Attacks on Transgender Athletes Are Threatening Women’s Sports
“The latest wave of anti-trans sports bills represent an escalation of the already dangerous and intrusive bills that we saw last year,” says Chase Strangio, deputy director for Transgender Justice for the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project. “The volume of bills and the pace at which they are advancing in state legislatures is particularly concerning, and if passed, I expect that these will open the door to greater surveillance of and intrusion into the bodies of young people who are gender expansive or perceived to be gender nonconforming in some way.”
Some athletes—such as former Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar and tennis legend Martina Navratilova, founding members of the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group—and anti-LGBTQ+ rights groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, argue that transgender girls are taking opportunities away from cisgender girls. But health experts, trans advocates, and people who understand sports policy, agree the arguments put forth by proponents of these bills are misguided—and potentially dangerous.
First, it should go without saying that subjecting girls and women to invasive exams and requirements to “prove” their gender is not protecting women at all. Beyond that, there is no medical basis for these exams and absolutely “no health reason to examine someone’s genitals before engaging in sports activities,” says Leah Torres, M.D., an ob-gyn at the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa.
But most concerning is the potential these bills create for abuse—it’s not hard to draw a line between the kind of sexual abuse that advocates have spent decades fighting and the genital exams they are now willing to allow in order to exclude trans girls. Athletes who were subjected to abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics doctor who sexually assaulted hundreds of gymnasts under the guise of treatment, often talk about not knowing what was normal and believing they just had to accept the intrusive exams or “treatments” in order to continue competing in the sport they loved. This legislation potentially asks young girls to accept the same violation in exchange for the ability to participate in sports.
“There are already serious problems with sexual harassment and assault—particularly youth in girls’ sports—and opening the door into this type of expansive bodily intrusion is extremely dangerous,” Strangio says. “It does nothing to protect women and girls, as proponents of these bills claim—on the contrary, these bills are a threat to all women and girls, particularly Black and brown women and girls who are already disproportionately subjected to scrutiny and testing for being considered insufficiently feminine in the context of standards derived from white supremacist and patriarchal norms of gendered appearance.”
Human Rights Watch and the United Nations have called the kind of sex testing included in some of the proposed legislation a human rights violation. “We should be extremely skeptical and concerned about the notion that any athletes have to testify with their bodies in those ways in order for sports to be kept as a competitively ‘fair’ space,” warns Elizabeth Sharrow, associate professor of public policy and history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, whose work focuses on equity, policy, and Title IX. Caster Semenya, a middle-distance runner from South Africa, has spent over a decade fighting for her right to compete in elite sports after being subjected to invasive tests, including genital examinations, and demands that she take medication to lower her natural testosterone levels. In February she announced that she is bringing her case to the European Court of Human Rights.
