One of the very worst contributions to the trans sports debate is an article like this: a journalist who admittedly knows little and cares less about sports, who nonetheless is comfortable expounding authoritatively about why other people have the wrong attitude about sports. It even incudes old chestnuts like implying that men who "pretend" to care about girls' high school sports are, I don't know, either bigots or perverts, or both.
This really isn't that hard. There are many people--especially people who have or had daughters playing high school sports--who think that girls' sports are valuable, and recognize that after puberty girls on average aren't competitive with boys on average (seriously, if you've ever been to a cross country meet where the girls and boys teams race together, it's not a subtle difference). And fairness matters! Even if you're not a bigot, or consumed with the delusion that your daughter is going to compete in the Olympics, or for a NCAA team.
Journalists who find this to be such an alien concept should perhaps ask themselves, do I really have anything valuable to contribute to this debate?
The piece's point is that the heated rhetoric around trans kids in sports -- on display in this comment -- is downstream of a youth sports culture that has raised the stakes so high that any perceived competitive threat feels existential. And that raising of stakes hurts most kids in sports who will never go to the Olympics or even get an athletic scholarship or even have the money to afford a travel team. It's burning out young athletes before they turn 13, pricing out low-income families, and replacing what should be healthy childhood activity with another anxiety machine for UMC parents.
And my point is, the article's point is incorrect and, to anyone who's been involved in (completely unremarkable) youth sports, profoundly odd. It is very possible to simultaneously (1) think that youth travel sports are, for most of the kids and families who get sucked in, a scam, a waste of time, and a waste of money (I agree!); and (2) object to certain aspects of trans girls participating in girls' sports without, in this article's words, engaging in a "trans athlete panic." A desire for fair competition in non-elite high school athletics can have, and usually does have, nothing to do with a "win at all costs" deformity in the hearts of parents or athletes.
To put it another way: if you're concerned about the trans athlete debate being overheated, writing an article which locates opposition to trans athletic participation in some kind of dysfunction (like bigotry, or overzealous youth athletic culture) isn't the best way to get there.
“To be clear, partisan identity, religious conviction, and philosophical disagreement about the relationship between sex and gender still contribute to this issue resonating so widely. I am not arguing that youth sports explains all of the opposition.”
"But its [youth sports] centrality in American culture helps illuminate something specific: why this issue has such traction among a suburban, middle-class demographic that might otherwise be open to trans rights and why the framing of “protecting our daughters” lands so effectively."
and:
"Since the 1970s, youth sports have grown more and more professionalized in the United States, crowding out recreational leagues and pickup games. By now, the consequences of this shift are well documented: increased injuries and burnout among children, priced-out low-income households, and strained family relationships.
To this list, I want to add another possible consequence: It has also cultivated a parental psychology unusually primed for the Right’s moralizing campaign against trans individuals."
The article is clearly arguing that middle-class parents who have qualms about trans girls participating in girls' sports have those concerns only because youth sports culture has "primed" them to oppose trans rights.
Yeah, I think we just see these passages differently tbh. I think the "only" in your last paragraph is doing a lot of work that I just don't see in the text myself.
Honestly, kudos to you for engaging in such good faith here. I do find it somewhat odd (surprising? disappointing?) how so much of the ostensibly *liberal*, centrist, moderate, or libertarian-curious newsletter commentariat is so anti-trans (they would disagree with my framing, of course).
The article acknowledges that there will likely be real fairness concerns starting at a high school level and that elite competition begins in high school even in the more calm countries it points out.
However, many people are stirring fear about youth sports at elementary and middle school ages. These people are clearly wrong, their children will not be bowled over be giant trans children because the sexes don't have major differences in athletic ability at that point. The only way you would care about this is if you had gotten carried away in a panic (as extensively argued by other sources already) or if you cared deeply about even minor differences in capability because of a highly competitive environment.
I didn't know youth sports had become so tense, so this article explained a reason people would care about trans children in sports that was new to me. I don't think the article contradicts anything you have stated here.
Jerusalem, I had high hopes for this publication, and those hopes remain. But it is the over-analysis of what are fundamentally 80/20 issues that gives me serious concern for the survival of liberalism in America.
The trans narrative was pushed onto Americans from above, and before long, anyone who pushed back against the established position was branded transphobic. The result is a debate that has become so intellectualized by “liberals” that it has lost touch with where most Americans actually stand. Until very recently, the existence of boys and girls, men and women, was not a contested claim. It was simply agreed upon by virtually everyone. Tinkering with something that fundamental is playing with fire, and the backlash from the right was entirely predictable.
I do not believe a Democrat can win the presidency without a significant course correction on this issue. And the stakes are too high to get this wrong. Most Americans want a straightforward life. They are not ideologically opposed to treating people with dignity, but they are not prepared to abandon categories they have always considered self-evident.
On the specific question of youth sports, the answer is not complicated: there are boys sports and there are girls sports. If liberalism cannot find its footing on something this basic, then we are, unfortunately, watching it lose its grip on the country it once spoke for. I would really like to see liberals placing some boundaries around certain (toxic) ideas. If that doesn’t happen then the illiberal right will continue their winning.
Is it also not about common sense? The position that Democrats have been forced to make is that there’s *no* difference between post-pubertal females and trans girls (natal males; go ahead, tell me I’m transphobic for using correct terminology). If we are the last bulwark of truth, how is the electorate supposed to regard our repeating such a barefaced lie?
I'm not a fan of travel sports. My kids will not be doing them.
But even without travel teams, regular high school sports are still very competitive. And people are always VERY concerned about fairness. That's why women's sports were created in the first place, because women literally can't complete against biological men.
I think this is an excellent piece about how supercharged youth sports has gotten. But it seems shoehorned into the trans debate. Lots of kids do get burned out before 13. Also, many youth sports are already co-ed before age 13, so the trans issue is not much of an issue? Before that age, there are not huge advantages to being male, and in fact, many girls the same are are physically bigger than the boys.
I think that's exactly the point of the article. It concedes that there is a relevant difference by high school and that it isn't feasible to demand that elite high school sports not exist, so there will probably be legitimate interests in enforcing segregation by birth sex in many sports starting at that age.
However, it is true that there are demands being made that segregation be enforced earlier by many Republicans and that this is a nonsensical demand unless you are using girls' sports as a disposable wedge issue or if you truly do care about competitive balancing to an unhealthy degree.
An article that spoke about the insane professionalization of youth sports would be welcome. Attempting to graft “this is why people who notice the obvious differences between post-pubertal male and female athletic performance are, if not transphobes, driven by poor incentives” is entirely unhelpful, especially when it includes a dollop of talking mostly about ages before puberty, when that’s not the concern being raised!
You were also guilty of this by trying so hard to whittle down Moulton’s point about his daughters being about only this precise moment in their lives. We have brains! We can see what you’re doing!
P.S.: It’s ironic that Dr Harper is quoted here, not on her research, which has failed to find that the gap between female and trans female physical performance is negligible enough (her term of art), but on her observations about the salience of this issue. Dr Harper has a tremendous amount of integrity about the facts she reports from her research, so instead the article tries this end-around.
"To me, self-identified NARP and skeptic of arguments made by grown men about little girls, the Seth Moultons of the world publicly concerned about their young daughters getting “run over” by a “formerly male athlete” has always read as adults using trans kids to score political points."
The author didn't use the word "pretend," admittedly, but equating concerns with trans girls playing girls' sports with "adults using trans kids to score political points" certainly seems to me like an accusation of insincerity.
Um as a trans person heavily involved with athletics for my entire life that coaches Cross country and Track at the Highschool level and your take is just so wrong. While your assertation that after puberty the difference between boys and girls is correct, but outside Varsity level competition who cares? The entire purpose of school based athletics is to teach kids skills and give them opportunities for professional development. Also you picked the entire wrong sport to epitomize the disadvantage of having trans participation because you can have trans people run and just not score in the race, Co-ed races are done all the time in small competitions its literally not a big deal. For state level championships yeah I'm all for banning trans people, but the entire thrust of this article is that the reason we have youth sports is for youth development opportunities not training the next crop of professional athletes. You strawman what the author argues and advocates for.
Also Moulton was commenting about his prepubescent children so you can see why many people including the author, are skeptical that this is actually about fairness in sports. How many youth sports do co-ed activities with kids under 10. So unless you have a super nuanced take on this you don't get to appoint yourself the arbiter of whose qualified to talk about the issue or theorize on the true motivations of people against trans kids playing sports. There is a huge difference between there is no athletic difference between the sexes and in prepubescent children inclusion and widespread participation and opportunist are the more important value than how "fair" the completion is. The author of this article very much says that this is an issue of changing inclusion criteria as children age and athletic performance is more important and impacted by the physical development of male and female athletes. Basically if you against prepubescent children and non varsity secondary school sports, there is a very strong assumption that "fairness" isn't the actually concern
If your solution is to let trans girls participate with cis girls, but not compete with cis girls, I'm actually all for that. If a trans girl wants to run her 100 meter heat with the girls, but have her time count against the boys (or in an open category), fine. I think that's the best way of balancing the interests here. But: (1) this only works for sports in which direct or indirect physical contact between the athletes isn't a part of the competition, so basically just swimming, diving and running; (2) most trans activists in my experience are not OK with a solution like this.
More to the point of my comment and your response, though: I really don't agree with the idea that the competitive aspect of sports only matters at the highest level of performance, like a state or NCAA championship, or the Olympics. Competition isn't the only thing about sports, but it is an important thing, even when kids are involved and even when no one involved is athletically remarkable. Indeed, this was one of the major arguments that feminists made back in the 60s and 70s when there was real resistance to interpreting Title IX in a manner that required high schools and colleges to establish womens' sports programs: that if you didn't provide sporting opportunities in which women could reasonably expect to compete and win, you weren't providing sporting opportunities to women at all.
Fair may have been a bit to hot in my initial comment. I brought up the alternative participation of non-scoring because you have experience in the sport of Athletics, which has plenty of opportunity to do arrangements like this, and is this a terrible example sport to use arguing against trans participation.
Also yes, winning and the completion itself is a major aspect of all levels of sport, the argument is that it’s way less of a priority for certain groups of athletes, and the places where winning and the fairness of the competition is the main overriding priority are few and far between for youth sports. For the highest levels of competition yeah fairness can override inclusion, but that doesn’t make sense broadly across the board.
I think with casual sports at all ages you can easily handle trans people by just using playground team pick rules. Let each team alternate picks so they have equal chance to get the strong/tall/fast people, no matter what the reason is they stand out from the average player. If somebody's so much better that their presence still unbalances the game, have them count as two players. Competitive high-level sports are a whole other thing though.
Fairness matters to me cuts a multitude of ways though that makes this issue really difficult for me. Fairness matters on who's included in the we as much as it does who gets the trophies and stands on the podium.
