Lawmakers launch sneak attack on female athletes
I have loved sports for as long as I can remember. Much of my youth was spent with a basketball in hand. I trained hard, studied harder, and by the time I was 18, had achieved my dream of wearing America’s brightest orange jersey as a Cowgirl basketball scholarship athlete at Oklahoma State University for four years.
Many of my favorite memories are from my athletic career, playing sports as a child reinforced the values I learned at home. It taught me about hard work, discipline, showing up for others, loyalty, teamwork and what it means to feel like you belong. That’s why it’s so important to me that all children, including transgender youth, have the same opportunities I had.
A sure sign legislators know they are passing harmful, misguided, unpopular laws is when they sneak language into an unrelated bill last minute. That’s what happened last week, when a school finance review bill in the House suddenly had its language stripped and replaced with an attack on transgender athletes.
The proposed law, Senate Bill 2, would ban transgender youth and young adults from participating in the sports they love. This misguided bill would increase inequality, put unfair burdens on women and girls, reduce opportunities for athletes and could put state officials in charge of invasive examinations of girls and young women. This bill could even threaten Title IX funding, which expressly forbids discrimination on the basis of gender.
Transgender children, like all children, play sports to have fun and be part of a team where they feel like they belong. Ensuring that all youth are able to participate in sports can only help women’s sports, not hurt them. The more we embrace gender equity, which must unequivocally include transgender equity, the more opportunities exist for all women in sports. When discrimination is allowed to fester, we all lose. Bills like SB 2 are fueled by an easily debunked myth that transgender women are unfairly dominating women’s sports. In fact, transgender girls and women have been playing openly on girls and women’s teams for nearly two decades, without any evidence that transgender girls and women have any competitive advantage. This concept falls apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
Bills like SB 2 frame transgender female athletes as threats that will take away roster spots, resources, rights and recognition from other female athletes. Threats to women’s sports certainly do exist, but equal treatment of transgender athletes is not one of them. Women’s sports struggle with a lack of opportunities, extreme funding disparities, crumbling facilities and issues around pay equity and sexual harassment.
If the authors of this bill actually cared about strengthening women’s sports, they would address those very real problems that women athletes have been raising for decades. The Legislature has an opportunity to do the right thing. If they choose instead to push sensationalized and radical attacks on children, we all lose.
The Rev. Dr. Lori Allen Walke is senior minister at Mayflower Congregational UCC.