At the heart of so much anti-trans activism is a simple trick: take a complex human reality, reduce it to a scary-sounding statistic, and let fear do the rest. The Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, or CWALAC, recently released what it called a study claiming that trans women and girls have “stolen” 2,293 gold medals from cisgender women in the United States. Penny Nance, the group’s CEO, used that number to demand that Congress act, insisting that trans athletes have unfair advantages and are eliminating opportunities for “biological women.” It sounds alarming. It sounds like proof of something deeply wrong. But when you actually dig into the data, the number falls apart—and the story becomes far less about trans dominance and far more about how misinformation is manufactured. The real tragedy is that this kind of rhetoric isn’t about protecting women at all. It’s about turning a tiny, vulnerable minority into a political target. And it works because most people don’t have the time or the tools to check the math behind the headlines. So let’s do exactly that: take the scary number, look under the hood, and see what’s really going on. What we find is not a wave of trans athletes sweeping every trophy in sight. Instead, we find a messy, uncleaned dataset, a lot of exaggeration, and a familiar pattern of seeing a few visible trans people as a threat out of all proportion to reality.
The first clue that something was off came when I tried to replicate CWALAC’s figure. I couldn’t get 2,293. In fact, using the exact criteria they described—a trans woman or girl winning gold, with a cis woman in second place, in an event in the USA—I found 4,174 cases. That’s almost twice their number. So even by their own loose standard, their headline statistic doesn’t hold up. The dataset they used comes from a crowdsourced project called HeCheated, launched alongside a companion site called SheWon, which aims to track trans and intersex athletes across sports and history. But the dataset is a sprawling, messy collection. It reaches back as far as 1927, which actually reminds us that trans people have always existed, but it also includes entries from all over the world and across all levels of competition, from high school to professional leagues. And it includes sports you wouldn’t necessarily think of as the front lines of athletic dominance: bowling, disc golf, Irish dance, competitive oyster shucking. There’s even a separate section for non-athletic categories like prom queens, best actress nominations, and Jeopardy! performances. So when CWALAC says trans women have won 2,293 gold medals, they aren’t talking about Olympic titles or NCAA championships. They’re counting everything from a small-town 5K age group win to a high school bowling match—and they’re counting wins from a hundred years ago. If trans people were truly dominating women’s sports, you’d expect the numbers to be far higher, especially given that around one percent of the US population identifies as trans. Instead, the most striking thing is how rare these wins are.
The quality of the data makes the whole thing even more unreliable. This is what researchers would call a “dirty” dataset—it was never cleaned, corrected, or properly vetted. There are entries for “USA – Pennsylvania” and also for “USA – Philadelphia,” which is famously a city within Pennsylvania. There’s an entry for the state of New York and another for a place called “New Yorko.” There are seven entries for “USA – Ontario” that, when you actually look into them, are from Ottawa, Canada. These are not tiny, nitpicky errors. They show that the data was collected carelessly, without attention to basic facts. And yet CWALAC presented this as a reliable study worthy of influencing federal legislation. That’s not a good-faith mistake. It’s a pattern. Time and again, anti-trans campaigns rely on misinformation and misleading numbers to push an agenda that doesn’t have scientific support. Real research on trans athletes has repeatedly found no evidence of the massive, unfair advantage that activists like Penny Nance claim. But the anti-trans movement doesn’t need good data. It needs a boogeyman. And a number like 2,293, even if it’s wrong, is perfect for that purpose—because it’s big enough to scare people, but small enough that nobody bothers to check where it came from.
Let’s look at a concrete example to see what the data actually shows. The dataset includes information on 5K running events, which are often casual and open, making them a good window into how trans athletes actually perform against cis athletes. Since 1992, HeCheated has identified 186 first-place medals won by trans women and girls in 5K races. That’s over more than thirty years. In 2025, just two trans women won ten of those medals. One was a high schooler competing in a school event. The other was a woman in the 40–49 age category at a Massachusetts race, who came in first in her age group several times—often with only three or four other runners in the category. Meanwhile, according to the race registration industry, RunSignup alone hosted signups for over 52,000 running events of five kilometers or less last year, with more than eight million registrants. They estimate they represent only half of the US race registration market. Conservatively, that means there are over 100,000 running events in a single year. CWALAC seems to count winning an age category as winning a “gold medal,” and a typical 5K has multiple women’s age categories. Even if we assume an average number of categories, easily 500,000 women’s 5K “gold medals” are awarded across the United States every year. Ten medals out of 500,000 is 0.002 percent. That is not dominance. That is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. In fact, if trans people won medals at a rate proportional to their share of the population, we would expect about one in every hundred medals to go to a trans woman. Instead, the actual rate is roughly one in fifty thousand. Trans people don’t compete often, and when they do, they rarely win. But you’d never know that from listening to the outrage.
What we’re seeing is a well-documented psychological phenomenon called dominance theory. It’s the reason a small minority can seem overwhelmingly present the moment they gain any visibility. In the 1980s, researcher Dale Spender found that men in mixed-gender conversations believed women were dominating the discussion when women spoke only thirty percent of the time. Similarly, studies commissioned by the Geena Davis Institute found that when a movie crowd is more than seventeen percent female, male audiences perceive it as a fifty-fifty split. Our perceptions are not neutral. They’re shaped by a culture built around patriarchal and cisgender assumptions. So when trans people appear at all—in a school sport, on a movie screen, in a public bathroom—they can seem like they’re everywhere, even when their actual numbers are tiny. The same dynamic is at play in the panic over Lia Thomas. ESPN commentators like Stephen A. Smith claimed she transitioned and suddenly started dominating, but that simply isn’t true. Even in the race that Riley Gaines constantly complains about, Thomas and Gaines finished joint fifth. That’s not a stolen victory. That’s not an unfair medal. It’s a tie for fifth place. But the myth persists because it serves a purpose. It gives people permission to fear trans people, to exclude them, to legislate against them. It allows the anti-trans movement to claim they’re defending women’s sports while ignoring the fact that women’s sports are not under threat from trans athletes. They’re under threat from underfunding, from unequal media coverage, from all the real structural problems that nobody seems to want to fix.
In the end, this “study” from CWALAC is not about facts. It’s about fear. The group is using this flawed, crowdsourced, uncleaned dataset to pressure Congress into passing bills like the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025,” which would bar federal funding for school athletic programs that allow trans inclusion. If that bill becomes law, it won’t protect anyone. It will simply make life harder for a group of young people who already face enormous barriers to participating in sports, in school, and in society. Trans girls and women just want to live their lives, play their games, and be accepted. The data shows they are not taking over. They are not stealing medals. They are not a threat. But in a world where a fraction of a percent can be made to feel like a flood, where a dirty spreadsheet can be turned into a national crisis, and where a tie for fifth place becomes proof of an unfair advantage, we have to be willing to look deeper. We have to ask questions. We have to remember that behind every scary statistic is a human being—someone’s daughter, someone’s friend, someone’s classmate. The anti-trans crusade asks us to believe the worst about them. The evidence asks us to do the opposite: to see them clearly, to treat them with kindness, and to refuse to be manipulated by numbers that were never true in the first place.