I suppose if you don't believe in the concept of gender that there's a wide range of social codes for who's included in girls and boys this all gets very easy. If all we're concerned with is competitive fairness based on sex well this is easy. Medicalized trans girls will basically never ever make cuts by some point in high school after they start altering their hormonal mix and won't ever get back in in NCAAs, olympics or even your town's 5k or marathon. At which point they lose access to a wide range of social opportunities, scholarships, honors etc.
I don't have a clear sense of answers for how you would go about making sure all the ideas of fairness are being supported by the school. Unserious intramural sports aren't the same thing at all. This is just a different kind of unfairness that at the margin there are less opportunities provided by the state for already outcast people.
There's a couple of different ways you can think about the concept of fairness here. One is in connection with the question "why do we biologically segregate sports competition in the first place?" There is a VERY long-standing, VERY durable observation that certain biological differences have a potentially large effect on athletic performance: sex, obviously, but age as well. There's generally no point in having post-pubescent men and women who are close to the same age compete athletically, because the women will have almost no chance of winning, and most will struggle even to be competitive. The same would be true of asking middle-school boys' athletes to compete against college athletes. In cases like these, most people would object to the competition as being unfair to the athletes disadvantaged for obvious biological reasons. Hence not just the creation of girls' sports, but the fact that any 5k fun run will chop up its competitive tiers into 5-10 year age ranges within each sex.
One of the unfortunate turns that the "trans sports" debate has taken is that trans activists and allies tend to argue, often implicitly, that no one REALLY cares that much about "fairness" in this sense of the word. Instead, they argue, any argument that sex-segregation in sport is a valuable concept, for reasons having nothing to do with anti-trans animus, is insincere and just a cover for anti-trans bigotry. That's stupid and unproductive (and this article repeatedly gestured at it).
Another sense of "fairness" is: well, given that it will help trans girls to allow them to compete with cis girls athletically, how do we balance the desire to help trans girls in that way with the desire to maintain sex-segregation in sports for all of the reasons it has always been desirable to do so? And there's no easy answer! But this article's approach of pretending that the only people who think this is even a difficult question are bigots, or perhaps weirdos laboring under the misapprehension that their daughter is the next Caitlin Clark, is profoundly unhelpful.
I think for me the central question is something like how well can we include trans people in sports and help them build the social emotional bonds that sports provide and maintain fair outcomes. My basic answer is sometimes.
I agree there is a lot of people who aren't' very invested in sports who are making this more confused than it ought to be.
I always hear anti-trans people complaining that the advantages trans girls have in sports are so significant that they must be proactively countered (ie, all trans girls must be prevented from participating in all girls' sports), but despite years of complaining, I have yet to see any significant indication that trans girls *actually* win more often? Riley Gaines built a whole media career around tying for 5th place with a trans girl. Whatever advantage individual trans girls may have doesn't even seem consistent for individuals, as trans girls who participate in girls' sports do not win consistently, they seem to have records pretty comparable to cis girls (or worse). Perhaps because "sex" is not actually the primary determiner of athletic ability! Perhaps because medical transition is a physically rigorous process that changes your whole body and may or may not improve your athletic abilities, not a magical shot to make you better at sports.
The first example is irrelevant - shocking that world-class athletes are very good at what they do!
The 15 year old boys beating the women's US soccer team is just transphobic propaganda. Not saying something like that didn't happen, just that it was essentially a casual practice that conservative news ran with because it confirmed their transphobic worldview (and because its the kind of thing that gets repeated uncritically for years in forums like this by people like yourself). You sound like those asshole guys who insist they could beat a WNBA team with their hands tied behind their backs despite having zero personal athletic ability.
The fact is that statistical differences across 50% of the population does not tell you anything meaningful about any individual. Sure, those aggregate differences do exist, but you're still better off - if you care about fairness - determining the actual traits that give actual advantages in specific sports, and then segregating by those traits. Instead of saying "well, you're a woman who is chemically closer to a man, who is more competitive with men, but because you have that XX we're calling it fair, have fun." It just suggests you care more about discriminating against trans people than about actual fairness.
"The first example is irrelevant - shocking that world-class athletes are very good at what they do!"
You seem to be misunderstanding the example again. Literally the best female runner in the world can be beat by thousands of men, many of them high school runners.
"The fact is that statistical differences across 50% of the population does not tell you anything meaningful about any individual. "
We aren't talking about random 50% of the population, we are talking about competition.
The fact that the fastest female runner in the world can beat a male couch potato doesn't matter. The fact that she would be smoked by a bunch of male high schoolers does.
And again, if there's "really just no comparison" then why aren't trans girls consistently trouncing all the other girls they compete against? In the places they're allowed to compete with girls, they generally do no better than cis girls. They don't win every race, not even close. The transphobic right has to hunt around for examples of trans girls "stealing" trophies from cis girls (many of those being 3rd place, 4th place, etc) because there does not seem to be any kind of systematic advantage trans girls have in practice! As long as that's clearly not happening, I don't really care that much about theoretical differences in aggregate between cis boys and cis girls (which is what these comparisons are always about)
Easily the most poorly crafted and wrong column I've read at The Arguement. Simply someone who doesn't like sports who sought a route to criticize those who do. I am progressive or liberal or whatever describes a lifelong Democrat who lives in a deep blue coastal city and supports the disadvantaged. Yet I enjoy watching and playing sports and have raised kids who play them. The underlying issue is akin to the debate over the undocumented - fairness. People can be sympathetic to the plight of someone struggling with gender identity or someone escaping awful war torn poverty but also recognize the issue of fairness as problematic. And if you somehow think pre-pubescent boys and girls are the same athletically you are in a nice protective bubble that is outside reality.
I don’t see why “fairness” means you need to exclude people from leagues that are about having fun rather than pushing someone towards professional athletics. The issue this article identifies is about why leagues about having fun have been eliminated.
The idea that there are only two types of athletic competition--either quasi-professional, or purely for fun--is wrong, and one of the real blind spots in the article's view of sports. High school sports, in particular, are very competitive even when no one involved is likely to compete at a higher level! The vast majority of high school athletes, even those who have success in high school, are perfectly aware that they won't be competing at the NCAA or professional level. Yet they still care about their competitions, and how they perform in them, even when the object of their concern may appear silly or nonsensical to an outsider. And a lot of the real-world tension of trans participation in girls' athletics has come from precisely these sorts of competitions, and concerns over fairness in those competitions. Placing in the top 10 in a cross country race between two nobody teams in a who-cares league may seem utterly pointless to an outsider; but it can matter very, VERY much to the girl who got nudged out and ended up finishing 11th.
"Fun" leagues are typically coed and don't exclude anyone. Competitive leagues divide based on biological sex because of the athletic advantages males have.
I honestly don't know why they didn't decide to have an actual sports fan write this. Any piece on the politics of sports that basically starts with "I hate sportzball" is going to turn off any sports fans who are readers. I like the editors here, but this was really an own-goal.
It is unclear to me how much of the prepubescent sports thing is sociological. A notable part of it definitely is if you look at throw like girl experiments. When I start basketball club there's a difference but a lot of it is about politeness. But there is a non-zero difference amongst elementary cross country runners but it's hard to dismiss the boys are told to go play outside more explanation.
Props to Jerusalem for scheduling an article about how journalists are out of touch back-to-back with one that includes the sentence “It has been brought to my attention, however, that my blasé attitude toward sports makes me an outlier” played completely straight
Female children are almost always allowed to compete on "open" or boys teams because those teams are not restricted for competitive reasons. The only issue is when males wish to compete in a restricted female category, a category that exists solely to exclude people with typical male advantages. Equal opportunities for females do not exist in sports without sex-segregation.
Anyone should be able to answer the framing question: do females who wish to play basketball only with other females have the right to exclude males? If the answer is "no", there are consequences in many other domains in American life. If "yes", then what exactly is under discussion?
i continue to be baffled why more lines if reasoning do not focus on the sex segregation of sports as basically the Original Sin of this issue debate.
If the concern was truly one of “equal rights” you might expect the ask to be for sex segregation of sports to be ended entirely and for all sports to be coed.
But that’s an even *less* popular position with both parents *and* activist (as well as female athletes) as doing away with coed sports would decimate access to sports teams for many girls / women due to differences in physical abilities between males and females.
And given that so many are already willing to accept segregation of sports based on something like sex or gender (even if they do caveat that acceptance on claimed gender identity not birth sex), it’s quite hard to insist that one definition versus the other is a question of civil rights violation.
I don't think it's very baffling if you go and read the discussions around Title IX from the time.
Title IX treats *equal opportunity* as more important than identical treatment. Congress concluded that if schools were forced into one fully sex-integrated competitive system, females would lose opportunity, scholarships, and development chances. So the law broadly bans sex discrimination but allows separate teams when when that result is more equal opportunity overall.
The law accepts some sex separation because otherwise integration results in a de facto exclusion of females from sports.
of course, but if you allow segregation by “sex” and various other types of arbitrary segregation (age, zip code, weight even)…it also gets harder to argue that changing the definition of “sex” to from “biological sex” to “self identified gender*” (either one way or the other) is a “civil rights” issue. It’s as arbitrary as many of the other normalized forms of segregation in sports.
Plus, if access to *some* sports (opportunity) is maintained no matter which definition you choose. You do not see legal cases involving young gay boys who want to play soccer (a sport most schools only offer to girls instead of football, which is typically boys only) because several of their friends play soccer. Those boys are assumed to have “opportunity” to play football.
I may not be understanding your point. Sports leagues and divisions exist for many reasons. There are senior's leagues, weight classes, youth divisions grouped by school grade. I don't think anyone objects to their existence and people are free to create any sort of league they wish.
There are a number of universal, legally protected classes and they are sex, race, color and religion and in some other realms, disability and national origin. In another country those may not be protected. And we could change that here if everyone really wanted to. It's changed before.
But because sex is a legally protected class, we have laws like Title IX that say it's required in some situations to create opportunities for females because of natural male advantages. It is illegal to prevent someone from playing sports because of their sexual orientation, but it is not required to provide a gay-team or sports that gays might prefer on average because, like trans individuals, they are not at a natural disadvantage that requires a protected restriction.
So permitting males onto female teams may be a Title IX violation. A trans-man on a female team is not, because that person is not male. And a trans-man or a trans-woman is free to play on male team because male protections under Title IX are not warranted. Trans people or people of any gender or sexual orientation do not remove opportunity from males; trans people on female teams may remove opportunity from females.
That's not a "norm" but a result of the biological reality that there are two sexes shared by all vertebrates, whereas the current concept of gender identity is an academic or political distinction. ACLU lawyers argued in front of the Supreme Court that there were more genders than could be easily listed and people might change genders from day to day. Which is why it's not a legally protected class in most situations, but sex is.
