In 2021, dozens of states in the US introduced legislation that effectively barred trans kids from playing school sports. As many more legislatures prepared to follow suit in 2022, non-profit Human Rights Campaign commissioned the Twitter Brand Strategy team to produce an in-depth analysis of the conversation unfolding on Twitter.

For us, this was the beginning of a long process of educating ourselves about the experience of trans kids. As an introduction to this topic, we studied the scientific literature on the issue of trans athletic performance, and interviewed a panel of parents whose kids were impacted by anti-trans legislation. In parallel, we started investigating the conversation on our own platform, which stood out in a couple of ways.

In 2021, we saw the overall conversation about trans rights exploding on Twitter, as it doubled in size. A more fined-grained (n-gram) analysis of the tweets revealed this growth was in large part attributed to the specific issue of trans kids playing sports. This wasn't the first time trans rights were trending on Twitter—there had been previous moral panics about the rise of students identifying as non-binary, and others about bathroom access for trans people. But this time felt different: we saw a gradual build up that announced a much larger conversation to come.

The mentions of trans kids playing sports were also different in nature, and I produced a unique keyword analysis that revealed a shift in the sentiment harbored in those tweets. Topics in the overall trans rights conversation generally focused on allyship, identity, respect, normalization, and rejection of transphobia. On the contrary, mentions of trans kids in sports focused on unfairness, alleged transgender domination (the scientific literature doesn't find transgender people have a competitive advantage in sports), and the destroying of sports culture in the US.

Unique keyword analysis in the trans kids in sports conversation

Those keywords sounded familiar and we were unsuprised to find a strong correlation between the rise of these topics on Twitter and an increase in coverage by traditional media, including Fox News. This insight led us to dive deeper into the footprint of traditional media on online discourse.

Media Matters previously reported on Fox News' coverage of trans kids in sports

In order to better understand the impact of traditional news on the conversation, I collected the articles about trans kids in sports that had been retweeted the most in 2021. Our team annotated those posts as pro, neutral, and anti trans rights. From the onset, this revealed that 78 out of the top 100 most shared articles about trans kids in sports were anti trans rights, and many of them could be categorized as hate speech. This imbalance in the conversation was already striking, but there was something else that made this topic unlike any other political argument on Twitter.

I produced a network analysis of the propagation of US political news on Twitter. When visualizing top news articles as a force-directed network, where pieces of content shared by the same people were attracted to each other, I was able to reveale the polarization of discourse on the platform. Nothing new there: we could see how topics like black lives matter, immigration, and gun reform neatly formed clusters along the lines of known political divides in the US. However, we found two interesting patterns when highlighting news articles about trans kids in sports in particular.

First, this revealed an imbalance between conservative and liberal coverage of the issue: while only 7% of shared liberal media articles concerned trans kids rights, the same topic made a *third* of the conservative cluster. This made trans kids in sports the #1 most discussed topics in conservative circles. Furthermore, the visualization showed how central anti-trans rhetoric was to the conservative cluster, while pro-trans content in the progressive bubble appeared at the margins. In other words, articles about trans kids in sports were consistently retweeted by people who shared conservative media content, while remaining ignored by people who reposted progressive media.

A further analysis of impressions on those news articles revealed that people who usually shared progressive content, when it came to the topic of trans kids in sports, were more likely to see conservative articles than liberal ones in their feeds. Ultimately, when it came to trans kids rights, conservative talking points dominated both sides of the political divide.

Progressive media had failed to invest in this issue, and the resulting information void had been filled by anti-trans influencers, who were setting the agenda. I set out to find out who they were.

I found that in 2021, a staggering 95% of retweets on anti-trans articles could be traced back to posts by a coordinated group of 20 activists.

On the other hand, noticeably absent from the conversation, was the much larger and otherwise vocal group on Twitter: Gen Z. This demographic group generally favored other social media platforms over Twitter, but even on this platform it had previously been a dominant force in the trans rights discourse. In this case, Gen Z was the group least represented, and a time-based analysis of demographics in the conversation revealed how older generations had taken over.

The Twitter conversationa about trans kids in sports is dominated by older generations.

The absence of kids in this conversation about trans students, combined with the dominance of a few political actors, was the demonstration of a coordinated, astroturfed effort to manipulate the public opinion. It never was about fairness in sports: it was another attempt to erase trans people from public life.

The Twitter Brand Strategy team shared this research along with a pitch for a social media campaign in support of trans kids across the US.

We presented this research to the leadership of Human Rights Campaign, along with recommendations for their organization and community to advocate on behalf of trans kids. They published a white paper summarizing our findings and distributed it to their stakeholders.

Later in 2022, Human Rights Campaign launched a legislative effort backed by a cross-platform social media campaign, dubbed #LetKidsPlay. The initiative elevated the voices of transgender kids who had been targeted by political activists, and focused on a simple message: transgender youth just want to play sports.

Since this project, the attacks against trans people on social media have only grown in influence. In 2023, a boycott of Anheuser-Busch InBev orchestrated against the company's sponsoring of a trans influencer led to the company losing billions of dollars in valuation. In 2024, the discourse about the Olympics in Paris was largely focused on the alleged transgender identity of the competing athletes.