04-15-2021, 10:55 AM
This is a tough question, and with any tough question, I find it helpful to approach it with grace and an open heart.
With high school sports, I start from the premise that these are kids, and that being a kid in high school can be an absolute crucible at the best of times. Kids want to belong so desperately. I remember the pain of gay classmates in high school. How ostracized they often felt. How afraid they were of admitting to who they were. Having grown up in a somewhat conservative, religious area in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a background debate about whether this was a choice. Well, seeing that pain ended that debate for me as a kid. Who would choose that much pain?
Just as that identity was not a choice, neither is being transgender. It can take time to come to grips with one's identity, to be sure, particularly when one faces such consistent pressure to conform to the behavioral norms associated with your biological sex at birth. But it is who they are. A thought experiment for the men in the room: imagine how you would feel if everyone started calling you a woman, referring to you as "her" or "she," and mocking you if you claimed you were a man? Imagine how frustrating that would be. How painful. How wrong it would feel.
So, that's where I start. When, say, a 16-year-old transgender girl wants to play soccer and she is told she has to play with the boys or not at all, my heart hurts for her. She should be able to experience the highs and lows of athletic competition like the rest of us. There has to be a way to make it work. (And I say girl intentionally. The rationales I have heard in favor of requiring athletes to compete against others of their sex assigned at birth have solely addressed the perceived unfairness of transgender girls/women competing against cisgender girls/women. Just as the so-called "bathroom bills" were designed to keep transgender girls/women from using restrooms with cisgender girls/women, it smacks of a paternalistic attempt to protect girls from "non-girls," not to protect boys from "non-boys," though I obviously recognize physical differences between men and women.)
And then I consider cisgender girls competing in high school sports who want fair competition. I want them to have fair competition, too. Now, for the vast majority of high school athletes in the country, this is a non-issue. The vast majority of teams and athletes in individual sports haven't been faced with this issue, meaning the heated debate in some corners of the media is not a good faith attempt to solve a problem, but an opportunity to gin up division and emotion, along with the eyeballs that those things bring. And the examples of transgender girls beating cisgender girls at big tournaments are vanishingly small. And I think we all recognize that no high school student is transitioning from male to female solely to do better in sports. That's just not a thing.
This is mostly a hypothetical problem. Painfully, it leads some cable news programs not as an effort to come to a good faith solution that works for both transgender and cisgender athletes, but as yet another front in the culture war. A "bathroom bill" by another name. And heartbreakingly, one thing that would diminish this problem--earlier hormone treatments, surgeries, and other treatments to prevent going through the puberty associated with your sex assigned at birth, leading to transgender girls who lack mature male traits, for example--is being outlawed in an increasing number of states. That certainly calls the motivation of the legislators proposing these solutions to "protect girls' sports" into question.
And the issue is very much here for someone like Caster Semenya, who is intersex but was assigned female at birth, who competes as a woman but who nonetheless has natural testosterone levels exceeding those considered acceptable for women's competitions. She's competing with the body God gave her, and in order to continue to compete as a woman, she must take hormones to decrease her natural levels of testosterone to a level deemed sufficiently female by the IAAF. Imagine identifying as a woman and having female sex organs, competing and training and being an Olympic Gold medalist, and being told you're not female enough to compete as a woman.
But we are problem-solvers here on this board, so even if this argument is mostly a hypothetical one, it's reasonable to expect that it might not remain so hypothetical forever, as acceptance of transgender identities increases and we recognize the physical and psychological benefits to transitioning earlier. So, whatever the answer is for high school, I hope people approach it from the perspective that all of these kids are kids. In a difficult environment. Who all deserve to feel the rush of athletic competition while living truly as themselves.
Interestingly, I don't sense a lot of opposition to the NCAA policy, which is what kicked off this topic and presumably made it germane for discussion here. If the NCAA policy were adopted by state high school associations, would that satisfy those who argue for requiring athletes to compete against others of their sex assigned at birth? Would you like to see earlier transitions so that a transgender girl hasn't gone through puberty as a male and thus potentially acquired what might be a durable physical advantage? Recognizing the psychological damage that results to transgender girls who are forced to compete as boys or use boys' bathrooms, what is your proposed solution to stop that damage from occurring?
