Some Still Claim Trans Athletes Don’t Belong in Sports

From Connecticut to Mississippi, several states across the country are proposing and signing into law bills that intercept the rights of transgender women to participate in women’s sports. Since 2019, about 35 bills have been proposed by state legislators to rescind these rights from trans women.

According to The New Yorker, a federal complaint made in Connecticut claims that trans girls competing in sports is a violation of Title IX, and anyone testifying against this movement was more focused on defending conservative ideals than on the facts of the discussion at hand.

The debate is centered around whether transgender participants in sports have an advantage over cis participants. It is a heated debate that has been going for years—and revived by this latest movement against the rights of transgender athletes, according to NPR. These proposals cause the risk of allowing degrading treatment of trans athletes that go against the cultural norms of being feminine.

Also from NPR, one Dr. Eric Vilain, a geneticist and physician, spent several years studying the differences between athletes based on sex. Dr. Eric’s studies conclude there is no viable differences that would justify keeping trans women athletes from participating in cis women’s sports. Vilain infers that these propositions are being pushed in order to “target women who have either a different biology or … simply look different.”

According to them., transgender athletes are already the target of immeasurable discrimination from sports. A study made public from The Trevor Project shows that fewer LGBTQ youth wish to invest in athletics and sports than cis youth. Stonewall director of communications, Robbie de Santos, agrees that there is no advantage present that trans athletes could hold over their peers, believing that it is, “extremely harmful for this guidance to suggest that there is an inherent conflict between inclusion, fairness, and safety when in reality, the three go hand in hand.”

Given that this is already a confusing and tumultuous time in their lives, trans youth deserves support and guidance, which is inhibited by laws that give these young people the idea that they don’t belong in the world as they see themselves. The desire for control has to stop somewhere, and the people grasping for this control over others would do well to reconsider their actions here in order to set a good example for future generations of transgender people.