Ohio bill targeting trans athletes is cruel
The politicians who claim to be oh, so concerned about kids sure don’t hesitate to sign their death warrants.
Not content with banning transgender girls and young women from playing sports, Ohio House Republicans are encouraging people to hunt them down. Anyone could question the gender of a female athlete under legislation they jammed through Wednesday night, and those girls and young women would then have to “verify” their gender through a genital inspection.
That’s right. A physically intrusive exam that has no other purpose than to stigmatize and demean them. With the suicide rates among transgender youth already horrifyingly high – nearly 1 in 5 attempted suicide in the last year, according to research from The Trevor Project, while over half seriously considered it – this will only cause more harm.
Which is the whole point.
“It is heartbreaking to see transgender youth used as political pawns and have their well-being sacrificed for political fundraising and to try to increase the energy among a certain base,” Casey Pick, senior fellow for Advocacy and Government Affairs at The Trevor Project, told USA TODAY Sports on Friday. “These bills take away sports as an important source of belonging and a space where LGBTQ youth can feel affirmed.”
And for the bullies and bigots who are OK with picking on trans girls, your cisgender daughters and granddaughters won’t be safe, either.
Any girl who is tall or muscular or has short hair or doesn’t look “girly” enough, whatever that means, will be suspect. Because the legislation is so vague, opposing coaches, parents and players will no doubt use it as an opportunity to get a talented player off the field or court.
“Across the country, as people have been testifying in support of these bills, time and time again they’ll call out one team they say has a transgender athlete. Turns out, no they didn’t. The athletes they were calling out, maybe it was a queer girl, maybe it was a girl of color,” Pick said.
“These bills are rank with opportunities for discrimination all across the spectrum,” Pick added. “At a time when we know women and girls drop out of sports remarkably earlier than men and boys do … it’s the opposite of protecting women’s sports.”
It would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.
Over the past four years, The Trevor Project has seen an increasing trend line of the trans and non-binary kids who considered suicide in the previous year.
While Pick was quick to say the reasons are not definitive, 85% of trans and non-binary kids say the flood of antitrans bills across the country has had a negative impact on their mental health.
But The Trevor Project has also found that LGBTQ youth who participate in sports get better grades and report a nearly 20% lower rate of depressive symptoms.
“Having access to a space where somebody’s gender is affirmed significantly reduces the odds of attempted suicide in the past year,” Pick said. “For young trans athletes, that could be their coach, their teammates. It could just be their ability to participate in something that makes them feel good about their body.
“These are just kids who want to play like anybody else,” she added.
And contrary to the hysteria of the right wing, these bills are very much a solution in search of a problem.
Boys and young men aren’t waking up one morning and joining a girls team that afternoon.
The Ohio High School Athletic Association requires transgender girls to undergo at least one year of hormone treatment before being able to play on a girls team, similar to the NCAA’s rules, or be able to prove they don’t have a physical or physiological advantage.
Despite the near obsessive attention devoted to former Penn swimmer Lia Thomas, transgender women aren’t crowding cisgender women out of sports or off the podium, either.
When The Associated Press asked two dozen state lawmakers proposing bans on transgender girls playing sports last year for examples of where this had created problems, very few could.
In vetoing one of those bills earlier this year, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox noted that out of the 75,000 kids playing high school sports in the state, only four were transgender and only one was playing on a girls team.
In Ohio, out of the 350,000-some kids who play high school sports, only one this year was transgender.
“These laws are trying to make the world less welcoming for trans and nonbinary youth,” Pick said. “We don’t have to let them.”
The prospects of the Ohio legislation are uncertain. The House passed a similar bill last year, only to have it blocked by the Senate, and the legislature isn’t in session again until the fall.
But that isn’t the point.
This political stunt by Ohio Republican lawmakers, and others like them across the country, tells kids who are already vulnerable that they don’t belong and aren’t wanted. And some of those kids will believe it.
These bills are going to get kids killed.