Kendall Kotzmacher lost a softball semifinal in the Minnesota state tournament, and she is still angry about it. I can hear that in every line she has written. The noise in the dugout, the arms around her sister, the sense that everything she had worked for was finally within reach, and then it wasn't. That is a real story, and the hurt in it is real. I am not going to dismiss it.

But I am going to push back on what she does with it.

A loss is not a policy argument

The leap Kotzmacher makes is enormous, and it happens so fast you might miss it. She loses a game. She is upset. She concludes that the policy which allowed a transgender athlete to compete was wrong, that every team in that bracket lost something they had earned, and that Colorado voters should now pass Proposition 134 to ban trans girls from girls' sport across the state. One difficult afternoon, stretched into a statewide ballot initiative affecting every trans young person in Colorado sport.

She uses the pitcher's position beautifully to make her case. Catchers know pitchers, she says. A great pitcher controls a game in a way no other player does. One spot on the roster is not one spot on the roster: it is every at-bat, every count, every out. That is an elegant argument. It is also, as a claim about fairness, completely circular. She is saying that because the trans athlete was good enough to dominate, including them was unfair. But elite pitching in a state tournament semifinal is exactly what elite pitching looks like. If a cisgender girl had pitched every inning and beaten her team the same way, there would be no op-ed, no ballot initiative, no quiet loneliness she describes when people stopped standing beside her. The objection is not to the dominance. It is to who was dominant.

What the science actually says

The question of whether trans athletes hold a structural competitive advantage is a live and genuinely complex one, and that complexity deserves acknowledgement rather than flattening. What the research does not support is the clean, common-sense picture this piece paints: that a trans girl is simply a boy competing against girls, and the outcome is therefore predetermined.

Advantage in sport depends on the event, the individual, how long someone has been on hormones, whether they went through a male puberty, and at what age. A trans girl who has been on puberty blockers since early adolescence and gone through an oestrogen puberty alongside her peers does not carry the physiological profile this argument assumes. The phrase "a male competing against us" is doing a lot of work here, and it is not work the evidence fully supports. Major sporting bodies are working through exactly this nuance. The answer they are reaching for is not blanket inclusion or blanket exclusion: it is case-by-case assessment of actual physiological factors relevant to the specific sport.

Proposition 134 does not do that. It does not assess. It excludes. Every trans girl, regardless of her individual circumstances, regardless of what her puberty looked like, regardless of how long she has lived as herself. That is not a precision instrument for protecting fairness. It is a ban.

Title IX and who it was for

Kotzmacher invokes Title IX movingly, and she is right that it changed women's sport in ways her grandmother's generation fought hard for. Title IX exists because girls were being excluded from opportunities they deserved. She should consider that for a moment before using it to argue for excluding someone else.

Trans girls are girls. That is not a slogan; it is the position of every major medical and psychological organisation that has examined the evidence. When we talk about protecting girls' sport, the question has to include all girls, not just the ones whose girlhood was never questioned. A policy that excludes trans girls from sport is not protecting Title IX's legacy; it is repeating the logic Title IX was written to overturn, applied to a different group.

The loneliness she describes

There is one part of this piece I want to take seriously on its own terms. Kotzmacher writes about how lonely it was when she started speaking up, how people she expected to stand with her went quiet, how she began to wonder if she was the only one who believed in reality. That is a hard thing to feel, and I do not doubt that she felt it.

But I want her to consider, for a moment, what a trans girl in her school or on her team or in her state might also have felt. The same isolation. The same wondering whether anyone would stand with her. The same sense of being told that the way she understands herself is not real. Kotzmacher has a platform, a ballot initiative, a college softball career, and a Denver Post op-ed to make her case. The trans girls Proposition 134 would affect have rather less.

What is actually at stake in Colorado

Kotzmacher ends by saying this is bigger than Colorado's borders, that approving Proposition 134 would show every state still on the sidelines that exclusion is a common-sense idea that voters will back. She is right that this is bigger than Colorado, and that is exactly what concerns me. A yes vote here does not return the ball to the girls of Colorado; it tells trans girls across America that the democratic process can be used to erase them from public life one ballot at a time, starting with the sports field.

One semifinal loss, however painful, is not the right foundation for that.

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 advocate for trans rights and gender diversity.