It is amazing how much a minuscule substrata (trans athletes) of a tiny substrata (trans people) have come to dominate American politics. What is less amazing is just how bad faith the attacks on trans athletes has been. The right wing in the United States has always been about bullying, something we are seeing in full force in Trump 2.0.
Our biggest concern should be protecting vulnerable people, and there are few populations more vulnerable to bullying, to violence, to exclusion than our trans community. Kids suffering from gender dysphoria are vulnerable in myriad ways that can lead to suicidal ideation and beyond.
So, is there nothing to the criticisms about trans participation in sports, especially trans girls and women? At the risk of alienating a lot of people on my side of the aisle, I’m not sure we can say so.
At the same time, most of the criticisms are in bad faith, are driven by bigotry, and are going to make the lives of lots of people, mostly girls and women more difficult — there are going to be far more cases of creepy adults doing gender checks on girls and women because they see trans athletes everywhere even though statistically they are nowhere.
I only included about three tentative pages on trans athletes in my book Don’t Stick to Sports, but I think they bear repeating in full here, (minus endnotes):
Of Terfs and Turf: Trans Athletes in Modern Sport
One of the most treacherous hot-button issues in recent years has been the question of trans athletes competing in sports. This is, by and large, a culture war creation. Thus far it seems that right-wing politicians in states across the country are passing laws aimed to oppress. As of December 2022, eighteen states had passed laws restricting or banning trans girls from competing in a wide range of sports, even though in the vast majority of those states there had been zero cases of such athletes trying to compete. In other words, these were symbolic red meat, anti-trans gestures, not policies aimed at addressing real issues their constituencies faced.
Given the suicide rates and other issues faced by trans teens and young adults, this cruel approach seems especially loathsome, acts of hostility to no particular end other than the hostility itself. For many on the modern right, the cruelty is not an ancillary outcome to their policies—the cruelty is the point. And this is not to say that there are no concerns; just because the modern right is often cruel does not mean concerns about protecting girls’ and women’s sports for girls and women should be ignored.
The difficulty becomes clear when we consider the fact that there is a history of men competing as women in sports—not as trans athletes, but as cheaters. But the consequences of these few incidents have been rigorous and ugly, sometimes resulting in gender policing in which invasive (and thus abusive) policies have emerged to monitor girls and women. In general, girls and women deserve their own spaces for sport. In general, trans athletes should be able to participate in all aspects of society, including sports. But the space in between “in general” is the issue—and sports science will have to be a major part of the solution. This is especially alarming since sport science has often been the pretext for abuses to begin with. Yet the vast majority of sport science has been a force for good, for better performance but also for better athlete health. So we will need answers to myriad questions. At what point have individuals transitioned enough, through hormone blocking and other efforts, to ensure that they are not just men competing as women? At what age should this happen? What are the possible side effects, especially for adolescent athletes?
Once puberty hits, boys and girls are different physically and athletically, and men and women are definitely different—and when we are talking about high levels of sport in particular, any added advantage to an athlete can be a massive difference maker. What qualifies as a good high school boys shot put, for example, might be elite in women’s competition. Yet the overwhelming majority of trans athletes, especially trans girls who want to participate in sports, simply want to have fun, to play, to be part of a team. It is enormously cynical to imagine that any significant number of trans athletes who want to compete are tenting their fingers and scheming in hopes of winning women’s Olympic medals. It would be naive to imagine that there won’t be some fraction of men attempting to abuse those rules, or that there won’t be cynical politicians and others pushing other conservative men to playact as trans to prove a larger political point. But making sweeping laws for bad actors seems cynical at best.
A number of very vocal women, some of them quite famous, have earned the label “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs). They have been unremittingly hostile to transgender people, especially trans women. And they have revealed that their demand to protect female spaces is often more derived from anti-trans bigotry than anything else. But the uncomfortable question is, what are female spaces? And the uncomfortable answer has to recognize some number of bad faith actors who are abusing unclear, undefined concepts of transgenderism to do some horrible things—things far worse than simply taking a medal podium spot at a high school track meet. We shouldn’t make cruel and symbolic policies at the expense of trans teens, but maybe we should recognize that the biggest threat to women, in America and worldwide, has always been men, and that men acting in bad faith—and more than that, simply bad men—will find, use, and exploit loopholes. We shouldn’t confuse outliers for means. We also should not assume that outliers don’t exist. In other words, when writing laws and policies, we should not write for the outliers, but we need to take them into account. We do a disservice to the discussion to pretend that there are no debates here, and that all feminists who are skeptical of opening the doors to all self-declared trans athletes are necessarily TERFS—and even if they are, that all of them are always wrong all the time. Pretending that these are easy issues does a disservice to transgender athletes, to women, to girls, and, frankly, to all of us.
I don’t think my views have changed, really, but I want to augment some of this as the issue has become a major flashpoint for increasingly hostile right-wingers, and especially since there is some evidence that the trans issue, whatever its presence in reality, had an impact on Trump’s victory last November.
