Anti-Trans Sports Bills Are a “Solution” to a Problem That Doesn’t Exist

Lawmakers can’t name any trans girls competing in their states. That’s because in most cases, there aren’t any.
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Bills attempting to prevent trans girls from competing in girls’ sports have been flooding legislative sessions across the country faster than advocates can respond to them. In all, more than two dozen states have introduced anti-trans sports bills in the first two months of 2021, and legislation has been introduced at the federal level as well.

This nationwide assault on the rights of trans kids — and trans girls, in particular — is both alarming and unprecedented. If passed, these bills will harm young people who are already among the most vulnerable due to discrimination, lack of access to gender affirming resources, and high rates of suicidality. The rate at which these bills have been introduced would imply that trans girls competing in sports has caused an unfair and widespread issue for girls’ sports divisions, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, these bills propose a “solution” to a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

The argument fueling this wave of legislation goes that trans girls are “biologically male” and, therefore, will always have an athletic advantage over cisgender girls. The problem with this line of thinking is that it’s based in bigotry, not fact. This claim hinges on the role that testosterone plays in athletic performance, and the science on that is far from conclusive (and science-based discrimination has a long and ugly history).

In reality, a report from the progressive think tank Center for American Progress found that trans-inclusive sports policies don’t actually harm cisgender children, as guidelines allowing all youth to compete in athletics actually increase participation among all groups. Banning trans youth from gender-affirming sports experiences, however, deprives them of the benefits kids receive from athletics, which include lowered risks of anxiety, depression, and suicide attempts.

But even without scientific research, a simple look at the realities of high school athletics is enough to disprove the flimsy premise behind this new direction in anti-trans bills. Some cisgender people are framing the fears they have about trans girls dominating girls’ sports as pleas to “save women’s sports” or “protect girls and children.” They argue that boys and men will transition (or “pretend” to be a woman) solely so they can dominate girls’ sports, which is a willful misunderstanding of trans identity and the sacrifices people make to medically transition and live as their authentic selves. It also perpetrates long-held transphobic tropes about transgender identities being rooted in deception.

Not only is there no history of trans women dominating women’s sports, there’s no evidence of any future threat. Trans women have been allowed to compete at both the NCAA and Olympic levels for over a decade. During that time, not a single trans woman has even qualified for the Olympics in any sport. At the NCAA level, only one openly trans woman has won a title, CeCé Telfer in the 400m hurdles in 2019. If there were going to be a supposed trans takeover of women’s sports, wouldn’t it have happened already?

The current bills target high school athletics, where there is likewise no evidence that trans girls pose any sort of disruption. Lawmakers in the majority of states with anti-trans sports bills failed to cite a single example of trans girls even competing in their state — let alone it being an issue — in comments to the Associated Press earlier this week. When they did cite examples, those given weren’t of trans people cheating or dominating; they were complaints from cis people worried that trans people would cheat.

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For example, in Alaska, a cisgender sprinter defeated a trans girl in 2016 and then later appeared in a Family Policy Alliance video claiming the trans girl’s third place finish was unfair to other competitors.

The most oft-cited example of trans girls having an unfair advantage in the girls’ division is a Connecticut lawsuit, brought by the families of three cisgender track athletes in 2020 against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference for allowing two trans girls to compete. The families argued that the transgender girls had an advantage over the cisgender girls they competed against.

The families filed the lawsuit with the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, a well-known anti-LGBTQ+ group whose fingerprints are all over the current wave of anti-trans sports bills. Bianca Stanescu, the mother of runner Selina Soule, was upset because her daughter had finished in sixth place, and while overlooking the three cis girls who also placed ahead of Soule, they focused on the two trans girls. Soule later came in eighth place in another race and then appeared on Fox News to claim that trans girls were “destroying” sports for her.

Meanwhile, Chelsea Mitchell, one of the cis plaintiffs, regularly beat one of the trans girls she claimed had an advantage over her.

The five girls have all since graduated from high school. Mitchell and Soule are both running track at the Division I level in college, but neither of the two trans girls pursued track at the collegiate level. Despite that fact, Soule is continuing her crusade against trans girls in sports. She recently testified in favor of the South Carolina bill to ban trans girls from competing in girls’ sports — where she currently attends the College of Charleston.

But their case is far from the “gotcha” conservatives claim it is. “It’s their Exhibit A, and there’s no Exhibit B — absolutely none,” Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights and a prominent trans-rights attorney, told the AP.

Without facts to make their case, advocates for these anti-trans bills are relying on bigotry. They regularly misgender trans kids in their testimony and show little concern for the well-being of the trans athletes they are attacking. For example, the phrase “females transgendering to males” was used in Wednesday’s hearing in South Carolina.

This same disregard for trans lives was on full display during last month’s presser for the newly launched Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, a group of former Olympians working to “solve” the “transgender problem” in women’s and girls sports. Katie Barnes from ESPN asked the group, whose members regularly used “trans” as a noun, if they could provide examples of trans people being a problem in girls’ sports. Their answer was telling.

“We didn’t find it problematic,” tennis champion Martina Navratilova said, referring to Renee Richards, a trans woman who competed against Navratilova in the 1970s. “But I think we would have found it problematic had she started beating us, okay? I don't know if we would have been so happy if she started beating the pants off of us.”

There are likely hundreds of trans athletes competing across the country, and their participation is not seen as an issue unless they win. What anti-trans groups are asking for is “a complete guarantee on winning,” as Chelsea Wolfe, a professional BMX freestyle rider who also serves as ambassador for LGBTQ+ sports organization Athlete Ally, recently told The 19th. “And winning is not a human right. Participation in sport is a human right.”

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