Trans Rights Are Human Rights: Attacks against trans athletes are the front lines in a war on bodily autonomy
"We are just 1% of the population and yet suddenly it feels like everyone has an opinion on our right to exist."
The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
I read with dismay the news last week that the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA), which oversees most of the states’ middle and high school athletics programs, caved in to the Trump administration’s attacks on trans kids, reversing their guidance around trans girls’ ability to participate on teams that align with their gender identity. Instead, in their haste to comply in advance with an executive order of extremely flimsy constitutionality, the WIAA has gone against good science and good ethics and opted to ban trans girls from competing.
The decision comes on the heels of the NCAA adopting a similar policy for college and university athletics — another heartbreaking and infuriating case of backsliding and advance compliance with an order already being challenged in the courts.
I was a kid who loved to play sports and faced bullying for not conforming to what people thought I was supposed to look and act like based on my sex assigned at birth. I know and love many trans and gender non-conforming kids now who are being forced to deal with institutionalized bullying on a level I never had to face, and it breaks my heart.
We are just 1% of the population and yet suddenly it feels like everyone has an opinion on our right to exist.
Yes, the threat of the loss of federal funding is a serious one for school athletic programs. I’d argue that standing up for the dignity and rights of your student athletes should far outweigh such a threat. It’s also worth noting that, as a private non-profit that doesn’t rely on federal funds, the WIAA did not have to do this.
Regardless, states, athletic organizations and their boosters should be banding together to fight back against such brazen attacks. Take a page from Maine Governor Janet Mills and the state’s athletic governing body, who are refusing to comply with Trump’s order even in the face of open threats.
More from Emily Mills, here at The Recombobulation Area:
Did the WIAA’s nearly-all-white-male board take the time to speak with trans and gender non-conforming students or athletes about how such a policy might impact them? Or with the parents of those children, who could talk about the ways such a policy creates a hostile environment for their kids and opens the gates for gross invasions of privacy and bodily autonomy?
The thing too many people miss in the debate about whether or not trans kids (girls in particular) should be allowed to participate in sports — or society — as their true, authentic selves is this: The attacks on trans people are fundamentally attacks on the rights of all individuals to make decisions about our own bodies. How else do you go about enforcing trans bans than by giving some people the right to decide what the rules are for being “male” or “female” enough? Who gets to determine that and how? By forcing kids to undergo genital inspections, or obtain and then share chromosomal or hormonal testing results? What chromosomal conditions are OK and which aren’t? What level and combination of hormones? Not all girls or women produce eggs. Not all men produce sperm. Not everyone conforms to gendered stereotypes of dress or appearance. Not all people are one of the binary genders (me, for instance). Also, intersex people exist!
The people trying to erase trans and non-binary people have made it painfully clear that they don’t care about actual science or biology, though. They don’t care about “fairness in women’s sports.” If they did, they’d be investing in things like ensuring women and girls actually received equal funding, equal pay, and meaningful protections from abuse and harassment.
What this movement is actually interested in is enforcing a rigid standard of womanhood, one based in deeply racist and sexist ideas about “acceptable” feminine appearance and behavior. It’s why the majority of cases of women athletes being attacked for their appearance, performance, hormone level, etc. have been against Black women1.
It’s also why the targets are so often trans women and girls, with rarely a thought given to trans men and boys. Misogyny is at the root of it all. Women are seen as delicate, in need of “protection,” weaker and lesser-than. And so trans women — who are (wrongly) viewed as “men pretending to be women” — are seen as threats, while trans men, (wrongly) viewed as women pretending to be men, are not.
This misogynistic, white supremacist worldview doesn’t believe people should be able to make decisions about their bodies unless they’re gender-conforming white cisgender men. It’s deeply tied to the movement to roll back reproductive rights, and to push women, people of color, and disabled folks out of the workplace and back into subservient roles (see the recent attacks on DEI, which are essentially efforts to re-segregate society and keep white men on top).
Trans people, many of them Black and Brown, have long been on society’s front lines of change–both being attacked and fighting for the right to bodily autonomy and free expression. We’ve also been thrown under the bus, time and again, by people who should be our allies but who fear being marginalized in the same way. The hard truth is this, however: If the most marginalized don’t have their rights, then no one outside of the ruling minority truly has their rights, either. If we continue to allow a kind of Jim Crow for trans people, the impacts will also continue to bleed out and harm us all.
What kind of society are we building when we refuse to address the real threats to our children’s health and well-being and instead spend so much time and effort on attacking them or forcing them into impossibly rigid boxes? It’s not a healthy one, that’s certain.
If there’s one thing of enormous value that trans folks can offer everyone else, it is our insistence on living freely and authentically, and our dream of a world in which everyone is free to do the same. It’s well past time for the rest of society to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us in that fight.
Right now, in Wisconsin, that starts with speaking up and pushing back particularly on unelected bodies like the WIAA, to ensure that kids have access to sports that align with their gender identities. All children should have the right – free from bullying and harassment – to play and benefit from the many ways that athletics can enrich lives.
Emily Mills is a longtime freelance writer/reporter based in Madison. They previously served as Editor of Our Lives, Wisconsin's only LGBTQ+ media outlet, and as an opinion columnist in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. You can currently find Emily's work at tonemadison.com and at their own Substack newsletter, @Grist From the Mills (emilymills.substack.com)
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"What kind of society are we building when we refuse to address the real threats to our children’s health and well-being and instead spend so much time and effort on attacking them or forcing them into impossibly rigid boxes? It’s not a healthy one, that’s certain." one hundred percent!!
In addition to everything else you rightly note, the argument about trans girls in sports and the "unfair" advantage they have overlooks two key points:
1) Even if the argument had biological merit, some people's biology grants them advantages in certain sports...and we do nothing about it, in fact we steer such people towards the sports in which their biology advantages them. How many tall kids are encouraged to play basketball or volleyball? How many muscular, large kids are encouraged to play football? That's a biological advantage as much as whatever advantage being born assigned male might offer...but no one cares.
2) The "unfairness" also disappears if we regard kids' sports not as yet another venue in which the victorious are separated from the defeated but instead as a place where kids can learn skills, confidence, teamwork, and perseverance, regardless of which team or athlete wins. The problems that arise in school sports from excessive competitiveness are well-known. The arguments against trans girls in school sports nearly always boil down to an alleged competitive advantage...as if winning and losing are the only valuable things about school athletics.