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It’s not about “fairness” in sports. It’s never been about fairness in sports. That might be what you hear coming out of the mouths of the Republican politicians who supported banning trans athletes from girl’s and women’s sports at every conceivable level with the a bill passed in the United States House of Representatives earlier this week, but those are just words. The point, as has been made elsewhere before and after the passing of this bill, is to alienate trans people, to demonize them, to push them out of society and into isolation.
There is no evidence that a trans girl or trans woman has some kind of advantage playing in sports leagues for girls and women, and it’s not because no one is looking for any. As Sydney Bauer recently put it in a piece you should take the time to read right now or after finishing this one, the reason for these “advantages” have to do with the idea that Men are Superior at sports, and therefore — due to both this perceived hierarchy and the transphobic belief that trans girls and trans women aren’t really girls or women, leads you straight to the patriarchal idea that they have some kind of advantage. You know, the same kind of attitude and belief system that allows some no-talent, zero-athleticism slob to believe that they’d be anything but a smoking crater after receiving a serve from Serena Williams, simply because they’re a man.
Sport as we know it was reserved for only certain classes of people when it began to be organized – men. Then as time went on we allowed women access to these spaces and then created parallel structures for them to compete alongside the existing power structures. Inherently, the way we organized sport was for men to be the dominant group on the hierarchical structure. Its why we don’t call many pro leagues “men’s sports” but do call make sure to call their counterparts “women’s sports.”
Since men’s sports were established first and organized the way they were, there have been few considerations for mixed gender sports or using different groups to categorize how sports teams are formed. Thus, for transfeminine people such as myself, transitioning from men’s sports to women’s sports is seen as purposefully moving down the gender hierarchy of sports and purposefully putting myself in a position to prey on weaker competition. To compensate for this thinking, sport organizers largely adopted strict criteria for transfeminine athletes to medicalize themselves in order to shape their bodies into what a perceived cisgender female athlete is like to compete fairly.
As Michael Waters got into at Defector just this morning, and Lauren Theisen wrote at the same outlet back in November when the House’s bathroom ban for incoming representative and trans woman Sarah McBride became their post-election opening salvo, it’s not really about sports, or about bathrooms. It’s about control: over women, over bodies, over lives, over the concept of gender itself. As Waters put it:
And, really, let’s be honest here—enforcement is not the goal. This legislation is designed to frighten, to keep trans girls from ever even trying to join a sport, and, perhaps more to the point, to keep trans girls from coming out as trans at all. The troubling thing about this legislation, if it becomes law, is that its biggest repercussions will unfold just outside the frame. We won’t know the names of the trans kids who decide not to pursue sports because of the scrutiny they are sure to face, or who put off transitioning in the first place because doing so would jeopardize their chance at an athletic scholarship.
And from Theisen:
Given the implausibility of these laws’ effective enforcement, and that Mace has shown no hint of satisfaction at McBride’s quick acquiescence, it’s fair to conclude that this is not really about bathrooms at all. Rather, it’s about trying to reinforce the strictness of two social categories of gender, especially as that dichotomy starts to feel increasingly fragile. These bathroom laws don’t protect anyone from trans people but do make life harder for trans people. They’re intended to provoke anxiety in their targets—another clumsy punishment aimed at those who Republicans don’t like, whose lives aren’t pledged in service to fundamentalist Christian ideals. They offer us a pretense of safety from their wrath on the condition that we retreat from our lives.
The vote was mostly along party lines, with a couple of Democratic representatives from Texas voting in favor, so there isn’t necessarily a ton to glean from this in terms of which party believes what — how much of Dems voting against this has to do with their actual thoughts and how much is rooted in simply opposing the Republicans in a “we tried” vote can be difficult to untangle when there are hundreds of representatives. However, I did want to point out that Lori Trahan, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and who also happens to be the lone woman in Congress who has played Division I sports, spoke out against the bill.
Trahan, you might recall, spearheaded a campaign to save the minor-league teams that MLB planned to disaffiliate, but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and a whole lot of other legislation ended up taking precedence, leaving MLB to act, unchallenged, and shrink the minors. Trahan’s statement is… a mixed bag. It’s very politician-esque, is the thing, with a lot of couching and equivocating about genuine fears and concerns that parents might have about trans women in sports and the “fairness” and “safety” problems those might bring up, with the idea being playing up that these young trans girls in rec leagues just want a community, and to have fun, and don’t need to be subjected to the same rigorous testing and thorough checks as college athletes or Olympians or pros. The problem is that statements like that — which cede ground to the idea that there is anything to fear from trans women in sports — only furthers the agenda of the right, in othering trans women and forcing them to feel as if isolation, detransition, or never transitioning at all are their only choices to be left alone by society.
I single out Trahan here solely because it’s a point worth making, not because she’s making some kind of unique mistake. But it’s going to take stronger, more forceful language with a more obvious position than this, which comes off as “sure they make a few good points, however” before discussing the strays that younger trans girls might catch from the legislation to change things. Whether anyone in Congress has that kind of language and belief in them remains to be seen, but given how quickly they folded on which bathroom Sarah McBride — and any other non-representative trans people in the House — have to use, it’s understandable if you already feel that you know the answer.
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