Opinion: Can we finally stop talking about trans sports?

The sheer volume of ruckus Republicans have generated from the minuscule issue presented by trans female athletes deserves its own special place in the annals of wagging the dog. From 2020-24, the GOP clogged state legislatures with 296 bills hell-bent on banning less than 1% of children from school sports. Republicans repeatedly brought up trans women athletes during Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, and during the Paris Olympics — despite the fact that no trans women competed there. The Trump campaign found a photo of a trans grandma in her mid-50s playing on a community college basketball team, and aired it on television tens of thousands of times. All in the name of “protecting girls and women.”

Last month, after voting for the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) did some extra protecting at a news conference. “I’m the mom of five daughters and currently, so far, nine granddaughters,” she said. “It sickens me knowing that confused and predatory men can take away years of hard work from our girls and enter their sports and their locker rooms. Title IX was a hard-fought victory, and we must not allow the Left to erase 50 years of equal rights in one fell swoop.”

I wonder if Miller ever explained to her five daughters and nine granddaughters why she voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act in 2021. Or why, the following year, when the Supreme Court erased 50 years of women’s reproductive rights, she called the erasing of Roe vs. Wade “a historic victory for white life.” (A mix-up, her spokesperson said.)

And if she’s worried about predatory men in women’s spaces, she need look no further than our president, who brags about committing sexual assault, and derived pleasure from barging into women’s changing rooms at his beauty pageants and his neighborhood Bergdorf Goodman department store.

When I called the issue of trans athletes “minuscule” it was actually an overstatement — microscopic is more like it. According to NCAA president Charlie Baker, of 510,000 student athletes in college sports, fewer than 10 (or 0.002%) are transgender. There were many more little girls crowded around Trump for the signing photo of his “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order, than the total number of transgender college athletes the NCAA banned from competition hours later.

As a trans person, I have avoided writing about sports because it only distracts from infinitely larger issues facing my community, such as access to healthcare, bodily autonomy, equal protection, the right to privacy and the parental rights of parents of trans kids. When sports is the story, the trans community loses — every time. We get trashed and trolled and misgendered, and we lose allies. Republicans use sports as a gateway drug to spread trans hate.

That hatred infected Martina Navratilova six years ago, when she wrote about trans athletes in the London Times, and veered into delusional transphobic smears: “A man can decide to be female, take hormones if required … win everything in sight and perhaps earn a small fortune, and then reverse his decision and go back to making babies if he so desires. It’s insane and it’s cheating.”

The nine-time Wimbledon champion ought to know that no one “decides” to be queer or trans — that’s why it’s called “coming out” — and no one ever did it to cheat at sports, which is absurd. She couldn’t name a trans woman athlete winning “everything in sight” and going “back to making babies” because such science fiction creatures don’t exist. And calling trans women former (or future) men is the kind of misgendering that puts us in tremendous danger.

Last Thursday, when the NCAA changed its participation policy for transgender athletes, on the heels of the executive order, I was hoping against hope it wouldn’t ban all trans women from competition — which is what it did. I would have preferred to see it follow what the world swimming body, FINA, has done, and allow trans women who have not undergone male puberty to compete. FINA’s policy isn’t concerned with trans identity but rather bodily development.

When she was a University of Pennsylvania swimmer, Lia Thomas, who went through a male puberty, ranked 462nd among NCAA Division 1 men in the 200-meter freestyle, per swimcloud. After transitioning, she ranked fifth among NCAA Division 1 women in the event in 2022. Thomas could never beat Katie Ledecky, but that leap from 462nd to fifth is a hard fact to get around. Likewise, trans tennis icon Renée Richards was unable to beat Chris Evert but was still able to climb to No. 20 in the world as a woman in 1979 — at age 45. Before she transitioned, Richards competed five times in the men’s division of the U.S. Open, never making it past the round of 64, and never turning pro.

More than hormone levels or muscle mass, the huge jump in rank is a stat that speaks for itself: Trans athletes who’ve gone through a male puberty have an advantage in women’s sports. This is not to say Lia Thomas did anything wrong. She loved her sport, and fought to hold onto that love, as any dedicated athlete would. She played by the NCAA rules at the time, and didn’t deserve to be vilified and misgendered and cheaply targeted by politicians.

And I can almost guarantee she wishes she’d transitioned sooner — a regret shared by every trans person I’ve ever known. We can only come out when we’re ready, but for those who come out early enough to be spared the ordeal of a puberty in the wrong gender, it also levels all playing fields. That’s actually what Republicans are trying hardest to destroy: trans children.

Prior to the executive order on sports, Trump issued orders to deny healthcare to trans minors and erase the existence of all of us. He wiped us from government websites, and he is trying to force our passports to misgender and thereby endanger us, to criminalize us for being in restrooms and prioritize our prosecutions and to set up federal prisons as detransition sites. The orders were steeped in crude lies and dehumanizing language (the one banishing trans people from the military deems us mentally ill, and liars), all of which creates an environment that is, to use a term of holocaust scholar Raz Segal, genocide generating.

Now can we please stop talking about sports?

Diana Goetsch is a poet, essayist, journalist and the author of the memoir “This Body I Wore.”