There are people on Bluesky who believe I am “obsessed” with the issue of trans women participating in women’s sports, which is not the case. I am, rather, frustrated by Democrats’ tendency to take a No Compromise With the Electorate Approach to a question that while nuanced, doesn’t require a doctorate to understand and that also involves low stakes compared with other questions related to trans rights.
So I’ve been heartened to see Rob Sand, James Talarico, Amy Acton, and Josh Turek take a more pragmatic approach to this issue. And it’s especially heartening to see that while there is of course some blowback against these candidates, it’s mostly not being led by anyone with real clout or power.
In particular, we’re not seeing safe seat Democrats blast these politicians for their more moderate stances.
That is, in a lot of ways, the most important aspect of the politics. Democrats — including Democrats in safe blue seats who hew to activist orthodoxy on this question — are making it clear that the tent includes a diversity of opinion and that holding the same views as a large majority of the public does not make you a proto-fascist.
This will hopefully allow for some refocusing of attention on the question of who actually is supporting women’s sports and why.
For example, note that even Sophie Cunningham, who has spoken out against the participation of trans women in women’s sports, does not appreciate Enes Kanter Freedom’s efforts to troll his way onto a W.N.B.A. squad. It’s the difference between a woman who is a professional athlete giving her view about a policy question that is, currently, totally hypothetical and a person trying to gin up controversy and draw attention to himself.
An even more egregious example comes from Washington state, where conservative activists have put a trans sports initiative on the ballot that would require affirmative sex verification in order to participate in girls’ school sports. This is not the standard practice even in the many red states who’ve adopted rules on this topic, and by creating new barriers to participation, the new rule would likely generate fewer opportunities for girls to play sports.
It’s not entirely clear to me why the Washington initiative is written this way. In Rachel Cohen Booth’s reporting, the proponents just deny that it says that, but it appears that they are wrong. Advocates for the initiative did not provide Booth with any legal experts who would back up their account, and when I asked Grok (seeking a “based” analysis of the controversy), anti-woke artificial intelligence agreed with her.
It’s basically impossible to know what they were thinking when they drafted this, but it’s clear that they weren’t thinking about the best interests of girls’ sports or female athletes.
Which in a lot of ways is the natural order of things. Promoting women’s sports is and always has been a progressive cause. Lately, this topic has been a political godsend for the right, but conservatives were never actually going to center women’s sports as a cause worth fighting for.
Destroying the village in order to save it
In most of these political arguments, progressives’ point that there are actually very few trans athletes is pretty unpersuasive. You still need a rule about who can play on which teams, and people are entitled to care about what the rule says.
But when it comes to an implementation and verification regime, the underlying rareness really is a relevant consideration.
To justify doing something that will inconvenience, embarrass, or possibly deter a huge number of girls from participating in sports, you need to be addressing a quantitatively significant issue. And this just isn’t one. Under the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association’s current policy of gender self-identification, there are 10 trans athletes out of 200,000+ kids playing middle school and high school sports in the state.
What’s more, by an overwhelming margin, these trans athletes are not people who’ve snuck surreptitiously onto sports teams. They came out as trans and that identity is known to parents and school officials.
If Washington state and its voters want to change current policy, that’s fine (my wishy-washy take is that stringently enforced sex segregation for middle school is probably unnecessary but that for high school it typically is). You can, though, just make a new declarative policy without subjecting everyone to a verification regime. In 99.9 percent of cases, there’s going to be zero controversy. If somebody wants to make a big deal about a specific athlete’s status, it’s not that hard to do an SRY gene test with a cheek swab, which is used as a proxy for biological sex. But in the real world, this is almost never going to come up.
I did a double take when I saw this story because I know Democrats have been in the habit of raising the prospect of universal genital inspections as a reason to oppose a chromosomal definition of sex for the purposes of sports. But obviously there’s no actual need to do that! And yet, here the authors of the Washington initiative seem to have done it.
Republicans don’t care about women’s sports
In what I think is a related development, earlier this year the Heritage Foundation put out a report blasting the whole idea of Title IX parity for male and female athletes in American schools.
I was glad they did it. Not because I agree, but because this is the actual conservative position on gender and sports!
