Laws claiming to protect girls from trans athletes do the opposite: they subject all girls to invasive inspections, push marginalised girls out of sport, and distract from the real threats to women's rights. Megan Rapinoe makes this case in Marie Claire, and she is right. The girls these laws claim to protect are the first ones they hurt.

The phone call that says everything

Rapinoe opens her essay with a detail that has stayed with me. She was packing for a World Cup commercial shoot when her agent called: the brand was pulling her from the spot. Not because she had done anything wrong. Because she had spoken in support of trans rights, and the company's new AI software had flagged her as a reputational risk.

Think about what that means. A two-time World Cup champion, an Olympic gold medallist, one of the most recognised athletes her sport has ever produced, made professionally radioactive not by scandal but by compassion. The fear campaign being run by anti-inclusion politicians has become so effective that brands without moral clarity are now running from the mere association with trans people. That is not a side effect of this legislation. That is the atmosphere it is designed to create.

The con at the centre of it

Here is the specific con Rapinoe names, and it deserves naming precisely. Across the United States, bills targeting trans girls in sport have been introduced under a banner that reads "protect women and girls." At the same time, reproductive rights have been stripped away and women have been left to bleed out in hospital car parks after being denied emergency care. The people waving the "protect girls" banner are often the same people who voted for those outcomes.

The protection being offered is not protection; it is control. And the spaces being policed are, as Rapinoe puts it, precisely the spaces that leave girls and women feeling empowered. That is not coincidence.

Washington's I-638 and what "enforcement" actually looks like

In Rapinoe's home state of Washington, a ballot measure called I-638 would require all girls, but not boys, to be medically sex-certified before they can play school sports. In practice that means genital inspections, or a DNA or hormone test, as part of a routine sports physical. Doctors have said clearly that these inspections are not only medically unnecessary, they can traumatise and physically harm young girls.

Rapinoe is precise about the arithmetic here: the measure is nominally aimed at a small number of trans children in sport across the entire state. The consequence of enforcing it would be driving thousands of girls out of sport, either because their families cannot afford the tests or because they will not submit their daughters to an invasive physical examination as the price of joining a school team.

She calls that a feature, not a bug. I think she is right. If the goal were genuinely inclusion, you would not design a system whose primary measurable effect is exclusion.

I was that girl at 13

The most powerful passage in Rapinoe's essay is the one where she turns the lens on herself. She was 13 once, she writes. She didn't fit the stereotypes. Too boyish, maybe, or too fast. Under the laws now being passed, she might have been questioned, flagged, pulled out of sport before she ever had the chance to discover what she was capable of.

She won two World Cups and an Olympic gold medal. But she writes, rightly, that even if she had never become a professional athlete, her life would have been shaped by the joys and friendships and lessons that came from playing. Every girl deserves that. No girl deserves to be asked to prove, at 13, that she is the right kind of girl to be allowed to play.

Girls of colour are the first to be targeted when sports authorities start policing femininity. We can all name Black and Brown athletes who have faced harassment about how they look or how well they perform. Girls with short hair, low voices, height, strength, or any departure from someone's narrow idea of what a girl should look like: they will face new demands to prove themselves. Trans girls are the stated target, but every girl who doesn't conform is the actual one.

What protecting girls would actually look like

Rapinoe asks the question directly: if we really cared about safety and fairness in girls' sport, what would we do? We would protect girls from sexual violence and harassment. We would pay professional women athletes on the same scale as their male counterparts. We would break down the financial and structural barriers that stop girls at every level from ever getting near a team in the first place.

None of that is on the agenda of the people funding these measures. The man bankrolling I-638 is a major donor to Donald Trump with no background in women's sport. He does not speak for girls. He is not protecting them. The claim that he is should be examined rather than accepted.

The distraction is the point

Trans girls in school sport are not a policy crisis. They are a handful of children who want to play with their classmates. The manufactured emergency around them serves one purpose: it takes attention away from the grocery bills, the healthcare costs, the housing, the reproductive rights, the real and material things that are getting harder for ordinary people. Every week the conversation is about trans children is a week it isn't about any of that.

Rapinoe ends her essay with something I want to underline. Standing up for trans siblings on the field sends a message to these politicians: we reject the hate, the division, and the attempt to control our bodies. That solidarity is not a distraction from women's rights. It is an expression of them.

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 at the centre of both.