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Abby Ross is a retired policy analyst and writer who recently moved from Brunswick to the “other” Portland in Oregon. As Gordon Adams, they were a founding member of Mainers for Accountable Leadership.
Is it “fair” to allow trans girls to participate in trans sports?
Gov. Janet Mills has put herself and the state on the front lines in the struggle to protect the rights and safety of trans Americans. Other Democrats have shied away from this issue. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, decided to join sides with those who would exclude trans girls from sports, saying “I think it’s an issue of fairness … it’s deeply unfair.”
The word “fair” appeals to emotions, but it is wrong.
Trans girls are not “boys” competing against girls in girls’ sports.
They are trans girls who want to play with other girls. By calling them “boys” in girls’ sports, the anti-trans movement conjures up an image of a broad-shouldered, muscular, testosterone-laden male pretending to be a girl, shoving aside the “real” girls, hurting them, and taking over their games.
No “boy” is going through the difficult hormonal experience trans-girls are going through just to capture some easy wins. A trans girl is committed heart and soul to this change, not doing it for kicks.
This hormonal treatment lowers testosterone levels in trans-girls to levels, research suggests, close to those of the average girl born female. It also shrinks muscle mass, alters body shape, even aerobic functions, all of which matter in sports outcomes. These bodily changes level the playing field with non-trans girls. Trans girls no longer have measurable performance advantages they might have had if they had remained boys.
As a result, performance in girls’ sports depends more on other factors, advantages that vary widely even among non-trans girls. For example, girls from wealthier families have earlier access to more and better training, giving them an advantage. Some girls are taller or bigger than others, giving them an advantage in sports like basketball or weightlifting.
We are not about to ban tall girls from basketball because they have an unfair advantage over shorter girls.
Nor are trans girls sweeping trophies away from non-trans girls. I was shown a highly dubious list arguing that trans girls had won 6,000 competitions in girls’ sports in recent years. Even were this true, which is doubtful, the list did not say how many total competitions were held in all these sports (from rugby to darts). Six thousand might end up being 1 percent of the total number. The data was simply dishonest.
Anti-trans groups like to argue from anecdote, not systematic data. Makes a better emotional story. But even the anecdotes, like University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, lose vastly more races than they win — to non-trans girls. Non-trans girls have good and bad days in the pool, too.
In reality, this issue is a tempest in a tiny teapot. It is difficult to find enough trans girls to make a decent sample for research. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that there are roughly 300,000 trans children under 18 in the U.S. If half were trans-girls, there might be 150,000 trans girls in America’s 117,000 schools. Maybe one to two in the average school, not all of whom want to do competitive sports. The NCAA president estimated that there may be as few as 10 trans players among the 500,000 involved in NCAA sports.
There are significant issues in girls’ sports, but they are not about trans girls. Things like sexual harassment and abuse, lack of funding, inequitable pay, lack of teams, and pure prejudice. The trans issue is a diversion from these more systemic problems.
Gov. Mills is exactly right to resist pressure from the Trump regime on this issue. The “exclusion solution” tries to solve a non-problem and is cruel to this small minority.