Tying laws to specific cases can do more harm than good

On June 30, a divided Supreme Court upheld state laws barring transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s teams. At least 27 states have recently adopted such legislation. 

Much of the impetus for these laws stems from the success of one transgender swimmer, Lia Thomas, who won an NCAA division title in 2022. Sports Illustrated labeled Thomas “the most controversial athlete in America,” and her victory galvanized a movement to limit women’s and girls’ teams to “biological females.”

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in dissent, the court’s ruling assumes that transgender women always have “an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.” Sports, she added, “are often zero sum, but the law need not and should not be.”

State laws banning transgender women from women’s sports reflect an increasingly prevalent pattern. A compelling incident convinces legislators to misidentify, magnify or manufacture a problem, in a rush to enact sweeping laws. Stark, emotionally powerful cases trigger availability bias — a tendency for people to overestimate the frequency of events they can readily recall. They also activate an identifiable victim effect, which produces far stronger responses to individual stories than to statistics that reveal they are anomalies.

According to the American Psychological Association, both lawmakers and voters are more likely to “prioritize emotion over evidence” when presented with a narrative involving a named victim.

Lia Thomas may well have enjoyed an unfair advantage in swimming, but it is a mistake to generalize from a single case. As the president of the NCAA testified in 2024, fewer than 10 of the 510,000 NCAA college athletes at that time were transgender. Scientific studies indicate that transgender women do not always enjoy a........

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