Transgender athlete bills put trans girls at center of America?s culture wars, again - ... - 0 views
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Tennessee state Rep. Bruce Griffey (R), who has a cisgender daughter on a school golf team, is co-sponsoring a bill that would allow school competition only based on the sex listed on one’s birth certificate.
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“What if one of the boys is not doing well, so he pretends to be transgender to win?” he asked. “I’m protecting a discriminated class: that’s girls and women in sports.”
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But detractors say arguments about biological advantages among transgender athletes are based on limited research and put an outsize focus on a tiny fraction of young competitors. About 2 percent of high school students in the United States identify as transgender
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The Montana youth athlete bill passed the state House on a 61-to-38 vote and is moving to the Senate.
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Democratic opponents of these bills and some political experts charge that the legislative efforts amount to a political power play to rally the conservative base around an issue they see as threatening traditional gender roles.
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The Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy group for socially conservative causes, published a blog post this week that charges transgender athletes with hijacking competitive opportunities and calls Biden’s executive order a threat to “gut legal protections for women and girls.”
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“It’s an easy way for them to show that Democrats have just gone over the edge, that there is no limit to how far they will push these radical ideas.”
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For generations, anti-trans messaging in the United States has largely focused on transgender women rather than transgender men,
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Trantham said one of the first people she notified when she decided to file the bill was the head of the LGBTQ advocacy group South Carolina Equality.“I want to make sure you guys understand this is not me trying to hurt the transgender community,” Trantham said she told him. “This is me trying to protect girls in women’s sports.”
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LGBTQ activists and many pediatricians say that the medical treatments transgender youth receive to align their bodies with their gender identity mitigate the physical disparities in athletics.
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“I’ve seen arguments that this will be the end of women’s sports,” said Katrina Karkazis, a cultural anthropologist and bioethicist. “If so, it should have ended already.”
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“Values always matter and there’s a divide in our country over values,” Deutsch said in a phone interview Thursday. “I stood up and said this is not a hate bill. It’s about biology. It’s science. You can’t change your sex. You can look like a boy, you can take hormones and sex operations but it doesn’t make you a boy. Your gender can be a boy, but you can never change your sex.”
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while public opinion polls across the board show support for transgender military service and other transgender rights, support softens when it comes to public accommodations and sports, Haider-Markel said.
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School athletics are “an extremely competitive environment,” said Trantham, whose daughter was a high school basketball player. “If it was my daughter and she needed that scholarship to go to college, it would be very important to me that she was playing on an even playing field.”
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Serano argues that the disparity is rooted in sexism and misogyny, and the idea that “there’s a certain amount of societal respect for wanting to be a man.” Even when it comes to cisgender children, she said, “people are a lot more disturbed, concerned by feminine boys than they are by masculine girls.”
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bills about transgender athletes trigger the idea that “this is wrong; this male person is in this space that is supposed to be segregated to protect girls and women,
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Transgender cross-country runner Juniper Eastwood started competing for the women’s track team at the University of Montana after she began presenting as female and taking testosterone suppression medication. She said running improved her mental health. At one point, Eastwood said, she had contemplated suicide so she wouldn’t have to deal with knowing she was transgender.
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Eastwood said she’s hopeful that a new generation of conservatives will learn to understand who transgender people are, just as many conservatives have come to accept the gay community.“It’s just going to take a long time,” she said. “It won’t happen this year.”