When I was a little girl, my dad took me to “coach’s pitch.” I looked it up just now to see if it was a real thing and not just something churches in the South made up to be different from Little League, and it is: the summary I found indicates that it was designed as a “modified, developmentally appropriate level of youth baseball, emphasizing fundamentals, confidence, and fun over strict competition.”
Nothing about my experience emphasized fun. Nothing about it boosted my confidence. I spent more time getting yelled at about not being as good at it than I did learning the fundamentals of anything. I hit one ball in two years of playing and got violently tagged by an older child before I got to first base.
It was nothing like playing basketball, where at my age, the boys and the girls played together. There was something different there; something about the culture, the way we emphasized learning but also having a good time, the way the coaches acted, the way we behaved together. Something was different about basketball, and I didn’t know why. But I could feel the difference.
Playing basketball, the boys didn’t spend their time verbally abusing me when the coach wasn’t looking. Or hitting me. But as a six-year-old girl playing boys’ coach’s pitch, that’s just what you get, I suppose.
And so now I watch the debate over women in trans sports carefully, not because I particularly care about sports or want to personally participate in them. There is too much trauma there for me. Instead, I pay attention because I want a girl like me not to feel that way, someday, because something has gotten better.
And in watching that debate, I’ve noticed a recent change.
For a long time, the argument that the right proposed for trans women in sports had a particular form. It took the form of a toothless confession of sympathy for trans women, followed by an appeal to fairness. Their supposed general support and care for trans women was stated, but when it came to having to face the consequences of that position, the love vanished: They just felt that testosterone-based puberty creates biological advantages that are unfair.
It was ginned up as a sort of faux-tragedy. “Oh, we do care so very much for trans women, and it’s such a crying shame, went the hook, and then came the catch. It was just so regrettable that those trans women just have unfair advantages that make it impossible to support them competing against, you know, biological (read: real) women.”
Folks unfamiliar with the science but familiar with their general, uninterrogated sense of dis-ease with transgender people often parroted and fell for this argument. It was, unfortunately, effective—even though it is scientific and ethical balderdash.
Why Isn’t It a Good Argument?
First, natural variations make the argument stupid. Women are different. They have different capacities and abilities. Some have feet that make them good at swimming. Some have big lungs. Some have an ability to develop lean muscle mass that’s better than their peers. And some have penises.
Many women have “biological male” levels of testosterone and have similar kinds of puberty with similar developmental benefits. Are we banning them? Yes, in fact, sometimes we are, indicating that we don’t actually care what cisgender women are like. We care about defining a standard of womanhood that ignores what actual women’s bodies do.
Second, many transgender women do develop larger skeletons and frames under the influence of testosterone during puberty. But you know what happens when you start taking estrogen? Your muscle mass declines. Your effective strength drops. It drops to a level largely in line with cisgender women. Suddenly, you are trying to move a frame that was built under the influence of one hormone, but now must be propelled under the influence of another. Size is no longer a benefit; it is a drawback.
Bigots love to cite those size benefits like they are somehow the end of the argument, and while you can certainly measure those things and make an uninformed and snap judgment that this must mean transgender women have an advantage, actual studies of performance, that is to say, how people’s specific body parameters actually develop and sustain speed, endurance, strength, agility, etc., those don’t show much advantage, if any.
In fact, trans women often show less explosive power in their lower bodies than cis women, less aerobic function, and less lung capacity. Yes, that’s right: worse than cisgender women.
There are a few places where transgender women do seem to have some advantages. They seem to have better grip strength, and in certain kinds of sports where explosive upper body strength is valuable, such as swimming and weightlifting, they may have advantages.
May.
Nothing is proven, and there are many examples of out trans women athletes across the NCAA who have not been able to come in first in their sports. If testosterone is conferring some sort of residual advantage, it’s not showing up in the data.
And for every sport where testosterone is advantageous, there are others where it isn’t. In longer-duration events, performance decreases are markedly pronounced against cisgender female peers. In gymnastics, with all the jumping? Harder. It’s also harder to do flexibility-based feats, which are often mainstays of certain forms of female sport.
