We must stop the bigot bureaucracy
The GOP-fueled trans panic will harm children if we do nothing
Speaking of her athletic abilities, Ember, an 18-year-old high school softball player in Ohio, says she's "not great."
When it comes to her teammates and friends, she says, "Most of them are better than me, to be honest. I've got asthma. Almost after every warm-up, I've got to take a puff on my inhaler cause I'm about to pass out."
Yes, she made the varsity girls' team, but probably because her school has no junior varsity feeder team and there are too few interested students to keep the varsity time alive.
To hear her speak in humble tones with the innocence befitting her age, you would not detect that she is a menace and an enemy of the state.
Ember is a transgender girl, and in her state, politicians are still working on their slow-baking understanding that Moses didn't write the Constitution.
Last month Republicans passed a late-night bill (H.B. 61) that would prohibit girls like Ember from participating in girls' sports.
The bill's sponsor, Rep. Jena Powell, framed it as protecting cis girl athletes from unfair competition with boys.
"Across our country, female athletes are currently losing championships, scholarship opportunities, medals, education, and training opportunities and more to discriminatory policies that allow biological males to compete in girls' sports," she said.
Of the 400,000 young people playing organized sports in Ohio, Ember is the only high schooler, and ten other trans girls are at the elementary level. That's a fact that makes it difficult to understand the necessity for a fire sale on anti-trans legislation.
Nationally, about 2% of people aged 18 to 29 identify as transgender, and 3% said they are nonbinary. Together, an estimated 5% of people are getting outsized attention when it comes to legislation intended to marginalize rather than enfranchise Americans.
According to the Pew Research Center, 44% of people know someone who is transgender. Yet, for now, only a third of Americans support the participation of trans athletes in female sports.
That’s likely due to widespread ignorance and misinformation about the transition trans people make on their gender-affirming journey.
Republicans would have you believe boys and men are making overnight decisions to don dresses and join girls' and women's sports so they can dominate.
The truth is different than that.
First, in the case of trans girls, pubertal suppression therapy decreases their testosterone levels to roughly the same as cisgender girls. For those who say trans girls are just boys in disguise, I'd ask them to give cisgender male athletes these medical interventions and see if it leaves them with biological advantages when competing against other males.
Second, Ohio has an existing process for how trans girls and boys qualify to play with teams that match their gender identity. Young women and girls like Ember must complete at least one year of hormone treatment (she has had four years) and prove with credible medical evidence that they have no physical or physiological advantages.
Republicans can’t be solving the problem of too many trans kids taking over cisgender sports teams, or a biological advantage as proven by science, or the crushed dreams of girls and women who suddenly are displaced by unfair competition of trans athletes.
I’m only left to assume it’s good old-fashioned bias, bigotry, and hate.
Reasonable leaders who want all of their young people to to learn, flourish, compete, and feel affirmed in their communities would thoughtfully balance the human and developmental needs of trans youth with the unresolved and unscientific public fears about fairness in sports.
As Ember says, current rules are a bit onerous but livable.
But, the proposed rules pushed by Republicans are cruel. They would prohibit any trans athlete from competing with cisgender girls or women: period, hard stop, end of story.
That would leave girls like Ember unduly exiled from a normative childhood experience we should want for all kids.
Even worse, the proposed rules would require the most medievally invasive remedy when an athlete is accused or suspected of being trans.
Not only would the athletes in question have to endure tests of their testosterone levels and genetic makeup, but they would also have to submit to inspection of their external and internal genitalia.
Think deeply about that. Would you want that for your child?
The party currently accusing damn near everyone left of Breitbart of child grooming wants the government to be in the business of inspecting child genitalia.
The group championing smaller government wants more bureaucrats to make decisions that state sports leagues currently make for their players using the best available science.
The very people who talk a good game about freedom don't want Ember to be free to be herself.
Every human catastrophe in history started just like this. Identifying small groups of people who are different and therefore easy scapegoats for pent-up mass anxieties and insecurities about culture change.
Vulgar and opportunist politicians who have no low that they are unwilling to meet on their way to political objectives.
And, eventually, the legal and structural dehumanization of a people to the point of unthinkable consequences.
For every Ember in America, good people who are observant of history and faithful to concepts of decency must make damn sure the hateful right meets their match.