My only point was just to raise that everyone, regardless of biological sex / self identified gender, is inherently limited in what sports they have the “opportunity” to play in school for economic (schools cannot afford to offer every team sport to accommodate everyone students preference) and social preferences (regional and sex based affinities for one sport over another across a population), so even if a trans boy or trans girl is prevented on playing a sport they prefer due to a disagreement over how “sex” is defined (biological assigned or self identified gender) they ultimately still have the opportunity to play one set of offered sports…or the other.
That there is a check valve allowing biological females to play male sports is a quirk we all seem to accept, but ultimately it does not change the question of opportunity being offered.
1) Why are we getting lectured about sports by someone who doesn't care about sports? It's very irritating. It's like having a guy write an article explaining that menstruation is no big deal actually. This perspective is both uninformed and unwanted.
2) The sloppy and slanted statistics, consistent with the author not caring about sports. We get a uncritical citation of the claim that there are 10 trans athletes in the NCAA, a number with no independent sourcing or verification. Meanwhile, more thorough and better-documented statistics, like those from shewon.org, are ignored completely.
3) The goofy logic. A huge amount of weight is being put on this argument that trans athletes are rare. But does that actually imply letting them compete is a good policy? No. Does that mean people should stop supporting laws barring males from women's sports? No. It's like the author knows she can't justify the policy she supports, so she has to fall back to this weak meta-argument instead.
I don't think this author is competent to be writing about either sports or gender. All this person is doing is regurgitating the worst progressive arguments from social media (and Joanna Harper in this specific case). The original reporting about sports competition could have been fine as its own thing.
The Argument Mag should aim for something higher than just parroting Joanna Harper talking points IMO.
I coach sports in middle school in a school based track and cross country team and an elementary basketball all comers club. By middle school the difference between boys and girls is profound. Like it’s easy to forget this if you just watch but when we put in the times they’re notably different in events where .1 seconds is notable they have several second gaps.
I think there’s a significant difficulty in that as I understand it trans advocates goal is normalcy and sex sports advocates is competitive fairness and these aren’t really able to be aligned. Personally I tend to think while trans advocates don’t love this as a solution having categories for trans women and trans men wouldn’t impact many sports very much. Yes i recognize it would pose difficulties for team sports and it does mean trans boys and girls have a lower level of absolute opportunity than cis boys and girls for many things. Also the anti-trans position that trans girls should just play with the boys doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. If by high school a trans boy has been supplementing testosterone or a trans girl has been suppressing it for years you’re back to the root of the boy/girl problem. It’s not competitively fair. Even if you think not literally accepting that trans girls are girls is bigotry this seems better than the status quo in my state which is no even acknowledging their existence at all.
How many trans athletes do you need to accommodate that this would be unreasonable. I coach in a very progressive state, and in 8 years of coaching there has been 1 trans athlete competing at the state level. Yeah not feasible for all sports but in ours it certainly is. Realistically how many people are qualifying for high level completion. For other sports it’s easy JV and other sub varsity, who gives a shit, varsity sport governing bodies make the call. Field hockey generally gets along just fine with boys playing on the team because of lack of a boys team. I’ve seen only 1 boy take up that opportunity in my 8 years of coaching. Wrestling also has boys and girls of the same weight class wrestle if there aren’t enough to do sex segregated. Like this has never been a problem until bad faith conservative actors made it one by deceiving good natured people, that the entire GOP MO lie about everything and blame it on democrats.
This is a question that i basically agree with the premises but our parents won’t in my view and schools are set up not to say no to parents at this point in our state.
In the context of Florida k12 politics they can participate in separate categories seems like it would be a big step forward. It would be illegal for me to use their first name so I’m trying for baby steps.
Yeah i can imagine that landscape being super tough when the cultural inertia is so against it, I wish states like mine would make thing easier for everyone else if we backed off the most extreme stuff here. Like in MA we don’t have a law like CA did about non disclosure of trans status to parents. Our laws simply state trans people can’t be discriminated against, but they way most districts interpret this is that disclosure would be discriminatory as the influence of LGBT groups have over public servants due to the cultural inertia in the other direction, what admin wants to be tarred and feathered as a bigot. Would probably be a lot easier for people in conservative states if progressives didn’t push leftist social policy as empirical fact.
The whole point is that at young ages is high level competitiveness the main goal of organizing youth sports? Middle schoolers are 10-13, is the goal of them doing school sponsored sports to make the next great athletes or to give kids opportunities to learn and develop new skills, not only athletic ones but ones around executive functioning and social relationships. If its high school Varsity or state championship level stuff, yeah excluding trans girls is totally reasonable. But also for Track and Cross Country specifically there are plenty of events a trans person could compete in and just not be scored. Now yes theoretically there could be an impact by just them competing, but even at the high school level we are talking about children. I would so much rather we come up with some sort of gradient or rules that changes as kids age and physically develop and the level of competition and post graduation opportunities like scholarships increases. for college and pros yeah fairness is the only goal, but for kids participation and personal growth are.
I agree that trans people should be able to participate in track/XC. We had a paraathlete participate in a track match last year. He ran (not sure if that's actually the verb they use) in a recumbent wheel chair. You know what we did we kept his times separately even though we used the same track at the same time and just gave him a buffer lane to prevent a foot in a wheel situation.
Trans people in track, xc swimming, weights, cycling, and several other individual sports work like this just fine. We can run boys and girls xc races at the same time bibs are chipped we just need another page on the reporting spreadsheet. Team and fighting sports are messier. I just don't know if there is a good answer for these. I'm open to hearing one but wrestling seems tough.
But the reason to care about high level competition is significant. In that it makes the number of people who show up manageable. When we hold tryouts we may get 40 people to show up for 5 100m spots. We don't have the budget or the facilities to handle 300 athletes coming to a track meet. It's also not very good at those social skill, confidence, grade type rewards at that level.
I know this is a very controversial thing to say, but we’d be in a better place, a place of more understanding, on trans issues if it was treated as a disability. (I get a little irked by the idea of treating gender dysphoria as a disability is offensive.)
The fact that trans girls may not be able to compete in sports the way they want to is not so shocking when you think about the boys with a heart condition who can’t compete or the girls with migraines who can’t compete. It’s a loss to those individuals, but it isn’t really something we need to debate. We can and do try to create opportunities for athletics for people with disabilities, and that is good. It is also very challenging to create those opportunities in a way that is fair and fun for the participants.
When you do approach this as a medical condition, Republican talking points mostly fall flat or worse.
What if we listened to people's concerns instead of dismissing them as transphobes? Support for trans rights and trans-centric policies have eroded. This issue is an area with the strongest erosion of support. The fact that people that are closest to this issue, parents, are less likely to support trans kids in sports should be instructive to trans rights activists. This seems to be an area where increased exposure to a minority population decreases acceptance, which is counterintuitive.
I think this is a good article about an important topic, but I think it's really hard to effectively address it for someone like the author, who admits to not caring about sports outcomes ever. Lots of people, far too many, are over invested in their kids youth sports outcomes for the reasons in this article. But even more just want their kids to win, or just have strong views about the importance of fairness in sports, which they connect with a (philosophically unsophisticated) view about trans participation.
Exactly. We did not split sports into mens/womens for *social* reasons - this is not like the "Negro Leagues." Rather, in many sports the biology leads to unequal competitive ability. The separation is for biological reasons not social ones. In sports where that separation is not needed - feel free to go co-ed, actually.
But you see the performance difference not only in contact sports but even tennis and golf. I can understand why women want a competitive space that has only other biological women.
I am confused by your closing couple sentences, “Those rules, however, ought to be separated from the conversation about who gets to play recreational sports as a child.
By default, this category should include all children. Defending its existence is in the interest of everyone.”
Like, no one is advocating to bar trans kids from sports - just for them to participate in leagues aligned with their sex at birth.
If we should care less about competition and more about simple participation anyways … what’s the problem? Seems to me that trans children athletes can have their cake and eat it too
Bizarre take. Seth Moulton spoke to the real concerns of many parents, and the response of this article is “well we should just care about sports less”.
Also Jerusalem tried this “well his kids are small now” argument in her piece and it fell flat then too. One day they won’t be small! Some people advocate for housing supply so that their kids will one day have somewhere to live!
But stepping back, The Argument as a publication is just completely missing the moment here. Instead of acknowledging the political reality that families are very invested in kids’ sports and why don’t we shift the emphasis for trans inclusion to the 99% of other human endeavors where the conflict is less salient, let’s just argue for parents to care less about sports. Sorry, but no.
If you want to make an argument about how travel teams are ruining childhoods fine. But people see right through attempts like this to use that argument as an end around to the trans inclusion debate.
I've supported trans girls in sports not so much as a pro-trans issue, but because I think the problems "caused" by trans girls in sports are mostly just highlighting this professionalization problem, which is a problem for everyone. Fixing it by kicking trans girls out is just a bandaid. We should fix it by instead focusing on participation rather than competition. And once we fix that, whether trans girls play in girls sports will be a non-issue.
Sorry, but it's meaningless to say the fix should be "focusing on participation rather than competition." Sports without competition is not sports. That can be difficult to understand for people who didn't participate in sports, or who disliked it when they did, but the essence of sports is striving to excel in a contest where the other contestants are, in a meaningful sense, peers.
On a recent episode of Plain English, C Thi Nguyen provided a good explanation of the difference between an activity's goal and its purpose. Sports generally need winning to be their goal, but they don't need to be their purpose and generally should not be. The purpose should be some combination of having fun, getting exercise, building community, and practicing working with a team. But we've gotten confused and built youth sports leagues and youth sports culture, thinking winning needs to be the purpose, and not just the goal.
It didn't always used to be this way. Youth sports used to be much less structured. You'd go out and play with the kids on your street. Everyone was trying to win, but that wasn't the point. The point was to play. Go back to that, and no one will care if one of the kids is trans. They might even prefer it since it will help their team win.
If the point is to play, what do you say to the girls who get cut or sit on the bench and so don't play because a boy is faster/stronger? What happened to the importance of "the point is to play" for them?
But this is exactly the point of the article! How many kids are cut or benched or priced out of sports bc we've turned every youth league into a way to prey on the anxieties of middle class parents who think their kid is going to play D1. Almost all of the kids who can't play are pushed out because of this dynamic.
I've spent large chunks of the last decade taking my kids to organized sports in the New York city suburbs and I think your characterization of youth sports seriously oversimplifies what's going on. Your stereotyping is accurate only as to a minority of parents. Rather than D1 ambitions, the overwhelming majority of parents pay for youth sports out of a combination of (1) they like the team experience based on their own love of sports and can afford the luxury (this is by far the biggest driver); (2) a regrettable race to the bottom where advanced skills/conditioning are needed to make high school teams in some (not all!) sports; and (3) anxiety about college admissions (not connected to D1 scholarships).
