How Do You Vote When Everything Matters?

As I have been inundated with televised political ads recently, I couldn’t help but notice how the concern over transgenderism and particularly its impact on sports is often front and center. [1] I have seen these ads so often that I decided to do a little research, because I am curious how many people are directly impacted by this.

It turns out that no transgender girls have requested a waiver to participate in Michigan girls' high school sports for the fall 2026 season. (Figures tracking winter or spring requests for the 2026–2027 school year have not yet been logged or finalized.) Transgender boys do not need a waiver, and I cannot find a source that tracks their numbers.[2]

MHSAA approved waivers for one student during the 2025-26 school year and two students during the 2024-25 school year. Since the waiver policy was established in the 2013-14 school year, only 10 transgender girls in total have ever received waivers to compete in Michigan high school sports.[3]

Considering how much I have seen this highlighted, I confess I was surprised to find out that the numbers were so small, and that no transgender girls are competing yet in a year when political ads are highlighting the issue.[4]

This got me thinking about all the other issues that also demand our attention if we are considering how to prioritize issues that impact our kids.[5] Whether we are considering physical, emotional or mental welfare, there are many areas of life that impact the well-being of our kids.

• An average of about 22 U.S. teens (ages 14 to 18) die each week from drug overdoses, totaling roughly 1,100 minor deaths per year. In Michigan, 20% of those 12–17 used illicit drugs in the past year. 21% - about 150,000 – Michigan highschoolers are current alcohol users. Michigan typically sees between 15 and 22 deaths each year in crashes where a teen driver was operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol.
• In the U.S., there are approximately 2,000 child fatalities annually from abuse or neglect. In Michigan, there were 41,000 confirmed CPS victimizations in 2024. Roughly 50 minor deaths are formally attributed to neglect against a parent or caretaker (though the maltreatment was not always determined to be the direct cause of death.)
• Around 1,040 deaths from cancer happen in children ages 0 to 14, and about 550 deaths happen in teens ages 15 to 19. (30-50 minors die of cancer each year in Michigan, which has a relatively high pediatric cancer diagnosis rate.)
• Between 2000 and 2023, 38,429 Michigan children experienced a parental death due to suicide, homicide, overdose or other substance-related death.
• An average of about 2,000 to 2,500 minors in the U.S. die by suicide each year. In 2023, 20% of U.S. high-school students reported seriously considering suicide and 10% reported attempting suicide during the previous year. In Michigan in 2024, there were 46 suicides in youth ages 15-19.
• Roughly 3,500 to 4,500 firearm deaths occur annually among children and teens, averaging about 5 to 7 deaths per day. In Michigan, there were 44 firearm homicides in youth ages 15-19 in 2024.
• In 2024, about 3,400 U.S. infants died suddenly and unexpectedly, including 1,351 classified as SIDS and 947 as accidental suffocation or strangulation in bed.[6]
• In Feeding America West Michigan's 40-county region, which includes West Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, 95,820 children—18%—lived in food-insecure households in 2024.[7]
• The American Lung Association’s “State of the Air” report grades air quality in terms of unhealthy levels of ground-level ozone air pollution (also known as smog), and year-round and short-term spikes in particle pollution (also known as soot) over a three-year period. In Michigan, 1,327,043 children live in areas with unhealthy levels of air pollution. 
• In Michigan, just over 3% of children do not have adequate medical coverage (inadequate health insurance or lack sufficient access to essential care, meaning unreasonable out-of-pocket costs or benefits/access insufficient to meet the child's needs).[8]
• 17.5%, or 362,000 children, lived in poverty in Michigan in 2025.
• Approximately 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys experience child sexual abuse, and roughly 1 in 8 have confirmed maltreatment by the age of 18. 
• An estimated 4% to 8% of U.S. teens suffer from a severe gambling addiction or problem gambling behavior.

It turns out that caring about the safety and well-being of youth is not a one-issue…issue.

I wish that voting presented us with a menu on which we can check “protect children” and be finished. It is far more complicated than that. Voting requires us to decide which risks deserve governmental intervention, which interventions actually reduce those risks, what tradeoffs they impose, and how much political attention and public resources each problem warrants. And, when the two main parties diverge significantly, we will have to decide what to prioritize.