I’m old now, so I remember back in 2003 when the Bush administration considered gutting Title IX parity but backed off under pressure. But then in 2005, with Bush’s re-election secured, they grew bolder and wrote new guidance to make it far easier for schools to say there just wasn’t interest from female students in playing sports. In 2010, the Obama administration reversed the Bush rule. This is politics! Democrats pushing an ambitious vision of social change and equality; Republicans pushing for traditionalism.
And unlike the trans issue, the implications of basic Title IX rules are far reaching. There’s a reason the U.S. women’s ice hockey team does better in international competitions than their male counterparts and the women’s soccer team does much better than the men — America has made unusually large investments in athletic opportunities for girls and it pays off. American men do very well overall at the Olympic Games, for example, but American women do even better because most of the world is behind us in women’s sports.
Like anything else in life, it’s perfectly fair to debate this. But my point is that this is a fairly big-picture, fairly long-running debate. It has intersected recently with L.G.B.T. policy in a way that landed Democrats on the wrong side of common sense and public opinion. But it’s pretty clear who stands where in the broader debate.
The endgame
This larger dynamic also helps explain why Sophie Cunningham was getting booed at games after speaking out in favor of the principle that only cisgender women should play in the W.N.B.A. The actual fanbase for most women’s sports in the United States in general, and certainly for the W.N.B.A., is quite left wing and disproportionately queer. They understand Cunningham to be doing right-wing politics, and they don’t like it.
By the same token, the family and I were at the Washington Spirit women’s soccer game last weekend and there was quite a bit of advocacy material in the section for the die-hard Spirit supporters. The video that introduces the team at the start of the game starts with a paean to the diversity of the district and depicts everyone getting to the game on the metro. It’s a very progressive fan base!
Notably, though, there are no trans women playing in the National Women’s Soccer League or the W.N.B.A. In both cases, the written rules could be construed as either barring them or not. And I think that status quo serves the business interests of these enterprises, as an explicit ban would probably antagonize a bunch of fans but an influx of players with XY chromosomes would mess up the competition. This is why Kanter Freedom’s intervention reads as obnoxious to fans of the league — he’s trying to embarrass people and make it hard for the W.N.B.A. to please all its stakeholders, not addressing an actual problem.
The thing I would urge progressives who are not sports fans to understand about high-level sports is that these are literally zero-sum competitions to which generic progressive interest in inclusivity does not apply. If there had been a trans woman in the U.S. Open draw, that would have almost certainly mechanically squeezed out a cisgender woman.
Conversely, I think it would be constructive for non-opportunistic conservatives to admit that they’ve won the argument about this.
The Women’s Tennis Association tour does not admit trans women. The W.N.B.A., regardless of its ambiguously worded policy, is in fact not full of people self-IDing into the league. The International Olympic Committee has adopted a rule using SRY testing. The N.C.A.A. has a simple declarative policy with no specific verification process. Democrats are not objecting to any of this or promising to reverse it. People don’t like to admit they made mistakes, so don’t expect Democrats to explicitly acknowledge that it was the Obama Department of Education that put on the table the idea that there needs to be a uniform national policy here. But they really have retreated from that view and seem content to let all kinds of sports bodies adopt rules on their own accord, and the trajectory of those rules is pretty clear.
When conservatives move toward something like mandatory sex verification for middle schoolers, though, that puts the debate back in more traditionally progressive terrain.
That’s a rule that’s only going to reduce girls’ participation and burden female athletes and their families for the sake of, I guess, rooting out the occasional extremely rare case of someone with an undiagnosed difference of sex development. And the broader Title IX fight is a classic left/right political battle, where conservatives just want to shrink opportunities and funding for girls’ sports.
Prediction based on this week’s content: Tomorrow’s article is “Will Trans Israelis Cause the AI Apocalypse?” and gets 5k comments. In the ensuing flame war, a misaligned CensorBot concludes that the best solution is to ban Yglesias from the internet.
Here’s the problem: even though it’s not an important issue, it’s a litmus test for being a sensible person. If someone looked at the Lia Thomas situation (for example) and said “this is fair,” they are lying, stupid, or nuts, and their judgment cannot be trusted. This is the trap that our left-wing coalition has walked into.
Nobody ever thought the GOP cared about women’s sports. But Democrats were supposed to care about women. And science. This whole debacle has seriously undermined their credibility on both.