Also, frankly, while it's absolutely true that youth sports has some unhealthy dynamics -- my preferred but unrealistic fix would involve selective colleges' admissions officers announcing that they no longer cared about athletic achievements or "leadership" generally -- I don't trust any reformer whose interest is youth sports is transparently about promoting trans participation in sports writ large, and lacks any genuine interest in sports.
You could also ask why “go outside and play” has ceased to be an option. I would go to the schoolyard and find other kids to play with. If my son did that, there would be no one else there, and we’d get a visit from DCFS.
We would still try to win, make no mistake, but there was always a “next time” sure to happen soon, not a schedule of games and practices. *That’s* the level where inclusiveness can work, with competition still an important part, as it *always* will be.
So you’re barking up the wrong tree: League play was always this intense hothouse (The Bad News Bears was *50* years ago!), but kids used to have the freedom to play on their own, in groups, away from adults.
I say that we should reorganize sports so that people don't get cut or permanently benched. That's my whole point. Trans girls in sports have only served to highlight an existing problem in how we handle youth sports. It isn't like no one was getting cut or riding the bench before trans girls started playing, and their experiences of sports weren't any better than the girls who now get cut because they got beat out by a trans girl.
I think this proposal reflects a lack of understanding about how most sports work. I suppose this might work for a handful of sports, but you're talking about functionally abandoning, for example, football, basketball, soccer, baseball, lacrosse, tennis, etc., etc. How is that remotely plausible?
None of those require competitive leagues. I remember playing AYSO as a kid. There were no tryouts. I don't think anyone kept track of team standings. It worked fine.
I think this is a terrible experience for kids in general at any affordable staffing level and most especially for kids with any level of talent and commitment. It's not really fun for a kid with a 6 second 50 yard dash to play basketball, or touch football or soccer with a kid with a 14 second 50 yard dash. They get near nothing out of the time and not even friends because kids who don't care don't even show up to play consistently.
I think this is inconsistent with your comment below, about how it's only during the teen years that sports are about talent. Why does this work for 10-year-olds and 25-year-olds, but not 15-year-olds?
I think it's frustrating that the participation layer evaporates in the teen years but I don't want to get rid of elite sorting. Cities have a fun run every weekend but they also have Boston qualifiers by age and gender.
Like one year I did a flag football club and had a player who was so much faster that he got a touchdown every single play. This is ridiculous and he should go play in a competitive league for people who are good while preserving club play for people who just play for fun.
I guess where I come down is that, if you have to pick one (and it seems like maybe we do), I'd pick the fun runs over the Boston Marathon, but we've spent the last 30 years shifting towards making all youth leagues into the Boston Marathon. I think that's bad.
You make a good point and I think I lean more towards your side. However, I agree with Andrew below that even when play is the point, it's true that losing all the time isn't fun.
I don't think that means that trans people can't be included in casual games though. People can be major outliers in capability for all sorts of reasons, just build teams by doing alternating draft selections or give the other team extra members to compensate.
I think that this is less of an issue than people think.
Most sports are team sports. In that setting, having a trans girl on your team (and there aren't enough trans girls out there that you should expect to have more than one or two), gives the whole team a bit of a boost, just like having the future pro kid on your team.
Sports that aren't team sports tend not to be directly competitive. If you're running track or swimming, the person in the next lane has almost nothing to do with you; you might as well be racing yourself.
There are a few exceptions to this, notably combat sports like wrestling and boxing, and other weight-class type sports, where you are one-on-one with another person, and your performance is directly impacted by their performance. I think those sports have the strongest argument for blocking trans girls from participating.
“Go out and play” is not the same as “join a team”.
I agree that the problem is that pickup games for kids have vanished. A hypothetical trans kid would have much less of a problem getting in a pickup game. But even there, everyone is trying to win. Trying to alter sports at an even more fundamental level than denying biology is, frankly, even more offensive than this article’s blase approach to sports.
This is one of the weirdest things about sports is in the teenage years sports briefly collapses to a thing that is for the very good. Elementary sports and adult sports are very much about participation and we've winnowed out club and intramural sports during this period of life.
I think this isn't terribly related to the question of trans participationI think that is sort of a separate question. But when you're 8 or 25 we have plenty of sports for participation. It's kind of weird how once common intramural sports and clubs at schools basically stops for several years.
It should be. Most people benefit from playing sports and most high school athletes don't go on to play sports professionally. The focus should be on getting more people to play than on providing a stage for a couple of people to show off.
By going immediately to a somewhat stretched economic explanation, I think you’re vastly undervaluing what people actually say. People have issues with kids under 18 transitioning to a different gender. If you take that at face value, and don’t treat that like some irrational thing that needs to be explained away by economic forces, I think you’ll get a better understanding. We may disagree with that, but it’s probably better to just listen to people and not assume they have some hidden motivation for what they’re saying. They think it’s weird. They think the completion is unfair. That’s about as deep as that rabbit hole goes.
Though there is a place for "just having fun" sports leagues, a lot of parents use competitive youth sports to teach their children the value of competition, hard work, and fairness. These parents far outnumber the minority who think their kids will get a scholarship.
At some point (certainly by early teenage years), trans girls will have an athletic advantage over cis girls. It is sadly unfair for them to play on the same competitive teams. Even in places where this issue hasn't arisen yet, parents know it might - and it is understandable for them to recognize and try to avoid that downside risk.
Kids try exceptionally hard to succeed in many competitive areas where there is no tangible reward. It takes thousands of hours of work to become, say, the first chair violinist in a high school chamber orchestra. Other kids spend countless days and nights preparing for debate club. Those kids and their parents would be rightfully incensed by unfair rules; the same goes for youth sports.
It would be nice for writers and editors to understand that.
100% agree with this article. Critics are missing the point. The biggest problem in youth sports is money, not trans kids. The author is arguing that even if it is “unfair” (debatable) at the youth level, the benefits of participating in sports in a way that aligns with your gender identity is worth it at a societal level. At the elite level, of course the stakes are higher and there probably needs to be sport-specific rules about participation, which ultimately requires more research about what truly constitutes an unfair competitive advantage.
The U.S. women's soccer program is probably the best in the world. They win golds in the Olympics and World Cup. But to get ready for international play our national team often scrimmages against Dallas's local, under-15 boys teams. Under fifteen. And sometimes they lose.
14 year old boys surpass the women's world record in High Jump, Hammer Throw, Javelin, 200m, 400m, 800m and 1500m events. Fifteen year old males have better than the current female world record in every other track event other than long-distance running.
There are numerous reports of WNBA teams struggling and losing in closed-door scrimmages against *middle school* boys’ teams. It's widely acknowledged that even an average high school boys team would dominate a WNBA season.
This is where I think the pro-trans side is not helping things. It is obvious to anyone with eyes that men have advantages in most sports. Pretending that it isn't clear is not doing anyone any favors. I also don't think it is helpful to look at the impact of hormone therapy on transgirl and transwomen athletes because a, it will vary so much from person to person (when did they start, how long have they been taking it, etc) and b, if the baseline is 'male bodies have a huge advantage over female bodies', then the impact of the hormone therapy feels like a moot point. I feel like this is a chance for trans advocates to cede ground by advocating for a fair but humane position that allows trans kids to compete when possible but also protects sex-segregated competition where the difference in performance of the sexes is meaningful. If they did that, there would be no ammunition for the transphobic politicians to use, and a sizeable group of erstwhile allies wouldn't be up in arms about the issue.
I do agree that setting guidelines as far as when this sex differential matters and in what circumstances transgirls can compete with cisgirls is important so that we aren't being overly restrictive when we don't need to.
Democrats need to have a position based on respect and fairness and reasonable accommodation. It does not serve the interests of transgender Americans to lose elections to people who want to run them out of public life because we are unwilling to adopt a reasonable view of what the purpose of a sex-segregated sports team is.
Democratic politicians will keep being asked about it if they keep giving risible or wildly unpopular answers. They need to respond that sex is a legally protected class and that females who want to play basketball with other females can exclude males. Democrats need to ensure that transgender Americans are treated equally in contexts where *the law already says men and women should be treated the same*. If the law says that men and women can be treated differently, then trans women can also be treated differently.
"If I'm elected I'm going to fight for everyone to be treated with respect and equally, no matter who you love or how you live. Transgender girls and women should be allowed to live with dignity and enjoy sports. But if there’s a point where safety or fairness is compromised, rules governing sex segregation are established in Title IX and we have to follow them."
While I agree that on average men have a competitive advantage over women (that's why we have different sex divisions), I can think of a number of questions that remain unanswered. e.g. does the advantage depend on the sport? does it matter if the person was on pubertal blockers and never underwent natal puberty? should certain disorders of sexual development, such as 46,XY androgen insensitivity, be treated differently?
The advantage does depend on the sport but isn't something we need to "research" to understand. Speed, strength, size, agility and reach are important in almost all team sports and median males have large advantages over upper percentile females. But darts, bocce, archery, billiards, target shooting, shuffle board and other competitions solely involving precision and focus are areas where competitive opportunities for females exist without sex-segregation.
I don't think androgen insensitivity or similar questions are germane. It seems reasonable to leave it up to courts and leagues to decide who is and who is not "female". There's no doubt rarely some room on the extreme margins on how some people could be classified. But it's not unclear in any way what the sex is of someone who says their gender identity is *trans* to their biological sex, which is the topic at hand.
If we wish to repeal Title IX and remove the legal mandate public institutions have to provide equal opportunities for females, that's something that can be debated. But we need to say that's what the discussion is about and not pretend that it's possible to have female-only leagues that include males, trans or otherwise.
One of the very worst contributions to the trans sports debate is an article like this: a journalist who admittedly knows little and cares less about sports, who nonetheless is comfortable expounding authoritatively about why other people have the wrong attitude about sports. It even incudes old chestnuts like implying that men who "pretend" to care about girls' high school sports are, I don't know, either bigots or perverts, or both.
This really isn't that hard. There are many people--especially people who have or had daughters playing high school sports--who think that girls' sports are valuable, and recognize that after puberty girls on average aren't competitive with boys on average (seriously, if you've ever been to a cross country meet where the girls and boys teams race together, it's not a subtle difference). And fairness matters! Even if you're not a bigot, or consumed with the delusion that your daughter is going to compete in the Olympics, or for a NCAA team.
Journalists who find this to be such an alien concept should perhaps ask themselves, do I really have anything valuable to contribute to this debate?
