The decision to compete — or not to compete — is a personal one.

Athletics, at its core, is a negotiation between body and will, the ability to articulate fluidity and strength past the mental limitations we have about ourselves. Whatever the external forces are that challenge us in sports, that first hurdle — pushing back against the voice in our head that tells us what we can and cannot do — is the most important and essential, no matter the discipline or the opponent.

I’m not here to rob Stephanie Turner, the woman who took a knee to forfeit a fencing match this past weekend, of her free will to compete. People decide to step back from the line for all kinds of reasons, none of which, I believe, are ours to judge.

But the decision to enlist a friend to film her kneeling to her opponent, who reportedly is transgender, is an altogether different exercise. It is much less about competition and much more about feeding a vast, political machine that runs on outrage and will cause real harm.

From a tournament that nobody has ever heard of outside the fencing community comes the latest topic your right-wing relatives will pound the dinner table about. “It will probably, at least for the moment, destroy my life,” the “private person” Turner told Fox News, for a national story which heralded her as a hero fighting for the civil rights of women.

Pardon me for feeling skeptical that Turner, who said she knelt to forfeit because she felt “that would be God’s will,” arranged for herself to be taped forfeiting the match out of some sense of celestial duty. It seems more likely she implicitly understood the forces such a video could set in motion: raising the hackles of conservative media outlets whose end game seems to be to erase trans people from every facet of public life.

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I don’t pretend to have a satisfying answer to those who say it is wrong for transgender athletes to compete in classes of their chosen gender instead of the sex they were assigned at birth. But I cannot understand how outsized the rage and demonization is for trans people, who represent a tiny portion of the populace and an even smaller number of competitive athletes.

It is a mangling of facts to present the trans community, which is actively being persecuted by the current presidential administration, as chasing any particular agenda except the right to exist.

NCAA chairman Charlie Baker estimated in recent congressional testimony that among 500,000 college athletes, perhaps fewer than 10 identify as transgender. But bad-faith conservative, rage-producing outlets would have you believe that less than a dozen people represent an existential crisis to women’s sports (already ignoring the fact that women’s sports has succeeded despite lacking the institutional support of male athletes for nearly all of history).

These commentators put a spotlight on any trans athletes in women’s sports they can — interestingly, I don’t notice these outlets wringing their hands over the “safety” of trans men who compete with other men — because it is politically convenient for their arguments, which almost always to dismiss the legitimacy of being transgender at all.

Fields, courts and locker rooms are often treacherous places for people who spend their lives wrestling with personal questions of belonging and identity. Trans people are already targets of violence at a higher rate than average, and more likely to commit self-harm — statistics that are probably being furiously scrubbed from federal websites as we speak by a government that is trying to pretend bigotry has not influenced American history.

For many of these trans folks, even suiting up for games and competitions takes an unimaginable sense of self-possession. They know that they will be gawked at, whispered about, and perhaps even confronted by those who want to make their personal discomfort into everyone else’s problem.

The tournament in question did not take place between children, but adults. The 31-year-old Turner admitted to Fox News that she knew transgender competitors registered for tournaments like the Cherry Blossom Open in College Park. The stakes of these competitions are low — a level of fencing that is closer to “hobbyist” rather than Olympian.

The framing of it as a “safety issue” is presumptuous to me, as if a woman could never compete with men (women can, and do) and as if the broad range of different heights, strengths, speeds and dexterity could never account for a trans woman in the field. In fact, the trans competitor in question — who had competed in men’s events in prior years — finished 24th in a field of 39, beaten by several other competitors who chose to fence.

The scant scientific evidence available does show some differences in physical performance between trans women on hormones against other women, but our understanding is far from complete. Notably, I’ve yet to see Turner mention fear for her safety as a defining motivation why she didn’t fence that day — instead, she used the word “saddened” to describe seeing herself lined up against a trans competitor.

For Turner, what she seems to be losing as a result of her actions are her LGBTQ friends, she told Fox News: “I don’t want them to be mad at me for this. I love them on a personal level.”

Losing friendships over political views, however painful that might be, doesn’t quite measure up to what’s on the line for the people that are now being demonized by the outlets to whom Turner is peddling her story.

President Donald Trump already signed an executive order to ban transgender athletes, whom you can count on two hands, from women’s youth and college sports, framing it as protection for women (even though his administration seems poised to gut meaningful parts of Title IX next). But he has also signed orders of extremely sketchy legality banning trans people from military service and restricting gender identity on official U.S. documents such as passports. His administration has threatened to cease funding to medical providers who provide gender-affirming care (which, again, is just a small percentage of any medical institution’s administration).

At the Stonewall National Monument in New York — a place of great history and reverence for LGBTQ rights advocates — the National Parks Service removed all references to transgender people, as if scraping them off a building would erase them from public consciousness. There is a legitimate concern by trans people and their allies that these campaigns to delegitimize their mere existence will keep getting more aggressive and potentially more violent.

As a person who believes humanity is more essential to a person’s identity than gender, I don’t abide the bigotry that is fueling these government campaigns. I revile it. In the last few months, I’ve spoken to trans athletes and advocates about the very real fear for their safety and rights that they’re feeling, which is being vigorously pursued by the federal government and many state legislatures. Many who have moved to Maryland from less tolerant states wonder if there is anywhere in America that will be a safe harbor.

I would ask that the people rage-clicking and working up their fervor over a regional fencing tournament examine their priorities and their empathy, asking themselves what has been lost here, and what we, as Americans, are losing when we make outrage mountains out of molehills.

Turner’s decision to forfeit may have been between her and her God. But by releasing a premeditated, performative video of her forfeiture, she made her personal choice into a stunt that will be used to fuel political movements that crack down on a class of people who have much more to lose than she does.

“It’s the last thing I wanted to deal with,” she told Fox News.

Now, other people have to deal with her decision — including those who never had a say in the matter at all.