Quote:
"'Oh, now we care about fairness? Now we care about women’s sports? That’s total bulls**t. And show me all the trans people who are nefariously taking advantage of being trans in sports. It’s just not happening,' said Rapinoe, who over the weekend announced she would retire from professional soccer at the end of the 2023 National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) season.
* * *
The latest [March 2023 World Athletics] regulations prohibit athletes who have gone through what WA calls 'male puberty' from participating in female world rankings competitions. WA said the exclusion would apply to 'male-to-female transgender athletes who have been through male puberty.'
Meanwhile, multiple US states have passed legislation restricting trans youths’ access to the hormone therapies known as 'puberty blockers' – meaning some trans girls will be forced to undergo the very 'male puberty' that would now prevent them from competing in WA events."
— "Megan Rapinoe says US has ‘weaponized’ women’s sports against trans people, ‘trying to legislate away people’s full humanity’," Ben Morse, CNN, July 10, 2023
Also:
"In 2013, I started www.transathlete.com, a compilation of trans-inclusive policies. … But in 2019 I began noticing a backslide, with a spike of anti-trans lawmakers and hate groups … The first state in the United States to ban trans youth from school sports was Idaho in 2020. Following that, a wave of bills was introduced in over two-thirds of the country. In most states, lawmakers could not name a single trans youth in sports in their state nor an instance where there was any reason to bar them. In other states, the bills targeted just a handful of youth. Sports quite literally saved my life as an adolescent, and the thought of another young person not being allowed to have the same experiences is absolutely heartbreaking."
— Chris Mosier, “Running, Away and To,” in Surviving Transphobia. ed. Laura A. Jacobs. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023.
(Update: Idaho also tried to ban gender-affirming care....but in early 2024, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction.)
Also, this attitude doesn't only affect trans people. Transphobia is linked to homophobia, which affects all kinds of LGBTQ people.
For example, in June 2023, the National Hockey League in the US and Canada (NHL) banned players from wearing Pride jerseys, and the following October, they banned players from using sticks wrapped in rainbow-colored tape even for warmups. The league explained that the athletes shouldn't be "put in the position of having to demonstrate (or where they may be appearing to demonstrate) personal support for any Special Initiatives."
Parker Molloy explained on Substack:
"You truly can't go, 'Get politics out of sports! Get things unrelated to the game out of sports! Just play the game! Shut up and dribble!' without being a hypocrite unless you actually mean to get all politics out of sports, including military displays and national anthems."
Then again, some gay people also explicitly exclude trans people. (Which might be internalized homophobia talking, or might be due to other reasons.) The thing is, no gay person or group is the gatekeeper for who else is gay.
But now Martina Navratilova is saying "Omg...a bloke cannot be a lesbian." (X, November 28, 2023) "She made the assertions," the Advocate reports, "in response to a video by Stonewall that promoted diversity and inclusion of lesbians from diverse backgrounds, including transgender women who identify as lesbians." (The Advocate)
Anyway, at first, someone might have been listening to Martina Navratilova's opinions on sports, like: Oh, she's an athlete, so she's informed about who can compete fairly in women's sports and who has an unfair advantage, and also she has a personal stake in the outcome because (though now 67) she's part of a community of athletes.
But then you realize that Martina Navratilova has opinions about who is a lesbian, and the fact that she's a former pro tennis player gives her no moral authority to go around saying who's legitimately gay. And then you realize: Oh, when she was talking about sports before, her opinions went broader and deeper. This was part of her plan the whole time.
But if trans girls take puberty blockers from a young age, they won't go through male puberty and then they can fairly compete with other teen girls, right?
Oh wait — sometimes you get puberty blockers and are still told you can't play girls' sports. Why? Because Florida. A trans girl, on hormone blockers since she was 11, played on a girls' volleyball team at a high school near Fort Lauderdale, and in November 2023, the principal and other staffers were reassigned due to "allegations of improper student participation in sports." (HuffPost)
But so many kids are on puberty blockers, right? So many? Wait:
Also
Next Level Girls Basketball, based in Wilder, Kentucky, coaches girls in 3rd grade through high school. A 6th-grade team recently (according to a WVX story):
"entered a city-wide basketball league run by Southwestern Ohio Basketball. At the end of the regular season, the team posted a 7-1 record and was preparing to fight for the year-end tournament title in February. But they soon found out they were banned from playing because of one glaring issue: the league was for boys.
A text from the league's president, Tom Sunderman, was sent to Next Level's Director Larry McGraw, informing him that his team's participation in the league presented a liability risk.
McGraw believes another factor may have been at play."
The director, Larry McGraw, registered the girls for the boys' league. Why? According to the article, "Often times, teams with younger players playing at high levels might enter a league with older players for a new challenge, he says. It's also not unheard of for a girl to play on a boys team or for a girls team to play against boys..." In response: "Southwestern Ohio Basketball claims Next Level was deceptive by listing the team's gender as "male" in its registration, breaking the league's rules."
"University of Cincinnati assistant professor Letisha Engracia Cardoso Brown says the issue is not whether Next Level broke the rules, but instead the rules themselves and their impact on young girls.
Brown focuses on Black women and girls in sports and how they're presented in media and culture. She says the team's banning is another unfortunate instance of girls getting punished for having success.
'It happens all the time,' Brown said, 'There's this mythos that boys and men are innately always better than girls and women when it comes to sports.'
Brown says this mythos stems from the idea that men have to present masculine traits and women must be feminine, pointing to examples in sports history where women were accused of 'gender fraud' for excelling in athletics and not fulfilling a specific gender stereotype."
In response to controversy, Southwestern Ohio Basketball issued a statement regarding, as WVX put it, "possible physical retaliation from other teams if the girls were to win the tournament." In other words, they were worried that boys with fragile egos, in response to losing a game to a girls' team, might (in the statement's own words) "retaliate against a girl. Then we have liability issues." The league decided that the appropriate way to deal with this risk to the girls was to prevent the girls from playing at all.
— A girls basketball team kept beating the boys. The league called foul Zack Carreon, 91.7 WVX, March 4, 2024 at 3:27 AM EST
See also
"World Athletics’ policy limiting trans women participation is ‘here to stay,’ says president Sebastian Coe," Amanda Davies, CNN, March 2, 2024
Helen Lewis’ Bait and Switch, Evan Urquhart, Assigned Media, March 19, 2024
For more on this topic: Oh, It's About Sports, Is It? It's a 14-minute read on Medium.
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