The piece's point is that the heated rhetoric around trans kids in sports -- on display in this comment -- is downstream of a youth sports culture that has raised the stakes so high that any perceived competitive threat feels existential. And that raising of stakes hurts most kids in sports who will never go to the Olympics or even get an athletic scholarship or even have the money to afford a travel team. It's burning out young athletes before they turn 13, pricing out low-income families, and replacing what should be healthy childhood activity with another anxiety machine for UMC parents.
And my point is, the article's point is incorrect and, to anyone who's been involved in (completely unremarkable) youth sports, profoundly odd. It is very possible to simultaneously (1) think that youth travel sports are, for most of the kids and families who get sucked in, a scam, a waste of time, and a waste of money (I agree!); and (2) object to certain aspects of trans girls participating in girls' sports without, in this article's words, engaging in a "trans athlete panic." A desire for fair competition in non-elite high school athletics can have, and usually does have, nothing to do with a "win at all costs" deformity in the hearts of parents or athletes.
To put it another way: if you're concerned about the trans athlete debate being overheated, writing an article which locates opposition to trans athletic participation in some kind of dysfunction (like bigotry, or overzealous youth athletic culture) isn't the best way to get there.
“To be clear, partisan identity, religious conviction, and philosophical disagreement about the relationship between sex and gender still contribute to this issue resonating so widely. I am not arguing that youth sports explains all of the opposition.”
Read the next sentence:
"But its [youth sports] centrality in American culture helps illuminate something specific: why this issue has such traction among a suburban, middle-class demographic that might otherwise be open to trans rights and why the framing of “protecting our daughters” lands so effectively."
and:
"Since the 1970s, youth sports have grown more and more professionalized in the United States, crowding out recreational leagues and pickup games. By now, the consequences of this shift are well documented: increased injuries and burnout among children, priced-out low-income households, and strained family relationships.
To this list, I want to add another possible consequence: It has also cultivated a parental psychology unusually primed for the Right’s moralizing campaign against trans individuals."
The article is clearly arguing that middle-class parents who have qualms about trans girls participating in girls' sports have those concerns only because youth sports culture has "primed" them to oppose trans rights.
Yeah, I think we just see these passages differently tbh. I think the "only" in your last paragraph is doing a lot of work that I just don't see in the text myself.
Honestly, kudos to you for engaging in such good faith here. I do find it somewhat odd (surprising? disappointing?) how so much of the ostensibly *liberal*, centrist, moderate, or libertarian-curious newsletter commentariat is so anti-trans (they would disagree with my framing, of course).
The article acknowledges that there will likely be real fairness concerns starting at a high school level and that elite competition begins in high school even in the more calm countries it points out.
However, many people are stirring fear about youth sports at elementary and middle school ages. These people are clearly wrong, their children will not be bowled over be giant trans children because the sexes don't have major differences in athletic ability at that point. The only way you would care about this is if you had gotten carried away in a panic (as extensively argued by other sources already) or if you cared deeply about even minor differences in capability because of a highly competitive environment.
I didn't know youth sports had become so tense, so this article explained a reason people would care about trans children in sports that was new to me. I don't think the article contradicts anything you have stated here.
Most elementary age sports are coed. Middle school is when kids start hitting puberty, those sports should be sex segregated if they are competitive.
Jerusalem, I had high hopes for this publication, and those hopes remain. But it is the over-analysis of what are fundamentally 80/20 issues that gives me serious concern for the survival of liberalism in America.
The trans narrative was pushed onto Americans from above, and before long, anyone who pushed back against the established position was branded transphobic. The result is a debate that has become so intellectualized by “liberals” that it has lost touch with where most Americans actually stand. Until very recently, the existence of boys and girls, men and women, was not a contested claim. It was simply agreed upon by virtually everyone. Tinkering with something that fundamental is playing with fire, and the backlash from the right was entirely predictable.
I do not believe a Democrat can win the presidency without a significant course correction on this issue. And the stakes are too high to get this wrong. Most Americans want a straightforward life. They are not ideologically opposed to treating people with dignity, but they are not prepared to abandon categories they have always considered self-evident.
On the specific question of youth sports, the answer is not complicated: there are boys sports and there are girls sports. If liberalism cannot find its footing on something this basic, then we are, unfortunately, watching it lose its grip on the country it once spoke for. I would really like to see liberals placing some boundaries around certain (toxic) ideas. If that doesn’t happen then the illiberal right will continue their winning.
Liberalism is not about siding with the majority. Whether that is what we have to do to win office is a separate question.
Is it also not about common sense? The position that Democrats have been forced to make is that there’s *no* difference between post-pubertal females and trans girls (natal males; go ahead, tell me I’m transphobic for using correct terminology). If we are the last bulwark of truth, how is the electorate supposed to regard our repeating such a barefaced lie?
Because it’s not “a lie” that some people are queer
I'm not a fan of travel sports. My kids will not be doing them.
But even without travel teams, regular high school sports are still very competitive. And people are always VERY concerned about fairness. That's why women's sports were created in the first place, because women literally can't complete against biological men.
I think this is an excellent piece about how supercharged youth sports has gotten. But it seems shoehorned into the trans debate. Lots of kids do get burned out before 13. Also, many youth sports are already co-ed before age 13, so the trans issue is not much of an issue? Before that age, there are not huge advantages to being male, and in fact, many girls the same are are physically bigger than the boys.
I think that's exactly the point of the article. It concedes that there is a relevant difference by high school and that it isn't feasible to demand that elite high school sports not exist, so there will probably be legitimate interests in enforcing segregation by birth sex in many sports starting at that age.
However, it is true that there are demands being made that segregation be enforced earlier by many Republicans and that this is a nonsensical demand unless you are using girls' sports as a disposable wedge issue or if you truly do care about competitive balancing to an unhealthy degree.
Do you care to point out the "heated rhetoric . . . on display in this comment?"
An article that spoke about the insane professionalization of youth sports would be welcome. Attempting to graft “this is why people who notice the obvious differences between post-pubertal male and female athletic performance are, if not transphobes, driven by poor incentives” is entirely unhelpful, especially when it includes a dollop of talking mostly about ages before puberty, when that’s not the concern being raised!
You were also guilty of this by trying so hard to whittle down Moulton’s point about his daughters being about only this precise moment in their lives. We have brains! We can see what you’re doing!
P.S.: It’s ironic that Dr Harper is quoted here, not on her research, which has failed to find that the gap between female and trans female physical performance is negligible enough (her term of art), but on her observations about the salience of this issue. Dr Harper has a tremendous amount of integrity about the facts she reports from her research, so instead the article tries this end-around.
Where was the claim about “pretend to care”? You seem to be reading things into this article that aren’t here.
From the article:
"To me, self-identified NARP and skeptic of arguments made by grown men about little girls, the Seth Moultons of the world publicly concerned about their young daughters getting “run over” by a “formerly male athlete” has always read as adults using trans kids to score political points."
The author didn't use the word "pretend," admittedly, but equating concerns with trans girls playing girls' sports with "adults using trans kids to score political points" certainly seems to me like an accusation of insincerity.
Um as a trans person heavily involved with athletics for my entire life that coaches Cross country and Track at the Highschool level and your take is just so wrong. While your assertation that after puberty the difference between boys and girls is correct, but outside Varsity level competition who cares? The entire purpose of school based athletics is to teach kids skills and give them opportunities for professional development. Also you picked the entire wrong sport to epitomize the disadvantage of having trans participation because you can have trans people run and just not score in the race, Co-ed races are done all the time in small competitions its literally not a big deal. For state level championships yeah I'm all for banning trans people, but the entire thrust of this article is that the reason we have youth sports is for youth development opportunities not training the next crop of professional athletes. You strawman what the author argues and advocates for.
Also Moulton was commenting about his prepubescent children so you can see why many people including the author, are skeptical that this is actually about fairness in sports. How many youth sports do co-ed activities with kids under 10. So unless you have a super nuanced take on this you don't get to appoint yourself the arbiter of whose qualified to talk about the issue or theorize on the true motivations of people against trans kids playing sports. There is a huge difference between there is no athletic difference between the sexes and in prepubescent children inclusion and widespread participation and opportunist are the more important value than how "fair" the completion is. The author of this article very much says that this is an issue of changing inclusion criteria as children age and athletic performance is more important and impacted by the physical development of male and female athletes. Basically if you against prepubescent children and non varsity secondary school sports, there is a very strong assumption that "fairness" isn't the actually concern
If your solution is to let trans girls participate with cis girls, but not compete with cis girls, I'm actually all for that. If a trans girl wants to run her 100 meter heat with the girls, but have her time count against the boys (or in an open category), fine. I think that's the best way of balancing the interests here. But: (1) this only works for sports in which direct or indirect physical contact between the athletes isn't a part of the competition, so basically just swimming, diving and running; (2) most trans activists in my experience are not OK with a solution like this.
More to the point of my comment and your response, though: I really don't agree with the idea that the competitive aspect of sports only matters at the highest level of performance, like a state or NCAA championship, or the Olympics. Competition isn't the only thing about sports, but it is an important thing, even when kids are involved and even when no one involved is athletically remarkable. Indeed, this was one of the major arguments that feminists made back in the 60s and 70s when there was real resistance to interpreting Title IX in a manner that required high schools and colleges to establish womens' sports programs: that if you didn't provide sporting opportunities in which women could reasonably expect to compete and win, you weren't providing sporting opportunities to women at all.
Fair may have been a bit to hot in my initial comment. I brought up the alternative participation of non-scoring because you have experience in the sport of Athletics, which has plenty of opportunity to do arrangements like this, and is this a terrible example sport to use arguing against trans participation.
Also yes, winning and the completion itself is a major aspect of all levels of sport, the argument is that it’s way less of a priority for certain groups of athletes, and the places where winning and the fairness of the competition is the main overriding priority are few and far between for youth sports. For the highest levels of competition yeah fairness can override inclusion, but that doesn’t make sense broadly across the board.
I think with casual sports at all ages you can easily handle trans people by just using playground team pick rules. Let each team alternate picks so they have equal chance to get the strong/tall/fast people, no matter what the reason is they stand out from the average player. If somebody's so much better that their presence still unbalances the game, have them count as two players. Competitive high-level sports are a whole other thing though.
Fairness matters to me cuts a multitude of ways though that makes this issue really difficult for me. Fairness matters on who's included in the we as much as it does who gets the trophies and stands on the podium.
I suppose if you don't believe in the concept of gender that there's a wide range of social codes for who's included in girls and boys this all gets very easy. If all we're concerned with is competitive fairness based on sex well this is easy. Medicalized trans girls will basically never ever make cuts by some point in high school after they start altering their hormonal mix and won't ever get back in in NCAAs, olympics or even your town's 5k or marathon. At which point they lose access to a wide range of social opportunities, scholarships, honors etc.
I don't have a clear sense of answers for how you would go about making sure all the ideas of fairness are being supported by the school. Unserious intramural sports aren't the same thing at all. This is just a different kind of unfairness that at the margin there are less opportunities provided by the state for already outcast people.
