More than half of US states have now passed laws banning transgender athletes from competing on sports teams that match their gender. A Supreme Court ruling in June 2026 upheld those bans, finding that they do not violate the Constitution and, unanimously, that they do not violate Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The result is a map of exclusion that stretches across the country, and at the centre of it, mostly invisible in the political noise, are children who just want to run.

What the map actually shows

Twenty states have passed legislation banning transgender girls specifically from girls' sports teams. Seven states go further and ban all transgender athletes from competing in sports that match their gender. Idaho was the first, in 2020. More than half of the country has followed. Alaska, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin do not have state legislation but their athletic associations have adopted their own restrictions, so the practical effect is similar.

Then there is Donald Trump's executive order, signed last year, banning transgender women from competing on women's teams at schools and colleges. The NCAA, the governing body for college athletics, followed that with its own policy. So the pressure runs from the top down and from the state legislatures upward, and the person caught between them is a teenage girl who trained all summer and now cannot compete.

Here is what the map does not show you. A trans girl in one state can play. Her counterpart two hours away cannot. Both of them are equally trans and equally girls. The question this patchwork answers is not about fairness in sport. It is about which children a state has decided deserve less.

The argument that keeps being made

Supporters of these bans argue that transgender women have a biological advantage over cisgender women in sport. I have heard this argument many times, and I understand why it sounds plausible to people who have not looked closely at it. But when you do look closely, it falls apart quickly.

We are not talking primarily about elite adult athletes. We are talking about children. We are talking about a trans girl in a middle school who wants to run track with her classmates, or a teenager who wants to swim for her high school team. The notion that her presence constitutes an unfair advantage that demands federal intervention is not a sports science finding. It is a political position presented in the language of fairness.

Sport at every level is full of natural variation. Children vary in height, in lung capacity, in muscle composition, in the age at which they go through puberty. We do not legislate against tall swimmers or early developers. The reason trans girls are singled out is not that the evidence demands it. It is that they are trans.

What it is like to be that girl

I think about what it is like to be a young trans girl in one of these states. She has done everything right. She has been herself, probably after years of working out who she is. She has found a sport she loves. She has turned up to practice, worked hard, made friends. And then the state legislature, or the Supreme Court, or a presidential executive order, decides that her presence is the problem.

She is not being protected by these bans. She is being told, in the clearest possible terms, that she does not fully belong, that belonging is conditional, and that the other girls on the team are more deserving of a place in it than she is. Children understand these messages. They carry them.

The harm is not hypothetical. Exclusion from sport means exclusion from community, from routine, from the ordinary adolescent experience of being part of a team. It means one more place where a trans young person is told the world was not built for them. That accumulates. We know it accumulates, and we know what it costs.

What we should be asking

The framing of all of this as protection for women and girls deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. Trans girls are girls. Protecting girls in sport means including trans girls in sport, not building a legal architecture to keep them out.

The states that have passed these bans have not produced evidence of widespread competitive unfairness caused by trans athletes. They have produced legislation. Those are different things. And the Supreme Court's role here was not to weigh the sports science. It was to rule on constitutional questions, which it did, 6-3, along lines that were entirely predictable given the court's current composition.

What concerns me most is not the ruling itself, though it is deeply damaging. It is what comes next for the children in those states, the ones who are trans right now, who are in school right now, who wanted to play and now cannot. They are not abstractions in a legal case. They are real people living through a real exclusion, and the adults around them need to say, clearly and often, that none of this is their fault, and none of it reflects their worth.

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. She is the founder of GenderGP.