President Trump’s executive order about female sports competitions and transgender girls and women was much less about stated fairness in athletics and much more about Trump seeking to stoke hateful passions about a tiny minority: the transgender community. Like all bullies, he is targeting a small, powerless group and is doing so to build up his support in his right-wing political base.
During the last campaign, Republicans made much hay, and many commercials, about the threat of transsexuals, accusing Kamala Harris of promising to use public funds to pay for the transgender reassignment surgery for criminal illegal aliens. Trump must think it a winning strategy. Making the handful of trans athletes his example solves a very small issue in girls sports, but also creates a large cultural split in our society, which is just what Trump is seeking.
On its face, Trump’s order to limit participation in K-12 and university girls’ sports to biological girls is in line with our own previous positions.
Title IX of federal education law, now more than a half-century old, created a parallel, level playing field for girls and women to participate in competitive athletics. However, the inclusion of stronger, faster biological males in women’s sports threatens that playing field — and though we sympathize with transgender girls and women who want to go up against those they consider their same-sex peers, there are innate advantages the very few bring to bear that can only be called unfair to the many.
The example lodged in the public mind is Lia Thomas, the UPenn swimmer who competed on the men’s team before transitioning and going on to earn titles in multiple events. Less well known is the case of Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, two Connecticut transgender girls who won track meets, set records — and prompted a lawsuit, still ongoing, by cisgender athletes who argued that their inclusion violated federal law deprived them of rights to compete fairly.
Still, Trump and his culture warriors on the right are whacking a fly with a sledgehammer all to bolster his claim to be beating back the evil of creeping wokeism. So he has his victory, he can claim to have saved women’s sports (which really weren’t facing any major danger) and the NCAA, following Trump’s action, has now restricted female competitions to those who have always been female.
But there’s also the damage, and not just to the impacted transsexuals individuals, but to the fabric of our society as a whole, by pitting people against each other. Trump doesn’t care about any of that. Exploiting fear of some swimmers and runners who are too fast and who the vast majority of female athletes will never encounter in a meet, Trump has taken a complicated situation and made it simple: get out of the pool and get off the track.
There have always been “others” based on race or religion or language or sex. It’s now impolite to have such exclusions. But not for trans people in these circumstances; they still get excluded.
There are ways to protect fairness in women’s sports, but Trump is only interested in scoring political points at the expense of a tiny minority.