There's a couple of different ways you can think about the concept of fairness here. One is in connection with the question "why do we biologically segregate sports competition in the first place?" There is a VERY long-standing, VERY durable observation that certain biological differences have a potentially large effect on athletic performance: sex, obviously, but age as well. There's generally no point in having post-pubescent men and women who are close to the same age compete athletically, because the women will have almost no chance of winning, and most will struggle even to be competitive. The same would be true of asking middle-school boys' athletes to compete against college athletes. In cases like these, most people would object to the competition as being unfair to the athletes disadvantaged for obvious biological reasons. Hence not just the creation of girls' sports, but the fact that any 5k fun run will chop up its competitive tiers into 5-10 year age ranges within each sex.
One of the unfortunate turns that the "trans sports" debate has taken is that trans activists and allies tend to argue, often implicitly, that no one REALLY cares that much about "fairness" in this sense of the word. Instead, they argue, any argument that sex-segregation in sport is a valuable concept, for reasons having nothing to do with anti-trans animus, is insincere and just a cover for anti-trans bigotry. That's stupid and unproductive (and this article repeatedly gestured at it).
Another sense of "fairness" is: well, given that it will help trans girls to allow them to compete with cis girls athletically, how do we balance the desire to help trans girls in that way with the desire to maintain sex-segregation in sports for all of the reasons it has always been desirable to do so? And there's no easy answer! But this article's approach of pretending that the only people who think this is even a difficult question are bigots, or perhaps weirdos laboring under the misapprehension that their daughter is the next Caitlin Clark, is profoundly unhelpful.
I think for me the central question is something like how well can we include trans people in sports and help them build the social emotional bonds that sports provide and maintain fair outcomes. My basic answer is sometimes.
I agree there is a lot of people who aren't' very invested in sports who are making this more confused than it ought to be.
I always hear anti-trans people complaining that the advantages trans girls have in sports are so significant that they must be proactively countered (ie, all trans girls must be prevented from participating in all girls' sports), but despite years of complaining, I have yet to see any significant indication that trans girls *actually* win more often? Riley Gaines built a whole media career around tying for 5th place with a trans girl. Whatever advantage individual trans girls may have doesn't even seem consistent for individuals, as trans girls who participate in girls' sports do not win consistently, they seem to have records pretty comparable to cis girls (or worse). Perhaps because "sex" is not actually the primary determiner of athletic ability! Perhaps because medical transition is a physically rigorous process that changes your whole body and may or may not improve your athletic abilities, not a magical shot to make you better at sports.
"Perhaps because "sex" is not actually the primary determiner of athletic ability"
Here is a pretty good article from Duke coving this issue
For example
"Just in the single year 2017, Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Tori Bowie's 100
meters lifetime best of 10.78 was beaten 15,000 times by men and boys. (Yes, that’s the
right number of zeros.)"
"The same is true of Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Allyson Felix’s 400 meters
lifetime best of 49.26. Just in the single year 2017, men and boys around the world
outperformed her more than 15,000 times.
"
Or the group of 15 year old boys that beat the women's US soccer team
Really there is just no comparison
https://law.duke.edu/sites/default/files/centers/sportslaw/comparingathleticperformances.pdf
The first example is irrelevant - shocking that world-class athletes are very good at what they do!
The 15 year old boys beating the women's US soccer team is just transphobic propaganda. Not saying something like that didn't happen, just that it was essentially a casual practice that conservative news ran with because it confirmed their transphobic worldview (and because its the kind of thing that gets repeated uncritically for years in forums like this by people like yourself). You sound like those asshole guys who insist they could beat a WNBA team with their hands tied behind their backs despite having zero personal athletic ability.
The fact is that statistical differences across 50% of the population does not tell you anything meaningful about any individual. Sure, those aggregate differences do exist, but you're still better off - if you care about fairness - determining the actual traits that give actual advantages in specific sports, and then segregating by those traits. Instead of saying "well, you're a woman who is chemically closer to a man, who is more competitive with men, but because you have that XX we're calling it fair, have fun." It just suggests you care more about discriminating against trans people than about actual fairness.
"The first example is irrelevant - shocking that world-class athletes are very good at what they do!"
You seem to be misunderstanding the example again. Literally the best female runner in the world can be beat by thousands of men, many of them high school runners.
"The fact is that statistical differences across 50% of the population does not tell you anything meaningful about any individual. "
We aren't talking about random 50% of the population, we are talking about competition.
The fact that the fastest female runner in the world can beat a male couch potato doesn't matter. The fact that she would be smoked by a bunch of male high schoolers does.
And again, if there's "really just no comparison" then why aren't trans girls consistently trouncing all the other girls they compete against? In the places they're allowed to compete with girls, they generally do no better than cis girls. They don't win every race, not even close. The transphobic right has to hunt around for examples of trans girls "stealing" trophies from cis girls (many of those being 3rd place, 4th place, etc) because there does not seem to be any kind of systematic advantage trans girls have in practice! As long as that's clearly not happening, I don't really care that much about theoretical differences in aggregate between cis boys and cis girls (which is what these comparisons are always about)
Easily the most poorly crafted and wrong column I've read at The Arguement. Simply someone who doesn't like sports who sought a route to criticize those who do. I am progressive or liberal or whatever describes a lifelong Democrat who lives in a deep blue coastal city and supports the disadvantaged. Yet I enjoy watching and playing sports and have raised kids who play them. The underlying issue is akin to the debate over the undocumented - fairness. People can be sympathetic to the plight of someone struggling with gender identity or someone escaping awful war torn poverty but also recognize the issue of fairness as problematic. And if you somehow think pre-pubescent boys and girls are the same athletically you are in a nice protective bubble that is outside reality.
I don’t see why “fairness” means you need to exclude people from leagues that are about having fun rather than pushing someone towards professional athletics. The issue this article identifies is about why leagues about having fun have been eliminated.
The idea that there are only two types of athletic competition--either quasi-professional, or purely for fun--is wrong, and one of the real blind spots in the article's view of sports. High school sports, in particular, are very competitive even when no one involved is likely to compete at a higher level! The vast majority of high school athletes, even those who have success in high school, are perfectly aware that they won't be competing at the NCAA or professional level. Yet they still care about their competitions, and how they perform in them, even when the object of their concern may appear silly or nonsensical to an outsider. And a lot of the real-world tension of trans participation in girls' athletics has come from precisely these sorts of competitions, and concerns over fairness in those competitions. Placing in the top 10 in a cross country race between two nobody teams in a who-cares league may seem utterly pointless to an outsider; but it can matter very, VERY much to the girl who got nudged out and ended up finishing 11th.
"Fun" leagues are typically coed and don't exclude anyone. Competitive leagues divide based on biological sex because of the athletic advantages males have.
Always respect your opinion but I don't think the article was about youth sports leagues. I see it as a path to discuss gender issues in sports.
I honestly don't know why they didn't decide to have an actual sports fan write this. Any piece on the politics of sports that basically starts with "I hate sportzball" is going to turn off any sports fans who are readers. I like the editors here, but this was really an own-goal.
I honestly don’t know that you can assume that the writers or editors here will know what your last sentence means.
It is unclear to me how much of the prepubescent sports thing is sociological. A notable part of it definitely is if you look at throw like girl experiments. When I start basketball club there's a difference but a lot of it is about politeness. But there is a non-zero difference amongst elementary cross country runners but it's hard to dismiss the boys are told to go play outside more explanation.
Props to Jerusalem for scheduling an article about how journalists are out of touch back-to-back with one that includes the sentence “It has been brought to my attention, however, that my blasé attitude toward sports makes me an outlier” played completely straight
Female children are almost always allowed to compete on "open" or boys teams because those teams are not restricted for competitive reasons. The only issue is when males wish to compete in a restricted female category, a category that exists solely to exclude people with typical male advantages. Equal opportunities for females do not exist in sports without sex-segregation.
Anyone should be able to answer the framing question: do females who wish to play basketball only with other females have the right to exclude males? If the answer is "no", there are consequences in many other domains in American life. If "yes", then what exactly is under discussion?
i continue to be baffled why more lines if reasoning do not focus on the sex segregation of sports as basically the Original Sin of this issue debate.
If the concern was truly one of “equal rights” you might expect the ask to be for sex segregation of sports to be ended entirely and for all sports to be coed.
But that’s an even *less* popular position with both parents *and* activist (as well as female athletes) as doing away with coed sports would decimate access to sports teams for many girls / women due to differences in physical abilities between males and females.
And given that so many are already willing to accept segregation of sports based on something like sex or gender (even if they do caveat that acceptance on claimed gender identity not birth sex), it’s quite hard to insist that one definition versus the other is a question of civil rights violation.
I don't think it's very baffling if you go and read the discussions around Title IX from the time.
Title IX treats *equal opportunity* as more important than identical treatment. Congress concluded that if schools were forced into one fully sex-integrated competitive system, females would lose opportunity, scholarships, and development chances. So the law broadly bans sex discrimination but allows separate teams when when that result is more equal opportunity overall.
The law accepts some sex separation because otherwise integration results in a de facto exclusion of females from sports.
of course, but if you allow segregation by “sex” and various other types of arbitrary segregation (age, zip code, weight even)…it also gets harder to argue that changing the definition of “sex” to from “biological sex” to “self identified gender*” (either one way or the other) is a “civil rights” issue. It’s as arbitrary as many of the other normalized forms of segregation in sports.
Plus, if access to *some* sports (opportunity) is maintained no matter which definition you choose. You do not see legal cases involving young gay boys who want to play soccer (a sport most schools only offer to girls instead of football, which is typically boys only) because several of their friends play soccer. Those boys are assumed to have “opportunity” to play football.
I may not be understanding your point. Sports leagues and divisions exist for many reasons. There are senior's leagues, weight classes, youth divisions grouped by school grade. I don't think anyone objects to their existence and people are free to create any sort of league they wish.
There are a number of universal, legally protected classes and they are sex, race, color and religion and in some other realms, disability and national origin. In another country those may not be protected. And we could change that here if everyone really wanted to. It's changed before.
But because sex is a legally protected class, we have laws like Title IX that say it's required in some situations to create opportunities for females because of natural male advantages. It is illegal to prevent someone from playing sports because of their sexual orientation, but it is not required to provide a gay-team or sports that gays might prefer on average because, like trans individuals, they are not at a natural disadvantage that requires a protected restriction.
So permitting males onto female teams may be a Title IX violation. A trans-man on a female team is not, because that person is not male. And a trans-man or a trans-woman is free to play on male team because male protections under Title IX are not warranted. Trans people or people of any gender or sexual orientation do not remove opportunity from males; trans people on female teams may remove opportunity from females.
