In honor of Pride Month, I am going to be writing about a few different topics not normally covered on this blog. For those who have not yet figured it out, I am a transgender female; welcome! You can read about my coming-out story here. While I usually try to focus on motivating people to get out and achieve their dreams, I have elected to address a few issues currently affecting my community. There is still a lot to do before we achieve equality for me and my LGBTQIA siblings, after all, it can be hard to achieve one’s dreams while struggling just to exist in a world that wants to shove us back into the closet.
I have a confession to make. I have never been a fan of running. This may surprise the few of you who knew me in High School, as I ran both track and cross country. I remember being given a choice around middle school, I could play other manly sports like football or baseball or I could be on the track team. At the time I thought that if you played a sport you would end up looking like one of the pros on TV and being a large burly man was not something I was interested in. Runners were thin and lanky, almost feminine. I made my choice and quickly found a group of friends and a place I sort of felt like I belonged. I was never fully comfortable on the running teams though, and don’t even ask me about the men’s locker room! Running is very much a solo sport, you are pushing your body, measuring your reserves to make sure you have enough stamina for the next mile, paying attention to the angle of your hips on the starting block, the angle of your knee as you stretch over the next hurdle. I have always had a complicated relationship with my body. Most of the time I tried my best to ignore it, which meant I was never a very good runner. I have often wondered how different my life would have been if I could have run with the girl’s team. Would I have made lifelong friends? Would I have a healthier relationship with my body? These are the thoughts I wonder about as a transgender woman who transitioned late in life. Do you know what I don’t think about? If I would have won a trophy. Yet the latest craze we have from our politicians is that transgender people are a threat to women’s sports. Let’s try to dispel that, shall we?
Before we get very far let’s address a few of the elephants in the room. Trans-girls are who they say they are. Full stop. There are very few men who would want to pretend to be female just for a girl’s high school track and field trophy. In fact, I can’t find any credible sources or reports about ANY men pretending to be women for sports glory. Transgender people have existed for as long as we have had people on this planet and yet the number of transgender athletes who have excelled in their sports are very few. Quick quiz, how many transgender athletes have won an Olympic medal? Zero. Study after study shows negligible results when comparing transwomen to their cisgender counterparts. I can already hear the rebuttal, “But, but, but testosterone!” It is true that many transgender girls will, unfortunately, have to go through part of male puberty, but more and more girls are finding help earlier. The medications commonly referred to as puberty blockers effectively eliminate the changes puberty wreaks on the body. After puberty the medications that transgender people take to transition reduce testosterone significantly, we have to do this for the estrogens to take effect. In my own experience, I had reduced my testosterone well below that of most women only a year into my hormone therapy. Do you know what else I lost? A lot of muscle and stamina. At the time I was going to the gym regularly but instead of the weights getting easier, they got harder. Today I can lift about half of what I used to be able to.
Sport is a complex event. What makes someone better at a particular sport can often be attributed to winning a genetic lottery. While some advantages, like increased height, and wider shoulders remain after testosterone is lowered this is part of being an athlete. Currently, there are 26 men in the NBA who are over seven feet tall. Are they cheating because of their height? No one is complaining about the advantage younger, shorter women have in gymnastics. There are no articles from the Olympic committee about why Michael Phelps should give up his swimming records because of his unnatural arm length and lung capacity. Humanity is a varied and wildly differentiated species. Sport celebrates this and yet it is so much more than just physical prowess. We make friends we might never have talked to while on these teams. We learn skills and life lessons about effort and hard work while standing side by side with our peers. The things I remember best from my days as a high school athlete are the people I met along the way. Yet for transgender girls, it seems there is no place in sports for them.
The laws we are creating to bar transgender athletes from competing will not protect women’s sports. The threat to women’s sports is not from transgender athletes, it’s from a lack of funding. All of these laws attempting to prevent trans-girls from participating with their peers only accomplishes one thing, it creates another barrier transwomen have to overcome to be their authentic selves. It erects one more reason in a long, long line of awful reasons why a trans person would want to stay in the closet. I have known since elementary school that I was not one of the boys. I knew it in my bones. Yet I choose to bury that, to hide it away from others, to try and change it. Here is what being honest and coming out would have done for me in high school. It would have removed the dark clouds of depression that followed me into adult life. It would have enabled me to make friends who knew who I really was. It would have prevented me from having to endure painful procedures to remove hair from my face (a special kind of torture just for transwomen). It would have allowed me to just be me. I would have played volleyball and run track. I would not have won any trophies. I would not have even been on the varsity team for either of the sports I competed on as a guy, the girls were still faster than me. I would have just been happy, another one of the girls. Maybe I would have even learned to enjoy running.