this

Whoever wins this race will have no authority over school sports policy. The ban is already law. A federal lawsuit challenging it was dismissed. The children it affects will still be excluded from their teams on the morning after election day, whoever is counting the votes.

That is the final absurdity here. Three candidates are performing their positions on trans youth for an electorate, and not one of them, if elected, will have the power to alter those young people's lives by a single day. They are arguing over a signal, not a lever.

I think about the trans girls in Indiana who might read this coverage, or whose parents might. I think about what it feels like to be the subject of a political argument between people who do not know you, have not met you, and are debating your place in a sport you love as though your existence is a question to be settled rather than a life to be lived. That is the real story here, and it deserves to be said directly: these children are not a wedge issue. They are people.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.