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- cross-posted to:
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In February 2020, the families of three cisgender girls filed a federal lawsuit against the Connecticut Association of Schools, the nonprofit Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference and several boards of education in the state. The families were upset that transgender girls were competing against the cisgender girls in high school track leagues. They argued that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in high school sports and should be forced to play on boys’ teams.
Conservatives around the country have jumped on the question. Attorney General Merrick Garland was pressed on the issue during his confirmation hearing last month. State legislators around the country are pushing bills that would force trans girls to compete on boys’ teams. In describing the Connecticut case in the Wall Street Journal, opinion writer Abigail Shrier expressed a representative argument: when transgender girls compete on girls’ sports teams, she wrote, “[cisgender] girls can’t win.”
The opinion piece left out the fact that two days after the Connecticut lawsuit was filed by the cisgender girls’ families, one of those girls beat one of the transgender girls named in the lawsuit in a Connecticut state championship. It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children, and they don’t address a real problem. They’re unscientific, and they would cause serious mental health damage to both cisgender and transgender youth.
Policies permitting transgender athletes to play on teams that match their gender identity are not new. The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even qualify. California passed a law in 2013 that allows trans youth to compete on the team that matches their gender identity; there have been no issues. U SPORTS, Canada’s equivalent to the U.S.’s National Collegiate Athletic Association, has allowed transgender athletes to compete with the team that matches their identity for the past two years.
The notion of transgender girls having an unfair advantage comes from the idea that testosterone causes physical changes such as an increase in muscle mass. But transgender girls are not the only girls with high testosterone levels. An estimated 10 percent of women have polycystic ovarian syndrome, which results in elevated testosterone levels. They are not banned from female sports. Transgender girls on puberty blockers, on the other hand, have negligible testosterone levels. Yet these state bills would force them to play with the boys. Plus, the athletic advantage conferred by testosterone is equivocal. As Katrina Karkazis, a senior visiting fellow and expert on testosterone and bioethics at Yale University explains, “Studies of testosterone levels in athletes do not show any clear, consistent relationship between testosterone and athletic performance. Sometimes testosterone is associated with better performance, but other studies show weak links or no links. And yet others show testosterone is associated with worse performance.” The bills’ premises lack scientific validity.
Claiming that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in sports also neglects the fact that these kids have the deck stacked against them in nearly every other way imaginable. They suffer from higher rates of bullying, anxiety and depression—all of which make it more difficult for them to train and compete. They also have higher rates of homelessness and poverty because of common experiences of family rejection. This is likely a major driver of why we see so few transgender athletes in collegiate sports and none in the Olympics.
On top of the notion of transgender athletic advantage being dubious, enforcing these bills would be bizarre and cruel. Idaho’s H.B. 500, which was signed into law but currently has a preliminary injunction against its enforcement, would essentially let people accuse students of lying about their sex. Those students would then need to “prove” their sex through means including an invasive genital exam or genetic testing. And what happens when a kid comes back with XY chromosomes but a vagina (as occurs with people with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome)? Do they play on the boys’ team or the girls’ team? This is just one of several conditions that would make such sex policing impossible.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time people have tried to discredit the success of athletes from marginalized minorities based on half-baked claims of “science.” There is a long history of similarly painting Black athletes as “genetically superior” in an attempt to downplay the effects of their hard work and training.
Recently, some have even harkened back to eras of “separate but equal,” suggesting that transgender athletes should be forced into their own leagues. In addition to all the reasons why this is unnecessary that I’ve already explained, it is also unjust. As we’ve learned from women’s sports leagues, separate is not equal. Female athletes consistently have to deal with fewer accolades, less press coverage and lower pay. A transgender sports league would undoubtedly be plagued with the same issues.
Beyond the trauma of sex-verification exams, these bills would cause further emotional damage to transgender youth. While we haven’t seen an epidemic of transgender girls dominating sports leagues, we have seen high rates of anxiety, depression and suicide attempts. Research highlights that a major driver of these mental health problems is rejection of someone’s gender identity. Forcing trans youth to play on sports teams that don’t match their identity will worsen these disparities. It’s a classic form of transgender conversion therapy, a discredited practice of trying to force transgender people to be cisgender and gender-conforming.
Though this can be hard for cisgender people to understand, imagine someone told you that you were a different gender and then forced you to play on the sports team of that gender throughout all of your school years. You’d likely be miserable and confused.
As a child psychiatry fellow, I spend a lot of time with kids. They have many worries on their minds: bullying, sexual assault, divorcing parents, concerns they won’t get into college. What they’re not worried about is transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams.
Legislators need to work on the issues that truly impact young people and women’s sports—lower pay to female athletes, less media coverage for women’s sports and cultural environments that lead to high dropout rates for diverse athletes—instead of manufacturing problems and “solutions” that hurt the kids we are supposed to be protecting.
The US women’s soccer team, the best female soccer team in the world, has played exhibition games against high school boys and lost badly. The Canadian women’s hockey team, the best women’s ice hockey team in the world, practices against high school boys, and loses.
