Say what you mean to say

If we all manage to make it out alive from the culture wars of this decade, heads bloody but unbowed, may the prevailing sentiment be this: it was never about what they claimed it was about.

Banning books in schools was never about protecting kids. Battling “woke” and “CRT” and “DEI” was never about fairness or righting a wrong. And the transphobia surrounding women’s sports has never been about protecting women and girls.

The amount of trans girls and trans women participating in organized sports is miniscule to the point that it renders the anti-trans argument ludicrous on its face. The NCAA president in December said that of the 510,000 college athletes, ten are transgender (and didn’t specify if any of those ten are trans men). Per Parker Molloy, between 2004–when the IOC allowed trans women to compete–and 2022, of the 24,158 female competitors in the Summer Olympics, just one was trans (or 0.004% of the women athletes).

Louisa Thomas in the New Yorker recently explained that “the drive to ban transgender athletes from sports has never been about numbers.” 

In 2023, Ohio’s House of Representatives passed a bill banning trans girls from competing in girls’ sports as early as kindergarten. It was called the Save Women’s Sports Act, conjuring an image of barbarians at the gate. But, when the journalist Pablo Torre went looking for these girls who were, purportedly, breaking all the records and stealing all the opportunities, he found that, when the efforts of the measure began, there was one trans varsity athlete in Ohio: a backup catcher. (She wasn’t very good.) When the governor of Mississippi signed a bill in 2021 barring trans athletes from competing in sports according to their gender, supporters of the bill didn’t present evidence of trans athletes at public schools in the state. Around that time, the Associated Press contacted two dozen lawmakers who were sponsoring legislation to prohibit transgender girls from joining girls’ teams at public high schools, in addition to reaching out to conservative groups that were supporting the bills. In most cases, no one could cite any problematic instances of transgender participation. Many of the bills’ biggest advocates did not know whether there were any transgender athletes in their states at all.

It’s one of the more perverse episodes of tilting at windmills in American politics while unfortunately getting gobs of people to cheer it on.

Michael Waters for Defector notes regarding the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act”:

In fact, what this federal bill has done is take a conversation that has been unfolding for decades in elite sports, decontextualize it, and apply it to all school sports—to intramural college basketball as well as second-grade soccer. These are sports where the competitions are more about building a social community than they are about winning. Many of these kids would not consider themselves athletes in the strict sense; they play because they want to have fun and make friends. Writing trans girls and women out of these spaces is purely about exclusion—it’s an attempt to push trans people out of fundamental parts of American public and social life.

No kids in tee ball or ones in pee wee soccer where it’s just a gaggle of the drunkest-looking birds changing collective direction repeatedly for an hour as the ball escapes the cluster are impacted negatively by a trans peer being out there. (The fear is that there will be a positive impact.) Banning tikes from sports is just for cruelty’s sake. 

Survey analysis finds people who don't watch women's sports and/or think women are less deserving of media attention than men's sports and/or think women should prioritize being attractive are more likely to oppose transgender women's inclusion in women's sports. These are not people with any serious investment in “protecting” female athletes. 

And now this week the (waning) Department of Education scrapped a Biden administration guidance that called for NIL resources in college athletic departments and revenue sharing payments be proportionate between men’s and women’s sports, lining up with Title IX mandates. It would seem for anyone so concerned with “protecting” women’s sports that cutting funds from it doesn’t quite jibe with the supposed chivalry.

But that once again just gives up the game. It’s not about the thing the proponents of exclusion claim it is. It’s just about the exclusion (and, for some, eventual eradication). A Daily Wire host said as much at a conservative conference less than two years ago. The President of the TV has formally declared that the American government now refuses to recognize the existence of trans people.

So for anyone who opposes participation by trans women in sports, just say what you actually mean. Don’t code it. Own it. Be brave enough to put down your stake on that side of history. You’re backed by the federal government and now the NCAA–what’s the worry? 

If you’re transphobic–and by that I mean believing that trans people should be excluded from certain public spaces or situations–I can’t get you to grow empathy or see past your own blinded discomfort. I’m not going to spend time explaining the available science shadowed by so much confirmation bias. 

I would merely request that you be up front about your convictions. Because this game of using women athletes that you don’t actually care about as a shield is the opposite of bravery on behalf of girls and women. It’s tired and exposed.