We Lost the Trans Athlete Debate, We Will Win the Next Fight

The right has nearly achieved total victory on the trans athlete policy debate. From here on out, their outrage bait should have significantly diminishing returns.

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I don't want to spend too long on the specifics of the trans athlete debate. I have written literally hundreds of times about this issue, any one of which would serve to inform you on the ins and outs of the issue. But long story short, most cis people have no understanding of how transitioning works, how athletic bodies work, or indeed, how the hormones in their own body affect themselves.

For more on that, I recommend this deep dive from Reo Eveleth, whose podcast "Tested" is the best explainer you can find for what the new IOC policy will do to women.

There's this mythological belief that being born with a set of balls means automatic physical superiority over all women and the idea that taking some pills or doing a bi weekly injection could nullify that superiority is just too much for men to handle.

The public will never be convinced about trans athletes. I guess that's fine, I have made my peace with that.

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Much ink has been spilled and hours have been spent moaning on social media about how Democrats should simply abandon trans rights altogether because trans sports polls so poorly. It is a near constant argument in the New York Times opinion section and amongst Substack centrist bros.

I have consistently argued that trans athletes should not be left behind, pointing out that the campaign on this issue was designed to establish a legal precedent declaring that trans women are really men in certain cases, which can then be widened into issue areas that conservatives really want to target: medicine, bathrooms, and legal identification.

Over time, we have seen this strategy play out. Conservative states first pass a trans athlete ban, then moved on to banning transition care for trans youth, then requiring trans people to use their assigned sex at birth on the state IDs. Some have passed North Carolina-style bathroom bills, others are targeting adult transition care.

The trans athlete debate was always the canary in the coalmine, and that canary has been dead for awhile.

Twenty nine states ban trans girls from girls scholastic and youth sports. The NCAA caved to the Trump administration early last year and implemented a full ban on trans women in women's college sports. And now the International Olympic Committee has banned trans women from women's Olympic sports.

That leaves us with just a handful of trans kids in the few blue states that still allow full trans participation in school sports.

And yet still Trump brings up trans athletes on an almost weekly basis. Whenever polling gets really bad against Republicans, the first thing out of their mouths is trashing trans athletes. Hell, Republicans tried to insert a full trans athlete ban into the SAVE America Act, a bill that has nothing to do with trans people and is really designed to allow Republicans to rig the midterm elections in their favor by making it impossible for many Democratic voters to cast a vote in the first place.

That effort thankfully failed, thanks to Democratic Senators.

While the centrist consultant wing of the Democratic party might want elected officials to abandon trans issues because of how unpopular the Dem position is on trans athletes, I think they should instead start making the point that this is a mostly settled issue now given how few trans athletes there are now in the US.

Instead Democrats should stand on more favorable ground. Polling on trans medicine, and non-discrimination protections are much more favorable and more difficult for Republicans to argue against.

When looking at what trans people actually want for rights, sure the right to participate equally in sports is on the list, but it has never been our main priority. We still live in a time when the trans population in the richest country on Earth is still frequently lives at poverty level. The unemployment rate for trans women is equivalent to the national unemployment rate during the Great Depression.

And this is after it was made illegal to discriminate against trans people in the workplace!

I know of so many smart, productive, and capable trans women with all sorts of advanced degrees who just simply can't get a job in their field. Hell, employed trans journalists are few and far between.

All of those newspaper columns about what to do with trans people and none of those papers can be bothered to even hire a trans journalist. It's shameful. This whole conversation about us is taking place without us.

While I am not happy with how the trans athlete debate has gone these last few years, I hope that we are entering a new phase in the struggle for trans rights in which we do not have the sports albatross constantly hanging around our necks.

I don't expect Republicans to stop talking about trans athletes, given its polling levels, but I think we can all start pointing out that they got what they wanted and that we should move on.

There is more fertile ground for trans people in other issue areas, and once we win those, we can come back to athletes in the future.

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