There is no rule against women joining the NBA, or NHL, or MLS, women just aren’t capable of competing with men at the top levels of sport.
oop! maybe look up the context for that one. in short, it was a scrimmage, and as part of a structured practice routine that the US national women’s soccer team participates in as part of a youth soccer training program. not exactly representative of a competitive game, same for the women’s hockey team.
that being said, its basically a non sequitur. i’m not denying that physical differences exist, they absolutely do, but the idea that these physical differences are the primary reason our sports are structured the way they are isn’t historically accurate. there were potent social forces at work, including social forces which prevented women from participating in sports at all.
in any case, the fact that in some sports, some professional women athletes lost to some high school boy athletes in games that explicitly do not count for competition does not, to me, have some larger implications on the field of women’s sports more generally. the unquestioning acceptance of reports on these practice games for fun with children as some kind of proof that female athletes just can’t perform as well as men reveals, to me, a tendency towards confirmation bias. tell me, do you know if any prominent men’s soccer teams have ever lost to children during a practice match? i certainly don’t. exhibition matches aren’t newsworthy events. the fact that these ones were has much more to do with validating the ancient belief that men are just better than it does with genuine interest in a demonstration of friendly sport for high school kids.
So they lost on purpose? My goodness, they would not do that, the ridicule is too huge.
And the segregation of sports is the only reason we have paid professional female athletes today. Get rid of sports segregation and only have open leagues (which the “men’s” leagues are already), and you will have basically zero professional female athletes left.
And if you don’t care about women’s teams losing to teenagers, how about the time a low ranked male tennis player destroyed Venus and Serena Williams back to back, because they confidently stated they could beat any man ranked outside the top 200? And losing that was a blow to their reputations, they did not lose on purpose, they truly tried to win.
if you can’t conceive of the difference between a practice game and a game for competition, especially in the context of an explicitly educational goal, you can have fun with that. the idea that the segregation of sports is the only reason we have professional women athletes is a hilarious misunderstanding of why people like sports, and why women’s sports have been growing in popularity for decades. the idea that single games in single sports indicate anything substantive about “women’s sports” as a concept is silly.
you can live in your bubble of ignorance all you like, and insist that centuries old appeals to the superiority of the male body mean much at all to a modern context. the reality is, these stories about women losing matches? they aren’t relevant. i could not give a single shit. ranking people on numbered lists is not the only appeal of sports for audiences or athletes. Serena Williams is still a popular and well liked athlete, and you didn’t even give that dude’s name, so whatever reputational damage seems to have both not affected her rise to prominence, and not boosted her opponents reputation, so like, who fucking cares?
why do you know so much about this? what relevance does being able to tell people all the times women lost matches in sporting events have to your daily life? to what end are you telling people these things? the reality is, you don’t value women’s sports, so you’ve scoured the internet for justifications for that belief. but people who do find value in these things don’t look at things the same way. weird ass comparisons trying to judge the objective winner by category mean fuckall to me, i like watching cool people do cool shit with their cool bodies, and the fact that you can’t conceive of people being interested in the physical skill of people that don’t look like you is firmly a you problem.
Only because a women’s division exists where she can shine. In the open division she would not be good enough to gain any fame, and be just as forgotten as Karsten Braasch.
Because people like you keep arguing that women can compete in the open leagues, and we only have women’s leagues to segregate them from the men. This is not true, women are perfectly free to join the NBA and compete against them men, but at that level of competition they would just lose.
I value women’s sports far more than you do, because I understand their need to exist. Without them female athletes would not win in the majority of sports.
hypothetically, because we don’t live in a world where women’s sports don’t exist.
i’m not arguing that women can compete in open leagues, im disputing the assertion that women’s leagues only exist to segregate them from men. no. there are quite a few reasons women’s sports exist in the form they do today, and a pretty big reason was sexism. ignoring the long history of female exclusion from sports leaves you blind to the modern realities of sexism and misogyny in sports.
hypothetically, because we don’t live in a world where women’s sports don’t exist.
you can confidently assert that women wouldn’t have a place in sports if we did things differently all you want, but… uh, we don’t do things differently, have never done things differently, and if it were up to you will never do things differently. women’s sports and men’s sports are segregated, and have been since women started to do sports. there was never a time when women and men did sports together, and it was later decided that women just couldn’t compete. the assumption was that they couldn’t, even before women started to have professional sports, and honestly before we even had a solid scientific understanding of human sexual dimorphism. the idea that women’s sports came out some rational notion of fairness is wrong. its simply not what the historical arguments against having women in sports ever were.
Once again, women are allowed in the “men’s” leagues. You can damn well bet if any woman was competitive they would be drafted into those leagues. They are not, because the difference between men and women in sports is the equivalent of several years worth of high dose steroids.
Women’s sports exist to give them a professional platform where they can be competitive and entertaining, because in the open leagues they would just get crushed in most sports.