It’s the Fourth of July and SCOTUS Will Rule on Sports Bans
Our country doesn’t have to be this way.
Opinion, by Evan Urquhart
When the history books record this era, they probably won’t mention transgender sports bans. As I write, the fad among MAGA Republicans is taking selfies in customized swag in front of a concentration camp. They revel in bringing fear and death, disparaging any human concern for other human beings as weakness. They are monsters, enacting monstrous policies, and any history book that records their monstrousness will have at most a parenthetical devoted to bans on transgender athletes in sporting competitions.
So where does that leave transgender Americans on this Fourth of July Friday? The holiday caps off a week that saw Lia Thomas stripped of her records by UPenn and the Supreme Court announcing they intend to rule on whether Title IX protects trans people in athletics, a raindrop of misery in the downpour of US politics. In addition to the concentration camps, the other big news of the week is that Republicans are stripping healthcare from millions of Americans. How can we think about sports bans at a time like this?
One reason, perhaps, is that sports bans were the seed from which this monstrousness grew.
The mainstream often uses the euphamism of a ‘wedge issue’ to describe efforts by the far right to whip up hatred and fear towards a minority. The question of when, how, or whether trans women can be included in athletics made a marvelous wedge. It exploited the ignorance and prejudices of the public while seeming too insignificant for trans allies to defend. So few people are impacted it hardly seems worth defending. Surely there were more important uses of their time.
For trans girls like Becky Pepper-Jackson, who just want to play sports with their friends, the reason equal access to appropriate sports opportunities are important is because they don’t deserve to face discrimination for something they didn’t choose. But for the rest of us, there was something else at stake. Allowing conservatives to go unopposed on trans women’s participation in sports let them make bad policy based on lying and demonizing a small group of kids.I It rewarded the worst political impulses and showed weakness on the left, creating a crack for conservatives to drive their wedge in and exploit. We’re all living with the results, but if Democrats had defending trans kids vigorously, Americans could have found it easy to have empathy for the innocent victims of these attempts to drive a wedge.
Instead, the caricatures of trans women as men, the lies about trans women dominating sports, the ugly hatreds based on outdated stereotypes of men and women that the sports issue dredged up were allowed to fester and grow. Now, ignorance and reactionary fervor have become the ruling passions of the day.
These passions have grown so swiftly and become so overwhelming and all-encompassing and out of control that it’s hard to remember that just a few years ago trans girls were swimming and running and fencing and playing chess without anyone caring at all. Trans girls were accepted as girls, this generally included sports, and the world continued turning along. A kid could throw discus or shot put and be trans or cis and nobody cared.
It’s important not to let go of our memories of that world, however far away it seems. The right has made trans women in sports a symbol of their politics, and it’s as apt as any symbol has ever been. Wherever compassion, inclusion, and reasonable accomodations for difference existed the right substitutes suspicion, paranoia, and division. They reject science and compromise at every turn. Poised on the doorstep of a future where people of different sexes or people from different background could recognize one another as equals and move forward together they refused, dragging everyone into their score-settling grievances and making people miserable for no reason at all.
If posing for pictures in front of a concentration camps represents our current moment, trans girls in sports represent a politics of inclusion and empathy that we know can work, because we saw it working with our own eyes. Including trans girls in high school shot put teams isn’t the most consequential issue, and it shouldn’t be, because our lives shouldn’t be a brutal competition for survival under the boot of masked secret police. For now, we have to live in the world conservatives have made. But nothing should make us forget that there are other ways to live.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.