On the attacks against trans girls in sports

The "mostly White male state legislators," Kevin B. Blackstone says in an April 18, 2021 column for the Washington Post, are "writing and passing retrograde bills against trans youth athletes" and "found the gall to couch these discriminatory laws in words such as 'fairness,' just as they have done with restrictive voting rules they envelop with words such as 'integrity.'" Yet: "There is nothing fair or honorable about these efforts. They are nothing more than malicious."

The Alabama bill, deceptively titled the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, would criminalize filling a prescription for puberty-blocking medication or hormones for kids under 19. And when the Associated Press queried lawmakers in many of these states who are drafting and passing these anti-trans youth sports bills, those legislators struggled to name an instance where trans youth athletes created a problem.

Thus:

The anti-trans youth athlete bills metastasizing in Republican-controlled legislatures aren't about leveling uneven playing fields. They aren't protections for girls and young women who identify with their birth sex.

What they are, he says, are "the latest salvos in a cultural war waged the past few years by those who wish to impose 19th-century Eurocentric Christian values on 21st-century people who are diverse in every way."

2023 update

So here you can spot the extremes of the anti-trans argument. On the one hand, people say that trans athletes are super-powered by some contact with testosterone at some point in their lives, whether in childhood as people who went through male puberty before they started living in another gender, or in adulthood by choice as part of a transition to live as men, and if the trans athlete wins a competition, it's probably attributable to their testosterone, which is somehow considered unfair. And so it is argued that trans people should be put in a separate category of "trans and nonbinary" if they really insist on not being misgendered as a man or woman. On the other hand, people say that in any given competition, there are so few trans and nonbinary people that they're unlikely to be the top performers, and will probably underperform a large number of cis women as well as cis men, and so the creation of an extra gender category for them is just "rewarding mediocrity" because it gives them an opportunity to win a participation trophy. Statistically, the trans person probably wasn't going to win anything against cis people anyway. There are few trans people, and they probably aren't the winners of whatever it is. So just make them be in the cis category with their "birth sex" (of course not the gender they live in and want to be categorized with) so that they can lose. That is the increasingly elaborate transphobic argument.

In response to the quoted passages above:

Transphobes use the "boys beating up girls" trope to complain about:

• Trans girls who compete against other girls, as per the gender they live as
• Trans boys who compete against girls, as per rules that tell them they're 'really girls' so they belong on the girls' team

In other words, transphobes will imply that trans boy athletes belong on girls' teams and then will turn around and complain that there's a boy on the team. Further, they'll say that this is a problem of "transgender athletes" making it impossible for women to have fair competitions.

See also: "Oh, It's About Sports, Is It?". It's a 14-minute read on Medium. Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.