Let’s call this the Riley Gaines effect. To refresh (or inform, if you’ve been lucky enough to avoid this little cretin in your daily life) Riley Gaines has become a leading light in the anti-trans in sports movement. Never has someone gotten so much from finishing tied for 5th place in a swim meet. Gaines tied with Lia Thomas, a trans swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania, for 5th place at the 2022 NCAA championships in the 200-yard freestyle. This was Gaines’ highest individual finish in an NCAA championship meet, though she was part of a silver-medal winning 4x200-meter relay team at the NCAA championship in Greensboro in 2021, and is a 12-time All American, in no small part because in NCAA swimming an insane number of people earn All-America status, but also because Riley Gaines is unquestionably a good swimmer. But again: She tied for 5th. Had Thomas not been in the meet, then, she would have placed … 5th. She literally did not lose a place to Thomas.
And indeed in the initial moments after the event Gaines expressed wholehearted support for Thomas. But in the conservative outrage ecosystem things move fast. Thomas, instead of Gaines, got to hold the 5th place trophy at the awards ceremony, Gaines held the 6th-place trophy, and had a 5th place bauble mailed to her.
Thus began a career far more lucrative than being a very good but not-even-close-to-great swimmer: The “I’m the Real Victim” Right-wing grift. You know the buzzwords, so say them along with me: “Reverse racism!”; “They’re shoving their lifestyle down my throat” (conservatives are very big on things they purport to oppose going deep in their throats, for some reason); “Why isn’t there a white history month?”; and anything they have to say about “DEI” or “woke,” which will always be comically misinformed.
A lot of what we have seen in Gaines might be called the “Amy Fisher effect.” Fisher, last week’s front-page grifter, was the young woman who did not gain admission to the University of Texas at Austin a few years ago. She sued, blaming affirmative action. And the recent iterations being what they are, Fisher went a long way in destroying affirmative action, mediocre white people’s excuse for their own mediocrity since at least the 1970s. But the thing is, just as Riley Gaines would have finished in 5th place no matter what, with or without affirmative action in place, Amy Fisher would not have gotten into the University of Texas at Austin. Her numbers were simply not good enough — and by the way, every state undergraduate institution in Texas has, by law, a set standard for automatic admission. At most universities it is the top 10% of your graduating high school class. At UT-Austin and A&M-College Station that number used to be top 7%, but those institutions being the flagships that they are, lowered that number to the top 5%. Either way, Fisher did not gain automatic admission. So any claim that she was somehow kept out by unqualified minorities falls apart once you realize that the problem with Fisher’s admissions file was Fisher’s admission’s file. Similarly, if Riley Gaines had been better on the day, she would have beaten the women who placed ahead of rather than tied with Lia Thomas.
And yet, bad cases make bad laws, and Lia Thomas is a bad case. If, after all of this, my allies on the left turn on me, I’m sorry, but there IS something untoward about someone who was already a Division I men’s swimmer turning around and in just over a year transitioning to compete in Division I women’s sports. I don’t know what the scientific answer is. I don’t know enough about hormone suppression and testosterone rates and muscle mass and all that to draw a conclusion. But I have a hard time believing that a one-year transition for someone who is already a men’s varsity athlete is sufficient. There are biological differences between men and women and it feels as if Thomas dolphin kicked through a loophole that the NCAA may not have thought through.
There is such a long history of cheating in sport — including cases of men pretending to be women, not because they were trans, but simply to compete — that sex testing emerged for a reason. Sex testing has an ugly history, but surely there has to be some standard, some baseline expectation.
Because the fight for women’s sports — a major theme in Don’t Stick to Sports — has been long and difficult. Girls and women deserve to be able to play, and they deserve a fair playing field. There was a time when girls had to sue to be able to play Little League baseball (when there was no Little league softball), and once they won that case, the republic did not fall, even though during the Little League years girls are, in the aggregate, ahead of boys developmentally.
My support for women’s sports is pretty clear. Part of this comes from having been a track and field athlete in high school, college, and beyond. At all of those levels men’s and women’s teams train together, share coaches, share facilities. Although technically we were on different teams, I always refer to the women on my college track team as my teammates. After college I coached high school and college track at a wide range of programs, and I always coached both boys and girls, men and women. In Massachusetts I was technically the head coach of a girls high school track team, but really I was the sprints and jumps coach for the whole program, boys and girls. In Virginia I was the head coach of both boys and girls cross country and track and field teams, and my girls won a state championship. I have coached men’s and women’s sprints and jumps at the Division I and Division II levels, and I served a year as an interim head coach of both men’s and women’s cross country at the Division II level. In every one of those cases the men and women trained together, though obviously at times men and women grouped off for various aspects of workouts, especially where competition was involved.
And yet it seems to me that with the exception of elite sport this is a tempest in a thimble. We are talking about so few athletes, most of whom just want to play at a level so far removed from anything any of us should care about that you have to wonder just what the issue really is. And my answer to that comes back to it being about bullying, about being cruel to the weak just to be cruel.
The amount of bandwidth this takes up on social media relative to the number of actual trans athletes that there are in the entire world is mystifying, but then the number of men prepared to go and beat up a trans person in a bathroom (to defend their daughter! Always to defend their daughter!) relative to the number of trans people there are in the world is similarly out of balance. It’s a matter of some men just wanting to beat up on people they perceive as weaker than themselves, and bonus points if they will never have to be tested on their posturing. This, I’m afraid, is all part of the assholization of America. And the assholization of America is, ultimately, what the debate about trans athletes really seems to be about.