Transgender men and women have a right to play any sports they choose and legislation should reflect that.
The world needs to stop debating, as if the question is hypothetical, whether transgender individuals have the right to simply exist alongside their peers. These individuals are real and valid human beings. They do have the right. End of story.
Unfortunately, this dehumanizing debate continues to sink its claws into the sports world. Content warning: the following article contains information about the current debate over rights of transgender individuals; some of the quotes included invalidate transgender folks.
Since Mississippi enacted the first anti-trans law of the year on March 11, preventing transgender individuals from being on cisgender sports teams, the South Dakota governor has enacted an executive order to remove transgender girls from cisgender girls’ sports teams.
Montana, North Dakota, Tennessee and Arkansas have similar sports bills in the system already, each one having been passed by a single state legislative chamber as of March 12th.
On March 26, an attempt at banning transgender athletes from school sports got a hearing. All in all, 29 state legislatures are debating bills that favor preventing transgender women and girls from joining cisgender women and girls on their sports leagues. So … why?
South Dakota governor Kristi Noem tweeted, “Only girls should play girls’ sports.” Okay, so by that logic, transgender women and girls should play girls’ sports. Noem invalidates and otherizes transgender individuals by claiming they are not real members of the genders that they identify with and excluding them from opportunities afforded to cisgender individuals.
In an opinion for The Washington Post, professional soccer player Megan Rapinoe addresses the contradiction in the choice to prevent transgender women and girls from participating in sports apparently for the sake of cisgender women and girls.
“We can celebrate all girls and women in sports while ensuring trans people aren’t discriminated against,” Rapinoe writes. “That is why all women must stand up and demand that exclusion is not done in our name.”
According to USA Today, toxic gender norms and definitions fuel individuals promoting anti-trans legislature, while all major medical associations, “including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association,” support and validate transgender identities in adults and children alike.
Reasons offered by those advocating for anti-trans legislature are based in fair competition. However, according to Dr. Erin Vilain in an interview with NPR, these fears are not based in fact.
Vilain says the real question to ask here is “whether trans athletes are systematically winning all competitions,” and that the answer is no. Transgender athletes, regardless of age, do not have a substantial advantage over cisgender athletes.
“Every sport requires different talents and anatomies for success,” Vilain said. “So, I think we should focus on celebrating this diversity, rather than focusing on relative notions of fairness.”
The Los Angeles Times calls this new wave of anti-trans legislature “conservative political grandstanding—a sequel to the intolerant ‘bathroom bills’ a few years ago that sought to ban transgender people from the bathrooms of their sex—that can only result in a non-solution to an almost nonexistent problem.”
And that’s what this is—a way to discriminate against transgender individuals. We’ve been through this before. Let people exist and offer them the opportunities that their peers are also offered. Evidence supports the inclusion of transgender women and girls in traditional women and girls’ sports teams. Any other argument is a façade for transphobia.