States are working to change their policies regarding transgender athletes in school sports. Tennessee became the third state this year to enact a bill to prevent transgender girls from playing girls sports, joining Mississippi and Arkansas.
These three states and others working on similar bills are doing so under the guise of fairness. They don’t think biologically male children should compete against biologically female children because boys, on average, have physical advantages over girls — especially after puberty.
However, transgender athletes or not, boys playing girls sports has been a problem for years. And if politicians want to take the matter seriously, they should support fixing yet another flaw with Title IX.
When it comes to high school sports, people may think of Title IX as something that ensures the right of girls to play. That’s not exactly what it does. It offers boys and girls an equal opportunity to play sports. If a school has a boys basketball team and a girls basketball team, both genders have an opportunity to play. In cases where schools have only a boys team or a girls team, Title IX ensures that the other gender can play that sport.
This allows girls to play football and wrestle at schools that don’t offer such programs for girls. However, it also lets boys play girls field hockey and volleyball or do gymnastics and cheerleading at schools that only offer such programs for girls.
This is a bigger problem than the transgender athlete debate.
I’ve covered high school sports in liberal Massachusetts since 2015 and can’t think of an example of covering a game where there was a transgender girl on a team, nor can colleagues I have spoken to about the matter. The only one I’m aware of in Massachusetts is a transgender girl tennis player at Oliver Ames High School who wasn’t able to compete last year because schools canceled spring sports in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Many can point to transgender girls placing first and second in high school track state championship meets in Connecticut, but even politicians in states working to ban transgender girls from competition can’t name instances of it happening in their respective states. That’s because it probably doesn’t happen a lot, and the threat of transgender children ruining girls sports is way overblown.
There are, however, some examples of boys who identify as their biological sex doing well in girls sports. I’ve covered girls high school volleyball games where the opposing team had a boy on it — something the teams I normally cover could never do because both schools in Quincy, Massachusetts, have boys volleyball programs.
Meanwhile, there are a handful of instances in the past decade in which boys have been dominant girls field hockey in Massachusetts. Whether it’s three boys playing for Wayland High School, two boys scoring goals to help Somerset Berkley Regional High School win the Division 1 state title in 2018, or Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School having a standout male goalie in 2013, this is a problem that persists across states — and one for the federal government to fix.
This isn’t to say that states are wrong for trying to shore up policies regarding transgender athletes. However, it’s also probably not worth being their top priority in states when there isn’t one notable example of transgender girls competing in girls sports.
Perhaps these states should instead put more time into protecting the unborn, reforming occupational licensing, reducing healthcare costs, curbing the opioid epidemic, enforcing immigration law, improving school choice, and knocking down the cost of higher education since these are far greater problems. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to protect girls sports, but a largely Christian and conservative state such as Arkansas probably has little to worry about right now.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