That's not a "norm" but a result of the biological reality that there are two sexes shared by all vertebrates, whereas the current concept of gender identity is an academic or political distinction. ACLU lawyers argued in front of the Supreme Court that there were more genders than could be easily listed and people might change genders from day to day. Which is why it's not a legally protected class in most situations, but sex is.
My only point was just to raise that everyone, regardless of biological sex / self identified gender, is inherently limited in what sports they have the “opportunity” to play in school for economic (schools cannot afford to offer every team sport to accommodate everyone students preference) and social preferences (regional and sex based affinities for one sport over another across a population), so even if a trans boy or trans girl is prevented on playing a sport they prefer due to a disagreement over how “sex” is defined (biological assigned or self identified gender) they ultimately still have the opportunity to play one set of offered sports…or the other.
That there is a check valve allowing biological females to play male sports is a quirk we all seem to accept, but ultimately it does not change the question of opportunity being offered.
This is a bad article on multiple levels.
1) Why are we getting lectured about sports by someone who doesn't care about sports? It's very irritating. It's like having a guy write an article explaining that menstruation is no big deal actually. This perspective is both uninformed and unwanted.
2) The sloppy and slanted statistics, consistent with the author not caring about sports. We get a uncritical citation of the claim that there are 10 trans athletes in the NCAA, a number with no independent sourcing or verification. Meanwhile, more thorough and better-documented statistics, like those from shewon.org, are ignored completely.
3) The goofy logic. A huge amount of weight is being put on this argument that trans athletes are rare. But does that actually imply letting them compete is a good policy? No. Does that mean people should stop supporting laws barring males from women's sports? No. It's like the author knows she can't justify the policy she supports, so she has to fall back to this weak meta-argument instead.
I don't think this author is competent to be writing about either sports or gender. All this person is doing is regurgitating the worst progressive arguments from social media (and Joanna Harper in this specific case). The original reporting about sports competition could have been fine as its own thing.
The Argument Mag should aim for something higher than just parroting Joanna Harper talking points IMO.
I coach sports in middle school in a school based track and cross country team and an elementary basketball all comers club. By middle school the difference between boys and girls is profound. Like it’s easy to forget this if you just watch but when we put in the times they’re notably different in events where .1 seconds is notable they have several second gaps.
I think there’s a significant difficulty in that as I understand it trans advocates goal is normalcy and sex sports advocates is competitive fairness and these aren’t really able to be aligned. Personally I tend to think while trans advocates don’t love this as a solution having categories for trans women and trans men wouldn’t impact many sports very much. Yes i recognize it would pose difficulties for team sports and it does mean trans boys and girls have a lower level of absolute opportunity than cis boys and girls for many things. Also the anti-trans position that trans girls should just play with the boys doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. If by high school a trans boy has been supplementing testosterone or a trans girl has been suppressing it for years you’re back to the root of the boy/girl problem. It’s not competitively fair. Even if you think not literally accepting that trans girls are girls is bigotry this seems better than the status quo in my state which is no even acknowledging their existence at all.
How many trans athletes do you need to accommodate that this would be unreasonable. I coach in a very progressive state, and in 8 years of coaching there has been 1 trans athlete competing at the state level. Yeah not feasible for all sports but in ours it certainly is. Realistically how many people are qualifying for high level completion. For other sports it’s easy JV and other sub varsity, who gives a shit, varsity sport governing bodies make the call. Field hockey generally gets along just fine with boys playing on the team because of lack of a boys team. I’ve seen only 1 boy take up that opportunity in my 8 years of coaching. Wrestling also has boys and girls of the same weight class wrestle if there aren’t enough to do sex segregated. Like this has never been a problem until bad faith conservative actors made it one by deceiving good natured people, that the entire GOP MO lie about everything and blame it on democrats.
This is a question that i basically agree with the premises but our parents won’t in my view and schools are set up not to say no to parents at this point in our state.
In the context of Florida k12 politics they can participate in separate categories seems like it would be a big step forward. It would be illegal for me to use their first name so I’m trying for baby steps.
Yeah i can imagine that landscape being super tough when the cultural inertia is so against it, I wish states like mine would make thing easier for everyone else if we backed off the most extreme stuff here. Like in MA we don’t have a law like CA did about non disclosure of trans status to parents. Our laws simply state trans people can’t be discriminated against, but they way most districts interpret this is that disclosure would be discriminatory as the influence of LGBT groups have over public servants due to the cultural inertia in the other direction, what admin wants to be tarred and feathered as a bigot. Would probably be a lot easier for people in conservative states if progressives didn’t push leftist social policy as empirical fact.
The whole point is that at young ages is high level competitiveness the main goal of organizing youth sports? Middle schoolers are 10-13, is the goal of them doing school sponsored sports to make the next great athletes or to give kids opportunities to learn and develop new skills, not only athletic ones but ones around executive functioning and social relationships. If its high school Varsity or state championship level stuff, yeah excluding trans girls is totally reasonable. But also for Track and Cross Country specifically there are plenty of events a trans person could compete in and just not be scored. Now yes theoretically there could be an impact by just them competing, but even at the high school level we are talking about children. I would so much rather we come up with some sort of gradient or rules that changes as kids age and physically develop and the level of competition and post graduation opportunities like scholarships increases. for college and pros yeah fairness is the only goal, but for kids participation and personal growth are.
I agree that trans people should be able to participate in track/XC. We had a paraathlete participate in a track match last year. He ran (not sure if that's actually the verb they use) in a recumbent wheel chair. You know what we did we kept his times separately even though we used the same track at the same time and just gave him a buffer lane to prevent a foot in a wheel situation.
Trans people in track, xc swimming, weights, cycling, and several other individual sports work like this just fine. We can run boys and girls xc races at the same time bibs are chipped we just need another page on the reporting spreadsheet. Team and fighting sports are messier. I just don't know if there is a good answer for these. I'm open to hearing one but wrestling seems tough.
But the reason to care about high level competition is significant. In that it makes the number of people who show up manageable. When we hold tryouts we may get 40 people to show up for 5 100m spots. We don't have the budget or the facilities to handle 300 athletes coming to a track meet. It's also not very good at those social skill, confidence, grade type rewards at that level.
I know this is a very controversial thing to say, but we’d be in a better place, a place of more understanding, on trans issues if it was treated as a disability. (I get a little irked by the idea of treating gender dysphoria as a disability is offensive.)
The fact that trans girls may not be able to compete in sports the way they want to is not so shocking when you think about the boys with a heart condition who can’t compete or the girls with migraines who can’t compete. It’s a loss to those individuals, but it isn’t really something we need to debate. We can and do try to create opportunities for athletics for people with disabilities, and that is good. It is also very challenging to create those opportunities in a way that is fair and fun for the participants.
When you do approach this as a medical condition, Republican talking points mostly fall flat or worse.
What if we listened to people's concerns instead of dismissing them as transphobes? Support for trans rights and trans-centric policies have eroded. This issue is an area with the strongest erosion of support. The fact that people that are closest to this issue, parents, are less likely to support trans kids in sports should be instructive to trans rights activists. This seems to be an area where increased exposure to a minority population decreases acceptance, which is counterintuitive.
I think this is a good article about an important topic, but I think it's really hard to effectively address it for someone like the author, who admits to not caring about sports outcomes ever. Lots of people, far too many, are over invested in their kids youth sports outcomes for the reasons in this article. But even more just want their kids to win, or just have strong views about the importance of fairness in sports, which they connect with a (philosophically unsophisticated) view about trans participation.
The answer is quite simple, biological men playing in women's sports is unfair.
That's why we created women's sports in the first place.
Also, just because your daughter is only six or seven now. Doesn't mean you still wouldn't be concerned about later.
Which is why a lot of elementary age sports are, co-ed, and they become much more likely to be sex segregated after that
Exactly. We did not split sports into mens/womens for *social* reasons - this is not like the "Negro Leagues." Rather, in many sports the biology leads to unequal competitive ability. The separation is for biological reasons not social ones. In sports where that separation is not needed - feel free to go co-ed, actually.
But you see the performance difference not only in contact sports but even tennis and golf. I can understand why women want a competitive space that has only other biological women.
I am confused by your closing couple sentences, “Those rules, however, ought to be separated from the conversation about who gets to play recreational sports as a child.
By default, this category should include all children. Defending its existence is in the interest of everyone.”
Like, no one is advocating to bar trans kids from sports - just for them to participate in leagues aligned with their sex at birth.
If we should care less about competition and more about simple participation anyways … what’s the problem? Seems to me that trans children athletes can have their cake and eat it too
It what sense would they both have their cake and eat it?
Bizarre take. Seth Moulton spoke to the real concerns of many parents, and the response of this article is “well we should just care about sports less”.
Also Jerusalem tried this “well his kids are small now” argument in her piece and it fell flat then too. One day they won’t be small! Some people advocate for housing supply so that their kids will one day have somewhere to live!
But stepping back, The Argument as a publication is just completely missing the moment here. Instead of acknowledging the political reality that families are very invested in kids’ sports and why don’t we shift the emphasis for trans inclusion to the 99% of other human endeavors where the conflict is less salient, let’s just argue for parents to care less about sports. Sorry, but no.
If you want to make an argument about how travel teams are ruining childhoods fine. But people see right through attempts like this to use that argument as an end around to the trans inclusion debate.
I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion that the backlash to their polling from the Bluesky crowd may have colored their thinking here…
Great article (mostly because I agree with it).
I've supported trans girls in sports not so much as a pro-trans issue, but because I think the problems "caused" by trans girls in sports are mostly just highlighting this professionalization problem, which is a problem for everyone. Fixing it by kicking trans girls out is just a bandaid. We should fix it by instead focusing on participation rather than competition. And once we fix that, whether trans girls play in girls sports will be a non-issue.
Sorry, but it's meaningless to say the fix should be "focusing on participation rather than competition." Sports without competition is not sports. That can be difficult to understand for people who didn't participate in sports, or who disliked it when they did, but the essence of sports is striving to excel in a contest where the other contestants are, in a meaningful sense, peers.
On a recent episode of Plain English, C Thi Nguyen provided a good explanation of the difference between an activity's goal and its purpose. Sports generally need winning to be their goal, but they don't need to be their purpose and generally should not be. The purpose should be some combination of having fun, getting exercise, building community, and practicing working with a team. But we've gotten confused and built youth sports leagues and youth sports culture, thinking winning needs to be the purpose, and not just the goal.
It didn't always used to be this way. Youth sports used to be much less structured. You'd go out and play with the kids on your street. Everyone was trying to win, but that wasn't the point. The point was to play. Go back to that, and no one will care if one of the kids is trans. They might even prefer it since it will help their team win.
