I don’t want to be transphobic. I really don’t. And, I believe, in most respects I am not. Males and females should be allowed to express their gender any way they choose, and that expression should not deny them any rights or privileges extended to any male or female1.
Except when there is compelling interest in segregation by sex. Which, to my mind, is really just the cases of prisons and sports.
I’ll save the prison argument for another time, because an op-ed published on CNN has me thinking about the sports argument, the defense of which I find to be some of the weakest attempts at argument not attempted by a marijuana prohibitionist.
The governors of Indiana and Idaho signed into law bans on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors … The Kansas Legislature overrode Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto and banned transgender girls, from kindergarten through college, from playing on girls’ sports teams. And just last week, the US House of Representatives passed a federal anti-trans sports bill … According to some GOP politicians, such legislation is essential to ensure “fairness” and protect children. … These Republicans have simply repackaged old anti-gay rhetoric and scaremongering to target transgender people.
CNN: Opinion: What the anti-trans movement is all about
I remember the 90s! I don’t remember gays and lesbians trying to force female sports teams to accept male athletes, though. The opening of this op-ed conflates two issues—gender-affirming healthcare for minors and allowing males on female sports teams. That way, the writer can shame you with the fact that major medical organizations support the former while eliding the fact that major athletic organizations are undecided on the latter.
Another thing I remember about the 90s was Dennis Rodman. I remember him wearing makeup and eyelashes, dressing in dresses and lingerie, exotically coloring his hair, wearing multiple piercings. I don’t recall him demanding to play in the WNBA because of his feminine gender expression.
Also in the 90s, I remember a female placekicker, the first female to play NAIA college football with males, a person named Liz Heaston. For some reason, being a female football player on a male team was never a controversy. Accommodations were made for her showering and changing.
I guess the 90s were a different time, when feminine men and masculine women had no issue playing on male teams.
The op-ed writer continues trying to make the analogy that today’s anti-trans-sports issue is the same bigotry as the 2000’s anti-gay-marriage arguments, such as the “equal rights, not special rights” slogan promoting the false idea that recognizing gay marriage rights takes something away from straight people.
Social conservatives have argued that these bans are about fairness and paint transgender people as taking things away from cisgender people.
CNN: Opinion: What the anti-trans movement is all about
Well… yeah. If there are females competing in athletics that have been specifically segregated for female bodies, and a one of the females is beaten by a male body, she has had something taken from her—a first place trophy, a medal, an All-American recognition, a scholarship, even a spot riding the bench. Why is this clear and obvious sleight against females so easily dismissed by the pro-trans crowd?
The whole reason we feminists fought for Title IX in the 1970s was so that females, who have bodies that are, at every level and every age, at every level of competition, slower and weaker than male bodies, could compete against each other and thereby have fair and equal access to sporting opportunities.
We didn’t come up with Title IX because sporting opportunities were lacking for athletes who like to wear dresses and makeup.
Trans people are underrepresented in sports titles, and many politicians proposing these laws can’t even name a single transgender athlete in their states. At most, they’ll find a single successful trans athlete such as Lia Thomas, working on the presumption that sports are only fair if trans people never win.
CNN: Opinion: What the anti-trans movement is all about
I don’t know about that first point; Dennis Rodman has five championship rings. Yeah, I know, somebody will tell me Dennis Rodman isn’t trans. But, really, how do we know? Because he says so? See, that’s the problem. What if The Worm in 1997 tells us he’s Denise now and demands a trade to the WNBA? And then, the 6’8″ musclebound phenomenon who dominated rebounding against men in the paint is now happily welcomed into the WNBA to absolutely crush all the competition?
Let’s talk about Lia Thomas. I keep hearing the argument that the pro-trans-sports issue is about inclusion. As if we don’t allow Thomas to compete against females, Thomas is left without any way to swim. But Thomas was swimming on the male team (and performing poorly) for years before deciding swimming against females would feel more comfortable (and lead to better results).
What’s stopping Thomas from continuing to swim on the male team (besides being a poor male athlete)? We’ve somehow managed to have a couple dozen females get playing positions on all-male football teams, and their gender expression being contra to the males they play alongside has never been an issue.
You can’t say male bodies aren’t athletically superior to female bodies; over a century of athletic recordkeeping proves it wrong. You can’t say that lowering testosterone is going to make up for all the other advantages (thicker bones, smaller joint angles, larger hearts, larger lungs, etc.) granted by male puberty. You can try making the “Michael Phelps was a swimming freak, too” argument that pretends a male swimming body against female swimming bodies is akin to a perfect male swimming body against elite male swimming bodies. You can make complicated appeals based on questionable science that usually start with the word, “Actually…”
But then the world will see a Lia Thomas beating competitors by three pool lengths, or a 6’2″ 220lb. Hannah Mouncey being defended by a female half that size, or a mediocre middle-aged male weightlifter become Laurel Hubbard and take a spot from an elite female Tongan weightlifter, or a Fallon Fox break a female MMA competitor’s skull, or what will surely be more examples of who will soon be not just the washed-up middle-agers and failed college also-rans, but better male athletes now dominating more women’s sports, and now those arguments sound as silly as a Scientologist explaining how an E-meter reads your Thetans.
We have sports for two types of bodies: male and female. If you’ve got one of those bodies, you have access to sports. Everyone with enough athletic talent is included. But if you open up female sports to male bodies, then some female with enough athletic talent to compete with females will be excluded to make room for a male (who usually didn’t have enough athletic talent to compete with males).
It’s completely mind-blowing to me that this isn’t painfully obvious to everyone. I think what happens on the Left is that we so desperately wish to erase all forms of bigotry and discrimination and provide everyone with equal standing under the law and equality of access that we go too far and try to erase all differences and pretend we’re all equal. Males and females are different, and we can be different, and celebrate those differences, and still be equals It’s that same mindset behind “Latinx;” oh, no, we can’t recognize a culture that embeds masculinity and femininity into their very language! If we call people “Latinos,” we’ll be leaving behind the Latinas, and if we say “Latinos and Latinas,” we’ll disrespect the intersexed and agendered, so let’s call them all “Latinx,” which 97% of them hate!
1 I use the term “male” to refer to that half of humanity built to produce millions of tiny motile sex cells meant to fertilize the large fixed sex cell the “female” is built to produce; understanding, of course, that about 1 in 200 humans aren’t strictly “male” or “female” due to intersex conditions, but who still produce either a tiny cell or a large cell or both or neither but no other kind of sex cell; and granting that disease, illness, or abnormality may render a “male” or “female” incapable of producing sex cells, nevertheless, their genetic programming was designed for such purpose. I refuse to use the nonsense phrase “assigned male at birth,” as if obstetricians look down at the penis and testicles of infant they’ve delivered and mull over the complicated determination of that infant’s sex. Seriously, has a doctor ever seen the penis on a baby and said, “Nurse, we have a female here, I’m assigning her female at birth.” Sex is observed. It is an immutable physical reality of being a mammal. Gender, now that’s a fluid, dynamic, self-determined feature of mind and personality, and it may differ wildly from the expectations set for one’s sex. I thought, at least at some point in the past, we all understood that. I thought that’s what the whole trans in transgender meant; that your gender has transitioned away from the expectations for your sex. Somewhere along the line, it’s been decided that transgender means magically changed sex, like a clownfish, bearded dragon, or copperhead snake. And adherence to this one absurd, flawed point is what makes the whole issue like religion to me—if you believe the magical flying tortured God-Jew died for your eternal sins, why, it all makes sense!