Minnesota Proves Trans Inclusion Works; the Government Needs You to Believe It Doesn't

In 1993, Minnesota became the first state in the country to protect people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in its Human Rights Act, with explicit trans-inclusive language built into the law from the start. In 2014, the Minnesota State High School League clarified that student athletes can participate on teams that align with their gender identity. And just last year, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Cooper v. USA Powerlifting that it’s illegal discrimination for sports organizations to ban trans women from participating.

Throughout these 30-plus years of trans inclusion, girls' and women's sports in Minnesota have thrived—the state ranks No. 1 in the nation on Action Network's Girls' Sports Opportunity Index, which measures participation, access, and gender parity across all 50 states. Minnesota is also home to the winningest coach in Women's National Basketball Association history.

As a cisgender woman, I believe it's past time for more women like me to stand in loud, public solidarity with trans people, rather than let this manufactured fight be waged in our name. The people most invested in “protecting” women's sports have rarely shown up for women's sports at all. And as the executive director of Gender Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in the Upper Midwest, I’d love to know where all the urgency around fairness in women’s sports has been.

This is a familiar political playbook: Choose a wedge issue that polls well, use it to normalize the once-radical idea that civil rights law is negotiable, then expand from there.

I've spent years talking with women athletes across Minnesota. They talk about the sexual harassment. The state of their locker rooms. Subpar training facilities. Uneven access to fields and courts. Unequal pay and unequal media coverage. They talk about the coaches and administrators who still don't take their teams seriously. What they don’t talk about is the urgent need for the government to ban trans women from participating in sports.

So why does the noise persist? Republicans and their allies spent nearly $215 million on network television ads vilifying transgender people during the last presidential election cycle alone—more money than has ever been spent championing the women and girls they claim to want to protect.

Because sports was never the destination—they were the entry point. This is a familiar political playbook: Choose a wedge issue that polls well, use it to normalize the once-radical idea that civil rights law is negotiable, then expand from there. Across the country, courts are being asked whether Title IX protections extend to transgender students. The very law, passed in 1972, that guarantees equal access to education and athletics, protection from harassment, and freedom from discrimination based on sex, is being weaponized as a tool for exclusion. Executive orders now redefining "sex" across federal law and agencies don't stop at locker rooms either; they reach into schools, healthcare, and workplaces—into the fabric of American life. Title IX has never required schools to exclude trans students. It has long protected them.

What we are witnessing is not about fairness in athletics. It's political theater, and transgender youth are the ones paying the price—subjected to fear, harassment, and public scrutiny that lawmakers should be ashamed to have invited. What's happening now isn't a return to what the law always meant—it's a rewrite, carving an exception into a civil rights statute so that protections can be revoked for whichever group is politically convenient to sacrifice.

Attacks on trans rights, attacks on abortion rights, and persistent pay inequity are not separate fights; they are one fight against gender inequality, taking on different forms depending on the news cycle. Minnesota already answered the question of whether trans girls and women should have the right to play, with 30 years of evidence and a unanimous state supreme court ruling showcasing that trans inclusion works. The question still on the table is much more dangerous: Do we accept a government empowered to decide who gets rights, and who doesn't? When we allow our government to dismantle the fundamental rights of transgender people, we validate a legal precedent that threatens the liberties of every single citizen tomorrow.

If trans inclusion were the threat opponents claim, then three decades of it in Minnesota would have proven it. Instead, it's proven the opposite.