Transgender girls and sports

 When I was on the high school cross country team, we’d have Saturday morning races in Knoxpatch against kids from area schools. I say “kids” because it wasn’t uncommon to see some girls in the race. Indeed, some of these girls beat some of my teammates.

I don’t know whether any of the girls were transgender, but given that this was in the early 1970s in East Tennessee, I kinda doubt it.

The latest fake distraction from the extremist right is that transgender girls are a threat to girl’s sports. Sorry, that doesn’t pass the sniff test. For one thing, there just aren’t many transgender girls and most of them aren’t interested in varsity sports (just like most cis-gender girls and boys aren’t). And for another, I seriously doubt that boys who can’t cut it in boy’s sports are going to claim transgender status just so they can win as girls.

Finally, there’s no evidence that cis-gender girls can’t win in competitions that include transgender girls. But don’t take my work for it, here’s Scientific American:

“State legislators around the country are pushing bills that would force trans girls to compete on boys’ teams. In describing the Connecticut case in the Wall Street Journal, opinion writer Abigail Shrier expressed a representative argument: when transgender girls compete on girls’ sports teams, she wrote, “[cisgender] girls can’t win.”

The opinion piece left out the fact that two days after the Connecticut lawsuit was filed by the cisgender girls’ families, one of those girls beat one of the transgender girls named in the lawsuit in a Connecticut state championship. It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children, and they don’t address a real problem. They’re unscientific, and they would cause serious mental health damage to both cisgender and transgender youth.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belong-on-girls-sports-teams/?fbclid=IwAR3rgAhwF_BvJRXRqIDzMrj3zZruJppCzLvMMuXo7HA1ZGXBSasea-MFYIY