If the point is to play, what do you say to the girls who get cut or sit on the bench and so don't play because a boy is faster/stronger? What happened to the importance of "the point is to play" for them?
But this is exactly the point of the article! How many kids are cut or benched or priced out of sports bc we've turned every youth league into a way to prey on the anxieties of middle class parents who think their kid is going to play D1. Almost all of the kids who can't play are pushed out because of this dynamic.
I've spent large chunks of the last decade taking my kids to organized sports in the New York city suburbs and I think your characterization of youth sports seriously oversimplifies what's going on. Your stereotyping is accurate only as to a minority of parents. Rather than D1 ambitions, the overwhelming majority of parents pay for youth sports out of a combination of (1) they like the team experience based on their own love of sports and can afford the luxury (this is by far the biggest driver); (2) a regrettable race to the bottom where advanced skills/conditioning are needed to make high school teams in some (not all!) sports; and (3) anxiety about college admissions (not connected to D1 scholarships).
Also, frankly, while it's absolutely true that youth sports has some unhealthy dynamics -- my preferred but unrealistic fix would involve selective colleges' admissions officers announcing that they no longer cared about athletic achievements or "leadership" generally -- I don't trust any reformer whose interest is youth sports is transparently about promoting trans participation in sports writ large, and lacks any genuine interest in sports.
You could also ask why “go outside and play” has ceased to be an option. I would go to the schoolyard and find other kids to play with. If my son did that, there would be no one else there, and we’d get a visit from DCFS.
We would still try to win, make no mistake, but there was always a “next time” sure to happen soon, not a schedule of games and practices. *That’s* the level where inclusiveness can work, with competition still an important part, as it *always* will be.
So you’re barking up the wrong tree: League play was always this intense hothouse (The Bad News Bears was *50* years ago!), but kids used to have the freedom to play on their own, in groups, away from adults.
I say that we should reorganize sports so that people don't get cut or permanently benched. That's my whole point. Trans girls in sports have only served to highlight an existing problem in how we handle youth sports. It isn't like no one was getting cut or riding the bench before trans girls started playing, and their experiences of sports weren't any better than the girls who now get cut because they got beat out by a trans girl.
I think this proposal reflects a lack of understanding about how most sports work. I suppose this might work for a handful of sports, but you're talking about functionally abandoning, for example, football, basketball, soccer, baseball, lacrosse, tennis, etc., etc. How is that remotely plausible?
None of those require competitive leagues. I remember playing AYSO as a kid. There were no tryouts. I don't think anyone kept track of team standings. It worked fine.
I think this is a terrible experience for kids in general at any affordable staffing level and most especially for kids with any level of talent and commitment. It's not really fun for a kid with a 6 second 50 yard dash to play basketball, or touch football or soccer with a kid with a 14 second 50 yard dash. They get near nothing out of the time and not even friends because kids who don't care don't even show up to play consistently.
I think this is inconsistent with your comment below, about how it's only during the teen years that sports are about talent. Why does this work for 10-year-olds and 25-year-olds, but not 15-year-olds?
I think it's frustrating that the participation layer evaporates in the teen years but I don't want to get rid of elite sorting. Cities have a fun run every weekend but they also have Boston qualifiers by age and gender.
Like one year I did a flag football club and had a player who was so much faster that he got a touchdown every single play. This is ridiculous and he should go play in a competitive league for people who are good while preserving club play for people who just play for fun.
I guess where I come down is that, if you have to pick one (and it seems like maybe we do), I'd pick the fun runs over the Boston Marathon, but we've spent the last 30 years shifting towards making all youth leagues into the Boston Marathon. I think that's bad.
You make a good point and I think I lean more towards your side. However, I agree with Andrew below that even when play is the point, it's true that losing all the time isn't fun.
I don't think that means that trans people can't be included in casual games though. People can be major outliers in capability for all sorts of reasons, just build teams by doing alternating draft selections or give the other team extra members to compensate.
I think that this is less of an issue than people think.
Most sports are team sports. In that setting, having a trans girl on your team (and there aren't enough trans girls out there that you should expect to have more than one or two), gives the whole team a bit of a boost, just like having the future pro kid on your team.
Sports that aren't team sports tend not to be directly competitive. If you're running track or swimming, the person in the next lane has almost nothing to do with you; you might as well be racing yourself.
There are a few exceptions to this, notably combat sports like wrestling and boxing, and other weight-class type sports, where you are one-on-one with another person, and your performance is directly impacted by their performance. I think those sports have the strongest argument for blocking trans girls from participating.
“Go out and play” is not the same as “join a team”.
I agree that the problem is that pickup games for kids have vanished. A hypothetical trans kid would have much less of a problem getting in a pickup game. But even there, everyone is trying to win. Trying to alter sports at an even more fundamental level than denying biology is, frankly, even more offensive than this article’s blase approach to sports.
Participation is fine at the elementary school level. At the high school level, it is not
This is one of the weirdest things about sports is in the teenage years sports briefly collapses to a thing that is for the very good. Elementary sports and adult sports are very much about participation and we've winnowed out club and intramural sports during this period of life.
I think this isn't terribly related to the question of trans participationI think that is sort of a separate question. But when you're 8 or 25 we have plenty of sports for participation. It's kind of weird how once common intramural sports and clubs at schools basically stops for several years.
Agreed. If it's about participation then it's often coed. But for those that are competitive they will need to be sex segregated.
I will note that high school sports are the funnel for college sports
It should be. Most people benefit from playing sports and most high school athletes don't go on to play sports professionally. The focus should be on getting more people to play than on providing a stage for a couple of people to show off.
By going immediately to a somewhat stretched economic explanation, I think you’re vastly undervaluing what people actually say. People have issues with kids under 18 transitioning to a different gender. If you take that at face value, and don’t treat that like some irrational thing that needs to be explained away by economic forces, I think you’ll get a better understanding. We may disagree with that, but it’s probably better to just listen to people and not assume they have some hidden motivation for what they’re saying. They think it’s weird. They think the completion is unfair. That’s about as deep as that rabbit hole goes.
This meandering, unfocused and vacuous article is below what I’d expect from the Argument.
Though there is a place for "just having fun" sports leagues, a lot of parents use competitive youth sports to teach their children the value of competition, hard work, and fairness. These parents far outnumber the minority who think their kids will get a scholarship.
At some point (certainly by early teenage years), trans girls will have an athletic advantage over cis girls. It is sadly unfair for them to play on the same competitive teams. Even in places where this issue hasn't arisen yet, parents know it might - and it is understandable for them to recognize and try to avoid that downside risk.
Kids try exceptionally hard to succeed in many competitive areas where there is no tangible reward. It takes thousands of hours of work to become, say, the first chair violinist in a high school chamber orchestra. Other kids spend countless days and nights preparing for debate club. Those kids and their parents would be rightfully incensed by unfair rules; the same goes for youth sports.
It would be nice for writers and editors to understand that.
100% agree with this article. Critics are missing the point. The biggest problem in youth sports is money, not trans kids. The author is arguing that even if it is “unfair” (debatable) at the youth level, the benefits of participating in sports in a way that aligns with your gender identity is worth it at a societal level. At the elite level, of course the stakes are higher and there probably needs to be sport-specific rules about participation, which ultimately requires more research about what truly constitutes an unfair competitive advantage.
What sort of research is required?
The U.S. women's soccer program is probably the best in the world. They win golds in the Olympics and World Cup. But to get ready for international play our national team often scrimmages against Dallas's local, under-15 boys teams. Under fifteen. And sometimes they lose.
14 year old boys surpass the women's world record in High Jump, Hammer Throw, Javelin, 200m, 400m, 800m and 1500m events. Fifteen year old males have better than the current female world record in every other track event other than long-distance running.
There are numerous reports of WNBA teams struggling and losing in closed-door scrimmages against *middle school* boys’ teams. It's widely acknowledged that even an average high school boys team would dominate a WNBA season.
This is where I think the pro-trans side is not helping things. It is obvious to anyone with eyes that men have advantages in most sports. Pretending that it isn't clear is not doing anyone any favors. I also don't think it is helpful to look at the impact of hormone therapy on transgirl and transwomen athletes because a, it will vary so much from person to person (when did they start, how long have they been taking it, etc) and b, if the baseline is 'male bodies have a huge advantage over female bodies', then the impact of the hormone therapy feels like a moot point. I feel like this is a chance for trans advocates to cede ground by advocating for a fair but humane position that allows trans kids to compete when possible but also protects sex-segregated competition where the difference in performance of the sexes is meaningful. If they did that, there would be no ammunition for the transphobic politicians to use, and a sizeable group of erstwhile allies wouldn't be up in arms about the issue.
I do agree that setting guidelines as far as when this sex differential matters and in what circumstances transgirls can compete with cisgirls is important so that we aren't being overly restrictive when we don't need to.
Democrats need to have a position based on respect and fairness and reasonable accommodation. It does not serve the interests of transgender Americans to lose elections to people who want to run them out of public life because we are unwilling to adopt a reasonable view of what the purpose of a sex-segregated sports team is.
Democratic politicians will keep being asked about it if they keep giving risible or wildly unpopular answers. They need to respond that sex is a legally protected class and that females who want to play basketball with other females can exclude males. Democrats need to ensure that transgender Americans are treated equally in contexts where *the law already says men and women should be treated the same*. If the law says that men and women can be treated differently, then trans women can also be treated differently.
"If I'm elected I'm going to fight for everyone to be treated with respect and equally, no matter who you love or how you live. Transgender girls and women should be allowed to live with dignity and enjoy sports. But if there’s a point where safety or fairness is compromised, rules governing sex segregation are established in Title IX and we have to follow them."
While I agree that on average men have a competitive advantage over women (that's why we have different sex divisions), I can think of a number of questions that remain unanswered. e.g. does the advantage depend on the sport? does it matter if the person was on pubertal blockers and never underwent natal puberty? should certain disorders of sexual development, such as 46,XY androgen insensitivity, be treated differently?
The advantage does depend on the sport but isn't something we need to "research" to understand. Speed, strength, size, agility and reach are important in almost all team sports and median males have large advantages over upper percentile females. But darts, bocce, archery, billiards, target shooting, shuffle board and other competitions solely involving precision and focus are areas where competitive opportunities for females exist without sex-segregation.
I don't think androgen insensitivity or similar questions are germane. It seems reasonable to leave it up to courts and leagues to decide who is and who is not "female". There's no doubt rarely some room on the extreme margins on how some people could be classified. But it's not unclear in any way what the sex is of someone who says their gender identity is *trans* to their biological sex, which is the topic at hand.
If we wish to repeal Title IX and remove the legal mandate public institutions have to provide equal opportunities for females, that's something that can be debated. But we need to say that's what the discussion is about and not pretend that it's possible to have female-only leagues that include males, trans or otherwise.