Trans girls sports: exclusion is a solution to a non-problem

OPINION – Governor Gavin Newsom has expressed support for excluding trans girls from girls’ sports.  This is a tempting position because it would seem “fair” to keep boys out of girls’ sports and “unfair” to let them play.

This seductive idea appeals to emotions. But the premise is wrong.

Trans girls are not “boys” competing against girls in girls’ sports.

They are trans girls, few in number, who want to play in sports with other girls.  As trans girls, these young people do not appear to have an unfair advantage athletically. Any suggestion otherwise is anecdotal at best.

Excluding them would make the small number of trans girls victims, deprive them of rights we all enjoy, and could even risk their well-being.

Boys who remain boys are not “faking it” to pose as girls. There is no evidence that girls are being injured because boys are playing in girls’ sports (injuries happen in all sports; comes with the game.)

Boys would not want to go through what trans girls do unless they were very serious about a transition. The hormone regime necessary for such a transition is grueling; you have to want to do this with all your heart and soul.

Most important, the hormone-driven transition treatment lowers testosterone close to female levels; muscle mass shrinks; body shape changes; even aerobic function can change.

All these bodily changes level the playing field with the other non-trans girls. Trans girls no longer have measurable advantages they might have had as boys.

Because the playing field is level, research shows, performance in girls’ sports is affected by factors other than gender identity, things that can vary widely even among non-trans girls. Girls from wealthier families have earlier access to more and better training.  Some bodies are taller or bigger, conveying advantage in things like basketball or weightlifting.

Are we going to ban tall girls, trans or not, from basketball because the advantage they have – height – is “unfair”?  Probably not. We don’t do it for boys’ basketball.

The case might be stronger if trans girls now competing were winning every girl’s match; but they are not; the anecdotal winners people focus on also lose. The case of Lia Thomas, whose swimming fame at Penn fueled this debate, won one NCAA match; she loses most of the time competing with non-trans women. Non-trans girls have good and bad days, too.

In reality, the number of trans girls in America is so small that it is difficult to find enough of them to make a decent study. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that there are 1.6 million trans people in the US; roughly 300,000 are under 18. If half of these children were trans-girls, there might be 150,000 across the country. With 117,000 schools, it would be overstating the case to say there may be 2-3 trans girls in any one school.

The NCAA President estimated that there may be as few as 10 trans players among the more than 500,000 involved in NCAA sports competitions. Sadly, even the NCAA has now adopted a policy that rules them out of competition.

There are significant issues to deal with in girls’ sports, but they are not the question of trans girls. Things like sexual harassment and abuse, lack of funding, inequitable pay, lack of teams, and pure prejudice.  The trans issue is a diversion from these more systemic problems.

It would behoove the State of California to get smart on this question, before announcing a policy of exclusion, by commissioning a review of the increasingly extensive research being done on trans girls in sports.

This research is showing that trans girls do not have unfair advantages in sports and are, in any case, few in number.

The “exclusion solution” tries to solve a non-problem.

Abby Ross is a policy analyst and writer living in Portland Oregon.