Washington Examiner Kinda Admits Trans Women Don’t Dominate Sports
What’s left when a right wing writer admits that the performance of trans women athletes isn’t the point?
by Evan Urquhart
The Washington Examiner is exploring new frontiers in anti-trans writing with a recent essay by Tom Joyce of the New Boston Post (a conservative outlet covering New England), arguing that it doesn’t matter whether trans women have an unfair advantage in athletic competition or not. The entry point into the essay is a recently passed ban in Wyoming, a somewhat unusual choice of topic for a New England writer. If the bill is signed by the Republican governor it will prohibit trans students from participating in girls sports. The bill is much like other bills prohibiting trans youth from school athletics, and the essay is largely uninterested in the specifics. In that, it’s not unusual for the conservative press. What is more interesting is the author’s willingness to dispense with the pretense that the core concern of these bills is fairness in women’s athletics.
screenshot from the Washington Examiner
Wow, so according to this writer there have been a few instances where trans girls or women didn’t lose their cisgender competitors? Seems mighty hard to prove that when trans women to compete it’s impossible for cis girls to win, since they do most of the time. Could it be that biology is more complicated, and the suppression (or addition) of testosterone has a lot more to do with athletic performance than someone’s assigned sex at birth?
With the evidence of trans woman’s domination being this weak it makes sense that conservative writers would want to reach for some other reason why trans women need to be banned from playing sports. Let’s take a look at what Joyce has to offer in that vein:
screenshot from the Washington Examiner
This is very weak sauce! While complaining about transgenderism and gender ideology is very en vogue among the extreme right, ordinary people tend to want to live and let live. The widespread perception that cis girls won’t have a chance if trans girls get to play is what has led women’s athletics to more success than most bigoted bills. Athletics is a more complicated subject, a rare transgender issue where there are some nuanced conversations to be had. As Joyce seems to tacitly admit, however, these nuanced conversations tend to center in on requiring some testosterone suppression for post-pubertal athletes, particularly those competing at a high level. The evidence, while tentative, doesn’t seem to require an outright ban for fairness reasons alone.
This essay is more honest than most, because it admits that the motivating factor for conservatives is ideological, not practical. Whether trans people are an “ideology” or just a group of people who want to participate in normal life like anyone else, why would the government care unless there were issues of fairness at stake? While conservatives seem to enjoy repeated references to genitals and chromosomes, they are likely overestimating the appetite among the general public for navel-gazing discussions about what the definition of the word woman is. If everyone can play fairly, why not just let everyone play?
