How many transgender athletes are there in the US? Hardly any at all, according to experts

House Republicans passed a bill on Tuesday aimed at barring transgender student athletes from participating in girls’ sports despite the fact that the number of transgender student athletes in the US is vanishingly small.

The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act seeks to amend Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. It would ban schools receiving federal funding from allowing transgender girls and women to compete in sports designated for “women or girls.”

The legislation, which Republicans have championed as a defence of women’s sports, comes in the wake of a heated election cycle where transgender rights became a frequent target of the party.

In the run up to the election in November, Trump’s campaign trail was littered with anti-trans rhetoric and outright fake news. At rallies, Trump alleged that Harris wanted to perform “transgender operations on illegal aliens” in prison, that the US education system is now “mostly transgender” and that school pupils are undergoing gender-affirming surgeries during the school day.

Then, after Trump won the election, the president-elect vowed to make ending what he called “transgender lunacy” a priority for his administration. “With the stroke of my pen on day one we’re going to stop the transgender lunacy,” Trump said at a Turning Point USA event in Arizona on 22 December.

“I will sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation, get transgender out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools,” he told the cheering crowd of GOP voters, vowing to also “keep men out of women’s sports.”

Less than a month later, The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act passed the House in a 218 to 206 vote on Tuesday (14 January), backed by a large majority of Republicans, and two Democrats. Three Republicans and six Democrats did not vote, and one Democrat, Don Davis of North Carolina, voted “present.”

However, all of this increasingly bile-filled, culture war rhetoric about “protecting women and girls” from transgender athletes centres around what one expert says is an absolutely tiny number of people.

So, how many transgender student-athletes are there? Only five – in 2023, anyway

According to a report published by Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA’s Law School, in 2022, out of an estimated 332 million people living in the US, 1.3 million adults and 300,000 young people ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender, equaling half a percent and 1.4 percent of the population respectively.

Out of these 1.3 million adults and 300,000 young people, not all will identify as women – the legislation specifically targets transgender women – or play sports.

In May 2023, Newsweek interviewed researcher and medical physicist Joanna Harper, and asked her to estimate the number of transgender athletes competing in US sports.

“While we don’t know the exact number of trans women competing in NCAA sports, I would be very surprised if there were more than 100 of them in the women’s category,” Harper replied.

That number is even smaller when it comes to middle school and high school athletes. Newsweek also spoke to Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who told Newsweek that Save Women’s Sports, a leading voice in the bid to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, identified only five transgender athletes competing on girls’ teams in school sports for grades K through 12.

Yes, that’s right. Not 5000, not 500, not even 50 – just five trans student-athletes. All of this legislation, work, lobbying and anger – is aimed at preventing a tiny handful of young people from playing school sports.

The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act now faces an uncertain fate in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

A Republican –Tommy Tuberville – is championing the measure in the upper chamber, but with other priorities on the Senate’s agenda, including President-elect Trump’s Cabinet confirmations, a vote may be delayed.