So, consider the following dilemmas.[9] 

• What if you want girls' sports restricted according to biological sex, but also want universal health coverage for children? Which candidate should you choose?
• What if you believe unborn children deserve substantial legal protection, but also want significantly stronger SNAP, Medicaid, WIC, child-care and Child Tax Credit support for children after they're born? Which party supports both of those?
• What if you believe parents should have considerable authority over what kind of curriculum their children encounter at school, but also want aggressive government regulation of firearms to reduce youth gun deaths? Who do you vote for?
• What if you want a whole lot more money going toward the mental and emotional health of teens, but also want a fairly harsh crackdown on gambling and drug and alcohol use?
• What if you want schools hardened and violent students removed quickly, and also want a lot more public recourses going toward intervention in teen substance abuse? 
• What if you believe the government shouldn't impose excessive environmental regulation that raises energy and housing costs for families, but also want aggressive regulation of lead, particulates, PFAS and other pollutants that damage children's health? 
• What if you want the government to encourage two-parent families and parental responsibility, but also want substantially more government-funded child care, paid family leave and direct assistance for struggling single-parent families?
• What if you want tougher criminal penalties for people selling fentanyl to teenagers, while also wanting addiction treated primarily as a public-health problem rather than a criminal one?

What if you believe every child has inherent dignity, and you can't find a political party whose definition of “protecting children” consistently encompasses all of them?

Neither party allows us to assemble our own platform from an à la carte menu. Each offers a package. If you believe that all of these situations matter, you eventually have to wrestle with how much it should matter in light of the others concerns, which would then impact your support of prioritization, funding, etc.

Any genuine problem is important and warrants a thoughtful response. But if concern for children is an important governing principle when we think of how we will vote, we should apply it consistently, not just to the particular threats to children that our political tribe has taught us to notice or that we have experienced first-hand.

Therefore, we might ponder questions such as these as we think about the politicians, platforms and policies we want to support.

• How seriously - and in what ways - are kids being harmed? 
• How effective is the proposed policy likely to be? 
• What unintended harms might it create? 
• How much societal resources should this issue receive in light of all the things threatening the lives and/or well-being of children?
• What kind of means will be used to accomplish good ends?

Those questions don't necessarily tell us how to vote, but I think they are questions we ought to ask before we do.

May we have the generosity to acknowledge that all of these things can matter at the same time, and the wisdom to support politicians, platforms and policies that ascribe a proper priority to them. 
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[1] On August 28 alone, Mike Rogers and the National Republican Senatorial Committee launched a seven-figure advertising campaign in Michigan that included an ad attacking Abdul El-Sayed for supporting “men playing in women's sports.” This is the one I have been seeing so often.
[2] Concerns about transgender students playing sports usually revolve around transgender girls posing a physical danger to females in contact sports or having an advantage in terms of athletic prowess. Those concerns are not the same when transgender boys compete with males.
[3] In the United States, twenty-nine states currently restrict transgender high school students to competing on teams consistent with their gender identity. The NCAA "restricts women's collegiate sports competition strictly to athletes assigned female at birth."
[4] Ohio, for example, had three high school trans athletes from 2015-2023 before instituting a ban; Florida had eleven over a decade leading up to a ban in 2021. 
[5] This is not "should instead demand our attention." This is, "should also demand our attention." 
[6] I am not including abortion statistics, as I am focusing on what children experience after they are born, as this was the focus of the ads that got me started on this. Interestingly, while Democrats are running pro-abortion ads, no mainstream Republican politicians in Michigan are prominently running anti-abortion television advertisements for their campaigns this year.
[7] New SNAP requirements have already contributed to about 150,000 Michiganders losing their benefits. For example, parents and caregivers who previously qualified if their children were 18 or younger now only qualify if their children are 14 or younger.
[8] The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) projects that roughly 200,000 state residents will lose their Medicaid coverage as a result of the OBBB.
[9] Do NOT make assumptions about where I land based on these scenarios.