What Do Transgender Athlete Bans Really Do?
Hint: It's got nothing to do with "fairness."
Dear readers,
Before we get to our main story this week, a quick update on the subject of last week’s newsletter. On Monday, the Los Angeles Dodgers reversed course once again on their Pride Night debacle, apologizing to the LGBTQ pride organization that it had disinvited the week before and welcoming the group back to the festivities. The reversal came after several of the team’s Pride Night partners backed out in protest, so it’s hard to say what actually motivated the Dodgers’ decision: genuine regret over turning its back on the queer community, or fear of losing a potentially lucrative promotional event. They then decided to host “Christian Faith and Family Day” as well, another bizarre step that capitulates to the (clearly incorrect) idea that Pride is somehow infringing on the beliefs of good Christians.
But fear not: By the time Dodgers had reversed course, the right-wing panic over their Pride Night had already been overtaken by another conservative freak-out over corporate wokeness, this time focusing on Target’s decision to sell bathing suits for trans people. The woke overlords at Target apparently did not heed the lesson that the Dodgers learned the week before, and they capitulated almost immediately. We will presumably have another update for you next week.
As we wrote last week, these cultural skirmishes over corporate Pride are pretty dumb, and we’ll all be better off if they garnered less attention. But they are, nevertheless, windows into a broader and more serious problem: ongoing efforts by conservative politicians to actually strip transgender people of their rights. We’re turning to that broader problem this week.
-Calder and Ian
There’s a paradox in policy reporting that we, as political journalists, often wrestle with. In general, the policy initiatives that get the most media attention are the big splashy ones — like efforts to ban poetry in schools — that put off a lot of light but not very much heat. The less splashy efforts — the ones that unfold quietly, over several years in different jurisdictions — garner comparatively less attention, but they’re the ones that are more likely to have a lasting effect on Americans’ lives in the long run. The slow burn grabs fewer eyeballs than the fireworks.
This has always been the case, but it has been particularly clear in the coverage of Republican ongoing efforts to ban transgender women from competing in amateur and college sports.
The issue burst into the national conservation back in March of 2022, as it often does, with a splashy headline: Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, took home gold in the 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA Division I national championship. Thomas met all the rules and guidelines that the NCAA had set for a transgender woman to compete in the women’s division, but that didn’t stop conservatives from melting down over her victory. Leading the meltdown was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who issued a completely meaningless proclamation declaring the second-place finisher, a Floridian, the “real” winner.
In the meantime, 21 states have adopted laws banning transgender high school and college students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identities, as the below map from the Movement Advancement Project nicely illustrates.
To make matters worse, the map doesn’t even capture stalled or ongoing attempts to restrict the rights of transgender athletes at the local, state, or national level. Here’s a quick sampling:
In April, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill banning transgender women from competing on girls’ or women’s sports teams at schools and colleges that receive federal support.
In March, World Athletics, the governing body for international track and field competitions, banned transgender women who went through male puberty from competing in women’s events at international competitions.
Last week, the Texas House of Representatives approved a bill that would expand the state’s pre-existing restrictions on transgender athletes from K-12 schools to colleges and universities.
This list could go on, of course, but you get the point.
There are a few important things to keep in mind about these restrictions. The first is that not all these legislative efforts are the same, and they’re not all likely to have the same sort of impact. The World Athletics ban, for instance, will have an immediate effect on international track and field, but the House bill will likely never even make it to the Senate floor. Similarly, different bills draw on different bodies of scientific research to determine where to draw the line on women’s participation, and much of the science is far from settled. The Biden administration has used this ambiguity to its advantage, proposing a rule that would prevent schools from adopting blanket bans on transgender students’ participation in sports, but that still leaves room for more targeted restrictions.
But what all the bills do, regardless of their efficacy or reach, is signal that transgender people should be subject to a different set of rules than their cis-gendered peers. This is the nuance that’s often lost in the coverage of individual bills: The individual bills themselves may seek to set limits on transgender women in sports, but the nationwide (and even international) effort to pass these bills serves a broader goal — namely, to normalize the idea that trans people are threatening to “normal” society and need to be subject to specific rules. Sports is the arena in which this battle is playing out right now, because it's the arena where conservatives have a plausible claim to be doing something other than criminalizing transgender people (i.e. “protecting the fairness and integrity of sport”). But if you think that this effort to create one set of rules for transgender people and another set of rules for everyone else will end with sports — well, we’d love some of whatever you’re smoking.
There’s a pithy little adage about conservatism that gets bandied around lefty Twitter now and again that says: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Like any aphorism, it has its limits, but it strikes us as a pretty accurate summation of the politics that are motivating transgender athlete bans. These bans are part of an effort to define an out-group whom the law binds but does not protect. It requires a particular kind of callousness to spin these efforts as an attempt to protect “fairness.”
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
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. . . racism in Spanish soccer? “Vinícius Júnior Says Racism Is ‘Normal’ in Spanish Soccer,” by Tariq Panja in The New York Times (May 22, 202).
. . . a brief history of the cursed White House? “Sports no sure respite from politics when title-winning athletes visit the White House,” by Chris Megerian and Josh Boak for AP (May 25, 2023).
. . . the evolution of athlete activist groups on college campuses? “College athletes mobilized after George Floyd. Three years later, those groups have evolved,” by Glynn. A Hill in The Washington Post (May 25, 2023).