Tenn. lawmakers extend efforts to ban transgender athletes
Opponents: Legislation’s goal is to oppress people
Tennessee lawmakers are sharpening their efforts to block transgender athletes from competition with legislation aimed at sports from middle schools to universities.
Gov. Bill Lee signed into law Friday a bill that bans transgender women from competing in “intercollegiate or intramural sports that are designated for females” at public and private universities.
Friday’s action is the latest in a series of restrictions on transgender athletes. Tennessee last year banned transgender athletes from competing at the middle and high school levels, and Lee signed off on a provision in late April that adds penalties to that ban. School districts that fail to determine a student’s gender for participation in middle or high school sports can have state dollars withheld by the Tennessee Department of Education.
There’s been an explosion nationwide of ANTI-LGBTQ legislation introduced this year, with bills focusing on participation in sports, access to medical care and discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. Twelve other states have laws banning transgender girls and women from competing, and 24 states introduced similar legislation without passing it in 2021.
Last year, more than 500 college athletes urged the NCAA to prevent states with anti-transgender laws from hosting championships. This could be a potential blow to Tennessee, with the SEC basketball tournaments frequently in Nashville and Tennessee hosting NCAA Tournament games in multiple sports over the years.
Rep. Joey Hensley, R-hohenwald, who sponsored the bill, says it is “setting a level playing field for all of our female athletes” because he thinks those who experience testosterone-driven puberty have skeletal, muscle and fat distribution advantages.
There aren’t many examples of openly transgender athletes playing, let alone dominating, in college sports. One of the few examples is Lia Thomas, who became the first known transgender athlete to win a Division I national championship in any sport when she won the 500-yard freestyle.
Her achievements spurred a national conversation about transgender athletes. Before winning the championship in March, anonymous parents of Penn’s swim team members asked the NCAA to disqualify her. She quickly became the face of transgender women in sports, and her experience was brought up in nearly every committee meeting surrounding the Tennessee bill.
Cisgender women who testified in support of HB 2316 spoke to the same concerns that have been brought against Thomas: their competitive space is changing, in their eyes, unfairly. They said that they might miss out on scholarship opportunities, or they don’t have the same competitive advantage as transgender women have.
But Thomas didn’t even make the podium in her other two races at the NCAA championships in March. Lauren Hubbard, the first openly transgender woman to compete in the Olympic Games, placed last in her group in August.
“Every young person deserves the opportunity to participate in sports to challenge themselves, improve fitness, and be part of a team,” said Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee in a statement. “We urge Gov. Lee to veto this discriminatory bill and protect trans students.
“This harmful legislation tells trans students that they can’t participate in sports as themselves – excluding them from receiving the benefits of being on a team that their peers have, and sending the message that they do not belong,”
‘These are people’
Brian Pensky will never forget the day his former player asked to meet with him and his wife.
The former Tennessee soccer coach was the Maryland women’s soccer coach at the time and one of his seniors, who had already finished their eligibility, came out to him as transgender.
Pensky didn’t hesitate to support his player, who was staying on his staff as a student assistant. It didn’t occur to Pensky how important his acceptance was until a year later when the player’s father called him in tears.
“It was a moment for me where I understood, for the first time probably, the depth and the possibilities here,” Pensky said. “His dad called crying his eyes out, thanking me for talking to him and talking about how many kids in his shoes killed themselves.
“Because he had someone like myself and my wife to come to, he stayed alive, right? And I get chills saying that, I can cry right now saying that. These are people.”
Those opposing the bill say the legislation harms an already vulnerable population. A 2019 study by the Center for Disease Control revealed that 34.6% of transgender youth had attempted suicide in the 12 months prior. Other data indicates that as many as 82% of transgender youth have considered suicide and 40% have attempted it.
“We already know that LGBTQ+ students face a high level of harm, discrimination and bullying from their fellow students, and now our legislators are also a part of this, which is contrary to the call of Christ to love our neighbors as ourselves,” said Rev. Brandon Baxter, a pastor at at West End United Methodist Church in Nashville.
Pensky wants his players to feel accepted, comfortable and confident with who they are, but it gets complicated for him when it comes to determining what is fair when it comes to inclusion of transgender athletes in sports.
What is defined as fair?
The driving factor behind this bill and many others like it is the idea of fairness and protecting girls and women in sport. Besides the implication that girls and women in sport need protecting, that belief assumes that transgender girls and women are superior athletes because of previous exposure to testosterone.
“This idea that trans girls and women have a natural athletic advantage is a complete myth,” said Erin Whiteside, an associate professor at Tennessee whose research focus is gender in sports and Title IX. “There is no research that supports that.”
If one could ensure an equal playing field, Pensky said he would be fine with transgender women competing at the collegiate level. But Whiteside argues that the idea of an equal playing field is a fallacy.
“I think the heart of this question is: What counts as an advantage?” Whiteside said. “The advantages that we’re not bothered by are the ones that do not disrupt our fundamental understandings of gender . ... When we see a woman who does not reflect our shared understandings of gender, that is when we start to think, ‘This is unfair.’”
Who should be making these decisions?
In Chris Sanders’ opinion, the government shouldn’t be stepping in to make laws about sports eligibility. Sanders is the executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project, which lobbies for equal rights of LGBTQ people in Tennessee and is calling for a veto of the bill.
“We’re talking about sports eligibility getting codified in the law, and that is ridiculous,” Sanders said. “When you put sports eligibility in the law and politicize who can play, that’s a real problem and that’s where we’re coming at from this, because we know that that will be used to attack trans people.”
The NCAA’S current policy on transgender athletes’ participation defers to each sport’s national governing body. Pensky likes the idea that policies on transgender athletes’ participation is kept within the NCAA or the governing bodies — it’s the way sports have operated for years, and he thinks it should stay that way.
The bill, and many like it around the country, includes intramural sports, which are recreational leagues among students. To Whiteside, it is an indicator that the bill is less about the pursuit of fairness and more about oppressing a marginalized group of people.
“I think that shows the problem of lawmaking about this stuff,” Sanders said. “It always goes way too far. It’s an overreaction. … Where we are right now in this process is a bunch of people who have made no effort to understand trans people are banning their participation as their way of just taking care of it so they don’t have to bother to understand.”
State government and politics reporter Melissa Brown of The Tennessean in Nashville contributed to this report.