In February 2020, the families of three cisgender girls filed a federal lawsuit against the Connecticut Association of Schools, the nonprofit Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference and several boards of education in the state. The families were upset that transgender girls were competing against the cisgender girls in high school track leagues. They argued that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in high school sports and should be forced to play on boys’ teams.
Conservatives around the country have jumped on the question. Attorney General Merrick Garland was pressed on the issue during his confirmation hearing last month. State legislators around the country are pushing bills that would force trans girls to compete on boys’ teams. In describing the Connecticut case in the Wall Street Journal, opinion writer Abigail Shrier expressed a representative argument: when transgender girls compete on girls’ sports teams, she wrote, “[cisgender] girls can’t win.”
The opinion piece left out the fact that two days after the Connecticut lawsuit was filed by the cisgender girls’ families, one of those girls beat one of the transgender girls named in the lawsuit in a Connecticut state championship. It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children, and they don’t address a real problem. They’re unscientific, and they would cause serious mental health damage to both cisgender and transgender youth.
Policies permitting transgender athletes to play on teams that match their gender identity are not new. The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even qualify. California passed a law in 2013 that allows trans youth to compete on the team that matches their gender identity; there have been no issues. U SPORTS, Canada’s equivalent to the U.S.’s National Collegiate Athletic Association, has allowed transgender athletes to compete with the team that matches their identity for the past two years.
The notion of transgender girls having an unfair advantage comes from the idea that testosterone causes physical changes such as an increase in muscle mass. But transgender girls are not the only girls with high testosterone levels. An estimated 10 percent of women have polycystic ovarian syndrome, which results in elevated testosterone levels. They are not banned from female sports. Transgender girls on puberty blockers, on the other hand, have negligible testosterone levels. Yet these state bills would force them to play with the boys. Plus, the athletic advantage conferred by testosterone is equivocal. As Katrina Karkazis, a senior visiting fellow and expert on testosterone and bioethics at Yale University explains, “Studies of testosterone levels in athletes do not show any clear, consistent relationship between testosterone and athletic performance. Sometimes testosterone is associated with better performance, but other studies show weak links or no links. And yet others show testosterone is associated with worse performance.” The bills’ premises lack scientific validity.
Claiming that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in sports also neglects the fact that these kids have the deck stacked against them in nearly every other way imaginable. They suffer from higher rates of bullying, anxiety and depression—all of which make it more difficult for them to train and compete. They also have higher rates of homelessness and poverty because of common experiences of family rejection. This is likely a major driver of why we see so few transgender athletes in collegiate sports and none in the Olympics.
On top of the notion of transgender athletic advantage being dubious, enforcing these bills would be bizarre and cruel. Idaho’s H.B. 500, which was signed into law but currently has a preliminary injunction against its enforcement, would essentially let people accuse students of lying about their sex. Those students would then need to “prove” their sex through means including an invasive genital exam or genetic testing. And what happens when a kid comes back with XY chromosomes but a vagina (as occurs with people with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome)? Do they play on the boys’ team or the girls’ team? This is just one of several conditions that would make such sex policing impossible.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time people have tried to discredit the success of athletes from marginalized minorities based on half-baked claims of “science.” There is a long history of similarly painting Black athletes as “genetically superior” in an attempt to downplay the effects of their hard work and training.
Recently, some have even harkened back to eras of “separate but equal,” suggesting that transgender athletes should be forced into their own leagues. In addition to all the reasons why this is unnecessary that I’ve already explained, it is also unjust. As we’ve learned from women’s sports leagues, separate is not equal. Female athletes consistently have to deal with fewer accolades, less press coverage and lower pay. A transgender sports league would undoubtedly be plagued with the same issues.
Beyond the trauma of sex-verification exams, these bills would cause further emotional damage to transgender youth. While we haven’t seen an epidemic of transgender girls dominating sports leagues, we have seen high rates of anxiety, depression and suicide attempts. Research highlights that a major driver of these mental health problems is rejection of someone’s gender identity. Forcing trans youth to play on sports teams that don’t match their identity will worsen these disparities. It’s a classic form of transgender conversion therapy, a discredited practice of trying to force transgender people to be cisgender and gender-conforming.
