The fight for the future of transgender athletes
Battle grows over equality, opportunity and even what it means to be female
The women timed their announcement carefully, holding it the day before National Girls and Women in Sports Day, created three decades ago to promote female athletes.
Among them were trailblazers: Donna de Varona, the Olympic swimmer who lobbied for Title IX’s passage in 1972; Donna Lopiano, the former chief executive of the Women’s Sports Foundation; and Nancy Hogshead-Makar,
Olympic swimmer and law professor who authored a book on Title IX.
Before that day in early February, they were universally respected as pioneers in the long fight for women’s equality in sports. Then they unveiled their project: changing the way transgender girls and women participate in women’s sports. Almost immediately, their proposal drew bitter criticism in the fraught debate over transgender rights.
For starters, they said, they planned to lobby for federal legislation requiring transgender girls and women, in high school sports and above, to suppress testosterone for at least one year before competing, making universal a policy already in place in some states and some higher levels of sports. For transgender girls in high school who do not suppress testosterone, they suggested “accommodations,” such as separate races, podiums or teams.
They called themselves the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group.
“To give girls and women an equal opportunity to participate in sports, they need their own team. Why? Because of the biological differences between males and females,” said Hogshead-Makar, CEO of Champion Women, a women’s sports advocacy organization.
They portrayed their proposals as a science-based compromise between two extremes: right-wing politicians seeking wholesale bans of transgender athletes, and transgender activists who argue for full inclusion — and who even dispute what some view as settled science about the relationship between testosterone and athleticism. They quickly drew fierce backlash, illustrating how the issue of transgender athletes has become the most vexing, emotionally charged debate in global sports, and why it may prove impossible for schools and sports organizations to craft policies that are both fair to all female athletes and fully inclusive of transgender girls and women.
Transgender and women’s equality activists denounced their proposals as transphobic and accused the women of having a myopic focus on sports at a critical time for the transgender equality movement — as the Biden administration fights to expand federal anti-discrimination protections for transgender people and as conservative
lawmakers push bills in more than 20 states seeking to ban transgender athletes and criminalize gender-affirming hormone therapy for transgender youth.
Critics also pointed to members of the new working group with reputations of engaging in anti-trans rhetoric, including Martina Navratilova, the tennis champion whose commentary on transgender athletes has stoked outrage, and a Duke law professor whose work calling transgender girls and women “biological males” is cited in anti-transgender legislation.
Inside the world of sports — where careers are built on split-second wins and governed by rules that measure testosterone by the nanomole — these women’s proposals have gained some surprising voices of support. They’ve drawn endorsements from the first openly transgender Division I athlete in NCAA history as well as a leading transgender scientist researching the effects of hormone therapy on athleticism. With enduring credibility in the sports world and on Capitol Hill, they’ve begun meeting with state and federal lawmakers grappling with this issue.
But even advocates who view their proposed policies as sensible for collegiate and professional athletes wonder if these women have truly grappled with the impact their policies would have on the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of transgender girls across the country.
“The folks who are pushing these anti-trans bills ... they don’t believe transgender people exist. They think they’re faking it for an advantage in sports,” said Cathryn Oakley, state legislative director at the Human Rights Campaign. “I don’t know how you find a middle ground between a hate group and people pushing for equality.”
Before 2010, few college or high school athletic associations had policies on transgender athletes, according to a report published that year by the Women’s Sports Foundation and the National Center for Lesbian Rights.
Noting that “an increasing number of high school and college-aged young people are identifying as transgender,” the report proposed a set of policies: In college sports, transgender women should undergo one year of hormone therapy before competing against other women, a rule rooted in scientific research that suggested such an approach would mitigate any athletic benefits. The NCAA quickly adopted the policy.
For high schools, the report recommended letting transgender girls compete in sports as soon as they transition socially and begin dressing and acting in accordance with their gender identity. Requiring hormone therapy for adolescents is potentially harmful, experts said in interviews, because not all transgender teens have supportive families or access to gender clinics. Ones who do may not want to undergo hormone therapy, which for transgender girls typically involves puberty blockers that pause developmental changes followed by a combination of testosterone suppressors and estrogen.
According to information compiled by transathlete.com and the ACLU, 10 states now let transgender girls compete in high school sports after undergoing some treatment. Twelve states prohibit them entirely, including four that passed new laws and executive orders this year. Nine states have no policies at all. And 19 states, as well as the District of Columbia, let them compete regardless of testosterone level.
For the past decade, this policy patchwork has developed largely without controversy. Transgender youth are a very small minority of the U.S. population — 2 percent of high school students, according to a 2020 CDC report — and the number of those transgender girls likely to play sports and compete at an elite level is even smaller.
But then, a few years ago, a transgender runner took the Connecticut track scene by storm, catching the attention of politicians, pundits and advocates — including Lopiano, a Connecticut resident and Title IX champion.
Running on the boys team as a ninth grader in suburban Hartford, Terry Miller was an average track athlete, online records show, failing to qualify for any postseason events. But in 2018, Miller came out as a transgender girl. In her first season running against other girls, as a sophomore, Miller dominated. She won three state championships, broke two state records and won two titles at an all-New England meet, beating the fastest girls from six states.
The next fall, as a junior, Miller won another four state titles and two more all-New England titles. In several races, she was followed closely by Andraya Yearwood, another transgender girl who had also won two state titles.
In interviews, Miller and her supporters discussed how important track was for her confidence and stability as she transitioned.
“Track helps me forget about everything, and I love it,” Miller said in a 2019 story on DyeStat, a website that covers high school track and field. (Miller and her parents declined an interview request for this story.)
Support for Miller, however, was not unanimous. Girls who lost to her, and their coaches, complained that she had an unfair advantage. Parents of other girls started online petitions demanding state high school officials add a testosterone suppression requirement for transgender girls.
A lawyer representing a few mothers contacted Lopiano and asked for help. Believing Connecticut’s policy violated Title IX, Lopiano met with state officials and attempted to broker a compromise that would allow the results of transgender runners to not affect the results of cisgender girls.