Finally, sports themselves are often designed by men to measure things men are good at. If they had been designed by women, they would measure different things. For a long time, women weren’t allowed to ski jump because of a nebulous fear that landing would harm their reproductive organs! It was probably because men just looked at their world records and worried women might be better at it than them. I’m fully convinced that the only reason women haven’t held world records in ski jumping yet is that men have only allowed them to compete in it since 2022.
In short, trans women usually don’t actually have unresolvable biological advantages. Even in cases where they do, all women generally have differences one to another, which means some women will be better than others at some things. Absolutely no reasonable case can be made from sports medicine to suggest an impervious biological advantage.
It Isn’t a Good Argument, but It Was Effective.
Many people are subtly misogynist whether they admit it or not. They believe that “biological males” are forever going to be better at feats of athleticism than women, that this is “simply common sense.” The arguments don’t really matter, and it’s what allows them to wring their hands about how much they really do care for trans people, they just don’t believe they should be allowed to compete.
This fundamental misogyny helped right-wing viewpoints gain credibility across many segments of society, including within traditional progressive circles whose members certainly don’t intend to interrogate why they believe testosterone is a once-and-forever ticket to being a better, more powerful human being.
The Only Real Argument the Right Has
With cracks in their first argument appearing, the next argument the right has is ideological. This is the only argument they ever had, of course, but they no longer feel the need to couch it behind fairness or sympathy towards trans people.
There’s less sympathy towards trans people today, after all, and the fairness claims dissolve under the closest scrutiny. Time to say what they’ve always believed: trans women aren’t women.
Now they argue, straightforwardly, that trans women are in fact men, and that regardless of any of the science or the arguments, men shouldn’t be in women’s sports. That’s just their argument. They say it openly across comment threads. They say it whether the sport is swimming, darts, or competitive chess. They say it if the event is a fun run 5k in the park organized for charity. They say it if the event is Irish Dancing. I’m surprised they haven’t decided that your local library’s Summer Reading Challenge needs to be strictly segregated by gender assigned at birth.
That’s their argument. It’s the only one they ever really had, certainly the only one that they ever really believed: trans women should be excluded from participating in society according to their appropriate gender categorization, because they don’t count as women.
That’s it.
The reason they can say it now is that society’s willingness to coddle them on the first argument is what created the conditions that allowed them to progress with speed and confidence to the argument they truly and always believed.
Progressives: Never Concede
I will be blunt: the willingness of progressive people to buy the concession, to tell themselves, “Well, I don’t actually hate trans women, I just think they shouldn’t be allowed to participate in every aspect of society that other women participate in without issue, because of fairness,” is what led us to this point.
Do not concede the point.
Never concede the point.
Trans women are women.
They are to participate in society in the same way as all other women. Period.
Never concede that point in any place, at any time, for any reason. Never tell yourself that testosterone makes someone better. Never tell yourself that it’s only about fairness. Never let yourself fall prey to the mild misogyny that position represents. Never let yourself fall prey to the scientific illiteracy that undergirds such a proposition, or the fundamental hatred towards trans people that lurks within it.
Because for the right, the argument is always about elimination. When you fall for it, it is always, always a sign that there remains a dis-ease in your heart about us.
But you always have an opportunity to move yourself away from prejudice and towards welcome, simply by reminding yourself: trans women are women. They deserve to participate as women do in the areas of human society in which women normally participate. I know you can do it.
You just have to erase the asterisk that exists next to the word “women” when you tell yourself trans women are women. You have to erase the part of yourself that wants to say, “trans women are women, but…”
Until you do, little girls will continue being beaten up in the dugout, verbally and physically, by the boys who see exactly what they are, even if they themselves do not, and act accordingly. Little girls won’t have the opportunity to participate in the supreme glory of humankind: play with others, play for its own sake, play for the delight and happiness of a body in motion and a ball thrown just so, sailing straight to where it was intended.
For that world to be real, you have to do more than say it.
You have to believe it.
Image by Abner Velázquez via Pexels, free to use.
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