The Supreme Court has taken a giant constitutional swipe at the tiny minority of transgender girls and women who want to play school sports. Its end-of-term ruling upheld laws in Idaho and West Virginia that ban these students from playing on female athletic teams at their schools, no matter the students’ age or sport, or even if the only puberty they have experienced is female.

Whatever your views on transgender athletes and sports, it is important to see the bigger picture here: These bans are about far more than athletics. In this moment, a campaign against transgender people in the United States has produced hundreds of anti-transgender laws and policies across the nation. These measures aim to restrict transgender people in nearly every corner of civic life, including restrooms, passports, drivers’ licenses, military service and school activities.

Taken together, these laws convey that transgender people are a threat to public safety, education and national security — and that government must act to contain them. 

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This is what legal scapegoating looks like. These kinds of laws divert public attention away from real problems, like the persistent underfunding of girls’ and women’s school sports and pervasiveness of sexual abuse in sports, by directing fear and anger toward a minority group and then deploying that fear and anger to justify more restrictions. To focus on athletics in a vacuum is to miss this emotional bait-and-switch.

Had the Supreme Court taken off its blinders when reviewing the athletics bans, it would have seen that the bans did not stand alone. Each was part of a bundle of recent restrictions on transgender people in Idaho and West Virginia covering areas as diverse as identity documents, healthcare, restrooms, prisons, shelters and more. In the 2026 legislative session alone, West Virginia had 39 proposed or enacted restrictions on transgender people and Idaho had 11, including one of the most criminally punitive restroom laws in the nation.

With that context, the court could have taken seriously the argument that these laws, which say they are about fairness and safety, may be more about manipulating distress and targeting transgender students for exclusion altogether.

In normal times, governments pass laws to solve real problems. But the blizzard of restrictions on transgender people is not normal and does not solve real problems. Instead, these measures come largely from the same networks that sought to overturn Roe v. Wade and depend on distorted stories of isolated athletic successes, mischaracterized incidents and manufactured outrage like President Donald Trump’s false claim that kids were undergoing transition surgery at school. The result is an engineered sense of national crisis that demands our attention and our lawmakers’ action.

This playbook takes its lessons from neuroscience 101. When we feel threatened, our brains seize on information that confirms the threat and dismiss facts that challenge it. By stoking fears of unfair and dangerous athletic competitions, sexual violence in restrooms and other wide-ranging perils, this is precisely what restrictions on transgender people achieve.

Through law after law targeting transgender people, these threats repeat themselves. Their sheer volume amplifies our distress and distracts us from how government resources are being used. 

This explains why restroom bans keep coming when no credible evidence shows transgender women are likely to endanger other women in restrooms. And why, when the head of the National Collegiate Athletic Association told Congress in 2024 that “less than ten” of 510,000 NCAA college athletes were transgender, claims that transgender women were taking over women’s sports kept coming — and so did the bans, adding up to 27 states in all, plus a categorical ban from the NCAA after Trump took office.

Suzanne B. Goldberg

Suzanne B. Goldberg is the Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and founding director of the Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic.