When Log Cabin Republicans President Ross Hemminger explained why his organization was abandoning transgender advocacy, one sentence did a remarkable amount of political work.
“There’s a big difference between talking about two people’s rights to be married and whether your 12-year-old girl should be playing volleyball against biological men,” Hemminger said.
Read it again and notice what disappears.
There is no transgender child in that sentence.
Instead, there is a 12-year-old girl on one side and an adult “biological man” on the other. One is a child who needs protection. The other is an adult who sounds threatening simply by being placed on the same volleyball court.
That framing is not unique to Hemminger. It has become one of the most effective rhetorical devices in the anti-trans political movement: when discussing transgender children, describe them as adults.
A transgender girl becomes a “man.” A transgender boy becomes a “woman.” A middle-school student becomes an adult intruder in a children’s space.
Then politicians announce that they are protecting children from the frightening adult they just invented.
The Missing 12-Year-Old
Imagine Hemminger’s sentence written differently:
“There’s a big difference between talking about two people’s rights to be married and whether your 12-year-old daughter should play volleyball with another 12-year-old who is transgender.”
Suddenly, the emotional temperature drops.
People could still disagree about sports policy. There are legitimate discussions to be had about competitive fairness, puberty, age, athletic development, and how different sports should establish eligibility rules.
But now we are discussing what is actually happening: children playing sports with other children. The frightening image of a grown man spiking volleyballs at middle-school girls disappears.
That distinction matters because youth sports are not adult professional athletics. Children develop at wildly different rates. Puberty does not arrive according to an athletic department’s schedule, and two children of the same age and sex can have dramatically different heights, weights, strength and athletic abilities.
Yet transgender girls are frequently discussed as though they arrived at middle-school practice after spending 15 years in the NFL.
They didn’t. They arrived from algebra class.
Turning a Child Into an Adult Changes the Debate
Words such as “men in women’s sports” have become ubiquitous in conservative discussions of transgender athletes.
But when the subject is minors, calling transgender girls “men” does something beyond expressing disagreement about gender identity.
It adultifies children. That creates an enormous rhetorical advantage.
Ask whether a 12-year-old transgender girl should be allowed to play volleyball with her classmates, and people may consider several competing values: fairness, inclusion, childhood development, socialization, and the purpose of school athletics.
Ask whether a “biological man” should compete against a 12-year-old girl, and the question essentially answers itself.
Of course adults shouldn’t compete against children. Congratulations. We have successfully solved a problem nobody proposed.
This rhetorical construction transforms a complicated policy discussion into a horror-movie scenario where the audience is instructed who the monster is before the opening credits finish.
It also strips transgender children of something routinely granted to their cisgender peers: childhood itself.
The Same Trick Appears in Health Care
The pattern extends beyond sports.
Political discussions about gender-affirming care frequently jump from “transgender child” directly to “irreversible surgery,” creating the impression that a child who tells their parents they are transgender is immediately placed on a conveyor belt toward an operating room.
Actual clinical guidelines are considerably less cinematic.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care describe an individualized process involving assessment, developmental maturity, informed consent, discussion of fertility, and involvement of relevant medical and mental-health professionals. Its adolescent recommendations generally call for parents or guardians to participate in assessment and treatment unless doing so would be harmful or impossible.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has similarly described gender-affirming care as a spectrum. Social affirmation can involve clothing, hairstyles, names, or pronouns. Puberty suppression is associated with puberty, while hormone therapy comes later for some adolescents. Surgery is typically associated with adulthood, although some procedures may be considered for adolescents on a case-by-case basis.
There are genuine medical debates about the evidence supporting some treatments for adolescents, their risks, long-term outcomes, and appropriate eligibility standards. Those debates deserve careful examination rather than slogans. Even professional organizations supporting access acknowledge the importance of ongoing evaluation and individualized decision-making.
But “doctors, parents, and adolescents making complicated medical decisions” is much harder to weaponize than “they’re mutilating children.” So nuance gets mugged in the parking lot.
Sports Becomes the Perfect Political Weapon
Sports has proven particularly effective because it combines several emotionally powerful subjects: children, fairness, competition, and sex. It also allows politicians to take extremely small populations and turn them into symbols of a supposed national emergency.
The American College of Sports Medicine noted in a 2026 statement that transgender people are underrepresented in sports and that research specifically involving transgender athletes remains limited. The organization called for more robust athlete-specific data to inform policy.
Meanwhile, restrictions have expanded rapidly. A Congressional Research Service report found that at least 25 states had enacted laws requiring student athletes to compete according to sex assigned at birth.
The NCAA went even further in February 2025, changing its policy to prohibit athletes assigned male at birth from competing on women’s teams in NCAA competition.
Yet transgender athletes continue to occupy an astonishing amount of political oxygen compared with their actual presence in competitive sports.
The pattern has become particularly surreal around the WNBA, where transgender women have repeatedly been invoked as a threat despite the league having never had a transgender woman play on a roster. That hasn’t stopped politicians, activists, and former male professional basketball players from turning the hypothetical into a political spectacle.
The hypothetical threat becomes more politically valuable than the people who actually exist.
“Protecting Children” From Other Children
This is where the rhetoric becomes especially damaging. Transgender children are children. That statement should be painfully obvious, but much of the political language surrounding them depends upon pretending otherwise.
When conservatives say they are protecting “our daughters” from transgender girls, whose daughters are transgender girls? When lawmakers say they are protecting children in bathrooms, what happens to the transgender child who needs to use one?
When activists say they are protecting children from gender ideology in schools, what happens to the transgender student sitting at a desk while adults debate whether acknowledging their existence is dangerous?
The Williams Institute estimated in January 2026 that approximately 382,800 transgender youth live in 29 states with at least one restrictive law or policy covering issues including health care, sports, bathrooms, or pronoun use.
Those aren’t adult activists parachuting into schools. They’re students.
Some are playing the clarinet. Some are failing chemistry. Some are worried about prom. Some want to play volleyball.
They have parents, siblings, homework, embarrassing yearbook photos, and probably at least one teacher who assigns way too much reading over the weekend. In other words, they are remarkably ordinary children.
The Political Power of the Imaginary Adult
Hemminger’s comparison illustrates exactly why the adult-versus-child framing works.
Marriage equality is described using adults: “two people’s rights to be married.” Transgender inclusion is described using a child facing a “biological man.”
One movement receives ordinary adults seeking civil rights. The other receives a threatening adult violating a child’s space. The framing practically writes the political conclusion before the discussion begins.
The Log Cabin Republicans announced this week that it would stop advocating nationally for transgender issues and redefine itself as an LGB organization. Hemminger argued that transgender activism’s focus on minors had moved the organization away from the movement it originally supported.
But the language used to justify that separation demonstrates the larger problem. You cannot meaningfully debate policies affecting transgender children while rhetorically transforming those children into adults. A 12-year-old transgender girl is not a biological man playing volleyball against a child.
She is also 12.
We Can Debate Policy Without Erasing Children
None of this means every question involving transgender youth has an easy answer.
Sports organizations have legitimate reasons to develop eligibility standards. Doctors should continually evaluate evidence surrounding medical treatment. Parents deserve accurate information about risks and benefits. Policymakers can debate where legal boundaries should exist.
But those conversations become useless when language is deliberately engineered to produce fear before facts enter the room.
If the subject is transgender children, call them children.
If the discussion concerns adolescent health care, describe what treatments are actually being proposed at the relevant age.
If the discussion concerns school sports, distinguish a middle-school athlete from an adult professional competitor.
And if someone believes transgender girls should not participate in girls’ sports, they should be capable of defending that position without transforming a 12-year-old transgender kid into a grown man.
Because once adults begin describing children as dangerous adults in order to justify taking rights or opportunities away from them, the debate is no longer merely about sports.
It is about who gets to be recognized as a child worthy of protection. Anti-trans politics has become remarkably effective at asking Americans to protect children. The trick is making sure nobody notices which children have been edited out of the sentence.