Though this can be hard for cisgender people to understand, imagine someone told you that you were a different gender and then forced you to play on the sports team of that gender throughout all of your school years. You’d likely be miserable and confused.
As a child psychiatry fellow, I spend a lot of time with kids. They have many worries on their minds: bullying, sexual assault, divorcing parents, concerns they won’t get into college. What they’re not worried about is transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams.
Legislators need to work on the issues that truly impact young people and women’s sports—lower pay to female athletes, less media coverage for women’s sports and cultural environments that lead to high dropout rates for diverse athletes—instead of manufacturing problems and “solutions” that hurt the kids we are supposed to be protecting.
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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What are you talking about?
Separate teams are the only thing that lets biological women have any possibility to compete
Biological men are stronger faster and more resistant, this is a fact
Now downvote me to hell and then ask an admin delete my comment for being transphobic
no, they mostly exist to protect cis male egos from the "devastation" of not only competing against, but very possibly being beaten by, women (feel free to look up some of the endless list of examples where a women beat a man/some men, not even in anything physical, so even stuff like chess, so the men proceeded to change the rules, to make sure they could never be hurt like that again, the poor snowflakes)
no it isn't fact, it's a circumstance that has arisen from the discrimination and segregation of women from sports, not some natural or biological fact. Also there are millions and millions of women out there that could easily wipe the floor with any man at literally any sport you test them at, they're just never given a chance, because see aforementioned reason.
So you know you're a wilfully ignorant transphobe, you just can't help yourself but declare it to the world because you simply can't keep all that hate pent up inside your turd of a brain..
Won't see me complaining about the trash taking itself out.. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
This is a such a terrible take that you are either unhinged from reality or a right-wing troll.
Wut
Can you name one from all these millions?
I am not even going to reply to the rest of your comment since it doesn't really say anything worth debating
Lol?
We have the whole human history of sports which is very well documented, going against what you are saying.
Did you actual read the studies? Because that is patently false and ignores hormonal effects on the human body. Please actually read and educate yourself on the science. Endocrinology is not something taught in high school biology.
Hey I've seen this line of thinking before!
Just so you understand what logic you are using. Would you tell a commenter like this they need to challenge their beliefs?
Your stance relies on your gut feeling and bias, not historical or biological understanding. I won't spend my time linking studies you won't read, seems like a lot of others have done that already. But the reason you keep getting told you are wrong is because you are literally ignorant of the facts. Not because everyone else is virtue signaling or being more PC like a white nationalist would say.
You should think more critically about your beliefs.
What facts am I ignoring? Link em and I will read them
I think your comment applies to yourself better than to me so here are the links I suggest you to visit:
Marathon world records
200m dash world records
Powerlifting world records
What you will notice if you pay attention is that across history there has never been a moment in which the female record was better than the male one, that is a fact you can very easily verify yourself
This is what my stance relies on, not gut feeling or bias
Those links are missing the point of this thread. We aren't talking about men's world records, we are talking about trans women playing sports.
I'm just gonna link to the last time I talked about this issue.
TL:DR No one is saying testosterone doesn't have an effect. When trans women have been on hormones for two years there is no statistical difference between trans and cis women. Trans women suppress testosterone via medication, which leads to lower levels than the average cis woman.
You are missing the point.
Here is the point he was arguing:
Well, you can look at objective metrics across different racial categories (to the extent that those are even meaningful to begin with, which is incredibly debatable), and you'll some minor trends and statistical noise but nothing super meaningful. And even within those trends, there'll still be so much variation that the predictive power will be very weak.
Whereas males having significantly more muscle mass than females, largely mediated through sex hormones, isn't really something that can be denied if you value objective data at all. If you choose one random cis man and one random cis woman, the man will have more muscular mass and strength than the woman the vast majority of cases, and this has meaningful effects on performance in some sports. You can't really say similar things across racial categories (which, again, do not really have meaningful biological definitions to begin with).
Cringe
And they didn't say we shouldn't have any teams, they said teams not be divided by sex.