They want a way to include transgender athletes in mainstream sports but ensure cisgender females remain in the mix to win, insisting trans athletes have an advantage in the “participation gap” by default.ĭe Varona’s group offers a 37-page “briefing book” on the topic. De Varona, Martina Navratilova, Edwin Moses and Chris Evert have long been at the forefront for equality in women’s sports. The complexity of the debate has also placed sports icons in peculiar positions. They see us as not human and as predators.” “That’s what they see us as now, especially in the Republican Party in Iowa. “When I was in high school, people called me a ‘monster’ because I was bigger than the other girls,” she recalled on the Trans Porter Room podcast earlier this year, not long before Iowa passed its transgender athlete ban. I just want to play, like any other kid.”Īll the anti-transgender legislation hits home for Kyla Paterson, who was able to play soccer after the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union adopted regulations for the inclusion of transgender girls in 2014. “Then, to have the legislature pass a law that singled out me and kids like me to keep us from being part of a team, that crushed me, it hurt very much. “I was really looking forward to trying out for the boys’ golf team and, if I made it, training and competing with and learning from other boys and improving my game,” Esquivel said.
It was brought on behalf of Luc Esquivel, a freshman golfer who was assigned the sex of female at birth but in 2019 told his parents he identifies as male. Last fall, the American Civil Liberties Union and others filed a lawsuit against Tennessee’s ban on transgender athletes playing school sports. The number of athletes within that group is much smaller a 2017 survey by Human Rights Campaign suggested fewer than 15% of all transgender boys and transgender girls play sports. There are some 15.3 million public high school students in the United States and a 2019 study by the CDC estimated 1.8% of them - about 275,000 - are transgender. Without federal legislation to set parameters for this highly technical issue - on the front line of a culture divide that also includes abortion rights, gun control and “ replacement theory,” among other topics - high school athletic associations and legislatures in no fewer than 40 states have filled the void on their own. And it has always been complicated and nuanced.” “But people aren’t going to look at the underbelly because it’s complicated and nuanced. “We’re at a time where Title IX is going to be exploited and celebrated,” said Donna de Varona, the Olympic champion swimmer who heads the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, which seeks a “middle way” to be inclusive of transgender athletes while also not “forcing” what it sees as unfair competition.
That stance is at odds with efforts in states across the country. Today, it is one of the sharpest dividing points in American culture.Īs the transformational law heads into its second half-century on the books, the Biden administration wants transgender athletes to enjoy the same protections Title IX originally gave to women when it was passed 50 years ago. When the gender equity legislation known as Title IX became law in 1972, the politics of transgender sports was not even a blip in the national conversation.