With high school sports, I start from the premise that these are kids, and that being a kid in high school can be an absolute crucible at the best of times. Kids want to belong so desperately. I remember the pain of gay classmates in high school. How ostracized they often felt. How afraid they were of admitting to who they were. Having grown up in a somewhat conservative, religious area in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a background debate about whether this was a choice. Well, seeing that pain ended that debate for me as a kid. Who would choose that much pain?
Just as that identity was not a choice, neither is being transgender. It can take time to come to grips with one's identity, to be sure, particularly when one faces such consistent pressure to conform to the behavioral norms associated with your biological sex at birth. But it is who they are. A thought experiment for the men in the room: imagine how you would feel if everyone started calling you a woman, referring to you as "her" or "she," and mocking you if you claimed you were a man? Imagine how frustrating that would be. How painful. How wrong it would feel.
So, that's where I start. When, say, a 16-year-old transgender girl wants to play soccer and she is told she has to play with the boys or not at all, my heart hurts for her. She should be able to experience the highs and lows of athletic competition like the rest of us. There has to be a way to make it work. (And I say girl intentionally. The rationales I have heard in favor of requiring athletes to compete against others of their sex assigned at birth have solely addressed the perceived unfairness of transgender girls/women competing against cisgender girls/women. Just as the so-called "bathroom bills" were designed to keep transgender girls/women from using restrooms with cisgender girls/women, it smacks of a paternalistic attempt to protect girls from "non-girls," not to protect boys from "non-boys," though I obviously recognize physical differences between men and women.)
And then I consider cisgender girls competing in high school sports who want fair competition. I want them to have fair competition, too. Now, for the vast majority of high school athletes in the country, this is a non-issue. The vast majority of teams and athletes in individual sports haven't been faced with this issue, meaning the heated debate in some corners of the media is not a good faith attempt to solve a problem, but an opportunity to gin up division and emotion, along with the eyeballs that those things bring. And the examples of transgender girls beating cisgender girls at big tournaments are vanishingly small. And I think we all recognize that no high school student is transitioning from male to female solely to do better in sports. That's just not a thing.
This is mostly a hypothetical problem. Painfully, it leads some cable news programs not as an effort to come to a good faith solution that works for both transgender and cisgender athletes, but as yet another front in the culture war. A "bathroom bill" by another name. And heartbreakingly, one thing that would diminish this problem--earlier hormone treatments, surgeries, and other treatments to prevent going through the puberty associated with your sex assigned at birth, leading to transgender girls who lack mature male traits, for example--is being outlawed in an increasing number of states. That certainly calls the motivation of the legislators proposing these solutions to "protect girls' sports" into question.
And the issue is very much here for someone like Caster Semenya, who is intersex but was assigned female at birth, who competes as a woman but who nonetheless has natural testosterone levels exceeding those considered acceptable for women's competitions. She's competing with the body God gave her, and in order to continue to compete as a woman, she must take hormones to decrease her natural levels of testosterone to a level deemed sufficiently female by the IAAF. Imagine identifying as a woman and having female sex organs, competing and training and being an Olympic Gold medalist, and being told you're not female enough to compete as a woman.
But we are problem-solvers here on this board, so even if this argument is mostly a hypothetical one, it's reasonable to expect that it might not remain so hypothetical forever, as acceptance of transgender identities increases and we recognize the physical and psychological benefits to transitioning earlier. So, whatever the answer is for high school, I hope people approach it from the perspective that all of these kids are kids. In a difficult environment. Who all deserve to feel the rush of athletic competition while living truly as themselves.
Interestingly, I don't sense a lot of opposition to the NCAA policy, which is what kicked off this topic and presumably made it germane for discussion here. If the NCAA policy were adopted by state high school associations, would that satisfy those who argue for requiring athletes to compete against others of their sex assigned at birth? Would you like to see earlier transitions so that a transgender girl hasn't gone through puberty as a male and thus potentially acquired what might be a durable physical advantage? Recognizing the psychological damage that results to transgender girls who are forced to compete as boys or use boys' bathrooms, what is your proposed solution to stop that damage from occurring?