QueerED: Transgender Youth Participation in Athletics
Issue 001: June 30, 2026. Research to practice for LGBTQ+-inclusive schools and communities.
Let’s get QueerED.
Happy Pride, and welcome to QueerED (queer education, and a little bit of education, queered)! This newsletter translates research on queer youth and schools into actionable guidance for educators (and students - you’re always welcome too!). Twice a month, I’ll share takeaways from a recent study and connect them to helpful resources, with a focus on K-12 school experiences.
The Throughline
Today’s Topic
Today, the Supreme Court released its ruling in West Virginia v. BPJ, together with Little v. Hecox. Upsettingly and unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court upheld state laws barring transgender students from girls’ and women’s sports teams. The conservative majority, written by Justice Kavanaugh, grounded its holding in a narrow, biological definition of sex in athletics under Title IX:
“Title IX allows schools to provide separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex” (p. 14).
Fine Print
Clarifying Details
Today’s ruling permits the 27 states with bans to keep them. It does not impose a national ban, and it does not require the other 23 states to do anything.
From the Stacks
Relevant Research
The study (or today, a research brief)
McQuillan, M. T., Gill, E. K., Gong, X., Lebovitz, B. A., Juchems, B., & Swetz, A. (2025). Physical activity and trans students in Wisconsin schools [Research brief]. GSAFE, Fair Wisconsin, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Disclosure: I am a co-author.)
How it was done
The brief draws on two large datasets: more than 300,000 student responses to the Wisconsin Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) across 2019, 2021, and 2023, and more than 50,000 responses to the Dane County Youth Assessment (DCYA) in 2018, 2021, and 2024. Using these large samples, we compare transgender and questioning students with their cisgender peers across years, rather than relying on a single school or a small sample. More than 4% of Wisconsin high school students in the most recent waves identified as transgender or questioning.
What it found
First, trans and questioning students are less physically active than their cisgender peers. In the YRBS, trans students reported being active for at least 60 minutes on about 2.7 to 2.8 days in the prior week, compared with 3.8 to 4.2 days for cisgender peers. That is roughly one to one and a half fewer days of activity per week.
Second, the participation gap is widening. In the Dane County data, the difference in sports participation between cisgender and trans or questioning students grew from 25 percentage points in 2018 to 37 percentage points in 2024. Over the same period, trans and questioning students’ sports engagement fell from 44% to 32%. By 2024, cisgender students were participating at roughly 2.16 times the rate of their trans and questioning peers.
Context and Interpretation
Wisconsin legislators proposed statewide athletic bans for transgender students in every legislative session beginning in 2021, and the gap between trans and cisgender students widened during this time period. The most plausible reading is not that trans students lost interest in being physically active. Instead, the sustained policy debate told them, year after year, that they were not welcome, and many stopped showing up.
Translation
Today’s ruling neither starts nor solves this problem, but it could accelerate a withdrawal that is already underway. Restricting access to sports by biological sex tells anyone who expresses their gender outside traditional norms that they are less welcome in those spaces, and students have already shown they hear that message. The ruling concerns competitive teams; it does not reach PE, intramurals, or most club and recreational activities; there, a clear, repeated message that trans and gender-diverse students belong can slow the hostile impact of this ruling.
Showing Receipts
Things You Can Cite and Share
The cisgender and trans/questioning sports participation gap in Wisconsin’s Dane County widened from 25 points (2018) to 37 points (2024) (McQuillan et al., 2025).
Over that period, trans and questioning students’ sports engagement fell from 44% to 32%, while bans were still only proposed, not enacted (McQuillan et al., 2025).
Trans and questioning students reported roughly one to one and a half fewer days of physical activity per week than cisgender peers (McQuillan et al., 2025).
Tips for Conversation and Practice
What to Embed in Classroom Routines
The ruling governs competitive girls’ and women’s teams in states with bans. It says nothing about physical education, intramurals, open gyms, club sports, or the daily experience of being a kid who gets to move and belong.
When creating ‘teams’, especially in PE but in the general classroom as well, don’t separate students by gender. There are many ways to break up your class into groups!
Consider an informal participation audit. Pay attention to who participates, who sits out or asks to be excused, and how you monitor and enforce participation norms.
Especially if you coach or advise, state plainly and regularly that every student on your roster belongs there. Direct encouragement from an adult can motivate students to show up, participate, and feel like they belong.
Expanding Your Toolkit
This Week’s Resource
Movement Advancement Project (MAP)’s Equality Maps: Bans on Transgender Youth Participation in Sports
After a ruling like today’s, the first practical question for anyone is “What is actually true in my state?”. MAP can help answer it. The sports-participation map shows, state by state, whether transgender youth are banned from or protected within school sports through law or regulation. Note that MAP includes only state laws and regulations, and does not consider the policies or regulations of state athletic associations (which play a prominent role in regulating most competitive sports)!
MAP offers a wide set of resources beyond tracked bans on athletic participation. Additional Equality Maps track curricular laws, nondiscrimination protections, and other education-related policies, so you can see where your state stands across topics rather than guessing from national headlines. Bookmark it, check your state before you change any practice or discuss what you might have heard on the news, and share the link with staff and families who are asking what the ruling means locally.
About Me
As a National Board Certified Teacher, former Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) advisor, and scholar researching how politics and educational leadership shape the opportunities and well-being of LGBTQ+ and other marginalized youth, I bring more than a decade of experience to this work. QueerED is one of the ways I try to bridge research and practice, ensuring research reaches and can make an impact on educators, in classrooms, and for students.