Which sports are you referring to? The only sports I can think of that don’t have a hard limit on the number of kids who can play on the team are Capture the Flag or dodge ball…which are games more than sports.
By lower levels do you mean grade school or are you referring to JV? My post mentioned high-school several times so that’s why I disagreed with you with your idea that there aren’t any hard limits on the number of kids who can join. In high-school sports there definitely is a limit to the number of kids who can be on the team. In elementary school there’s room for everyone to play.
Looking at the situation in a realistic way isn’t creating an economic hardship. Additional teams will cost additional money. The coach costs money, the referees cost money, the uniforms cost money, the equipment cost money, the bus to transport the kids to the games costs money, sometimes the field/gym has to be rented…now sometimes some of that cost is donated or people volunteer their time to coach or referee or carpool to the game, but I’m not creating a hardship by considering the fact that extra teams will cost more money.
What cost? If the transgirl can play on the open team, then yes, I do think that they should use that option instead of playing on the girl’s team. And I’ve already said that if they don’t have the ability to play competitively with the boys, they shouldn’t play on the girl’s team. In that case, they can play on sports teams not affiliated with the high-school like sports organized by church groups or other youth groups.
The cost is that being trans in a transphobic society is immensely damaging to a trans child’s emotional wellbeing, as evidenced by the incredibly high rate of attempted and completed suicide among trans kids, and by other factors. The cost is that by either forcing transgirls to play on the boys’ team, or else radically redesigning kids’ sports for the sole purpose of excluding transgirls from the girls’ team, we reinforce the message to transgirls: you’re not girls, and you’re not worthy of respect.
I’m kind of blinking at this post, trying to figure out how to answer it. When you tell someone, “Naw, you tell us that’s a key part of your identity, but we call bullshit and design the world to prevent you from living as that identity,” that’s not exactly the apotheosis of respect.
In my high school there were always teams looking for additional players. The track team always had openings. Various other teams, as well. I find it hard to believe that many schools are running with every single team always exactly at it’s limit, so any child added to the system means someone is forced out.
And yes, i consider it less of a hardship for a cis girl to get bumped from soccer to track than for a trans girl to be excluded from every girls’ team.
One way to handle that is that a trans athlete does not count towards whatever hard limit the team has. A transgender athlete would never push anyone off the team. With the relative rarity of trans athletes, this shouldn’t be a big deal. If a team normally has 10 players, the addition of a transgender player making 11 doesn’t really change the sport in any meaningful way. If the division wanted to make sure things were equitable, they could say that all teams in the division could have extra players as necessary to even things out.
But one thing with regards to teams is that really only the trans girls have options open up to them since the girl’s teams are a step down in ability. Any trans girl who has the ability to play on the boy’s team will have the ability to play on the girl’s team. A trans girl who doesn’t have the level of ability to play on the boy’s team may still have the skill to play on the girl’s team. But the reverse is not true. A trans boy will not have that flexibility. A trans boy who is at the top of the girl’s level will probably make the boy’s team, but probably be a middle-level athlete in the boy’s sport. An average ability trans boy in the girl’s ranking is going to be towards the bottom of the boy’s team or not make the team at all. And then there are no teams for gender fluid, gender queer, non-binary, etc. students. But to your other point about hardship, it’s easier to handle not making the team because you don’t have the ability rather than the team saying you can’t join because they say you don’t have the right gender. So maybe the reduced or lack of team options for anyone who is not a cisboy or trans girl is not an issue.
It would be even better if you just stopped treating transgender athletes differently. No one has a right to spot on a team roster, there are any number of reasons someone can be bumped off a team. Money/resources/training are vastly more likely to cost someone a spot on the roster, but there’s no effort to compensate for those factors.
Trans girls and cisgirls are different in a very important reason that is directly applicable to sports. The boy/girl split in sports is because of the athletic advantage that comes from sex-based differences. The sports are not split because one set of athletes wants to wear shorts and the other wears skirts. There should be some consideration of the sex-based athletic advantage. Acknowledging these differences and seeing how they can intermesh is the path to a workable solution. In fantasyland, sure, let everyone play for whichever team, but that’s not really going to work in the real world. Too many people are going to point out the athletic difference and force segregation.
Texas has a bill moving through the legislature right now to force athletes to play on the team according to their birth sex. I don’t agree with it, but I can see why people think it’s necessary if there can’t be consideration of the athletic differences between transgender and cis athletes. And as you mention, no one has a right to a spot on a team. That same logic is what is going to boot trans girls from playing on girl’s sports with this kind of legislation.
And yet the evidence hasn’t really been presented that trans girls present a significant advantage over cis girls in the real world. Sure, there’s potential, and it should continue to be monitored. But it’s not clear if there’s even a problem that needs to be addressed.
Or rather, even if trans girls have an advantage, if it’s not an overwhelming advantage, and if there aren’t many of them, then their advantage doesn’t detract from cis girls having a good athletic experience.
In the real world, males annihilate females in virtually all sports, and everyone knows it. If what you’re saying is that transgirls on hormones aren’t at an advantage, the evidence is still coming in; however, whether a student needs hormones or not to participate in sports varies from place to place./
A modest proposal: let cis girls who believe they’re at a disadvantage take all the testosterone they want. If we’re unconcerned with forcing children to violate their gender identity in order to participate in sports, what’s the problem?
Or we could just divide sports according to sex rather than gender, which was the original idea anyway. Have an “Assigned Female at Birth” division and an “Assigned Male at Birth / Open” division.
That trans girls know they are being segregated away from the other girls due to what their body looked like at birth is hardly the same as saying they will be comfortable paying with the boys.
Cis girls who play high-school sports have lower rates of suicide and teen pregnancy than cis-girls who don’t.
Transgirls have challenges and so do cis-girls. I don’t think it’s helpful to anyone to engage in the oppression Olympics, but in case it needs to be stated, living in a society that devalues females is damaging to a cis-girls’ well-being. Prioritizing the wants and needs of transgirls over the wants and needs of cis-girls is harmful to cis-girls.
Transgirls can still play sports and they can even play against cis-girls if they play on a co-ed team, but I don’t think that a trans girl’s desire to play on the high-school female team instead of the open team or a co-ed team should be prioritized over a cis girl’s desire to play high school sports.
Well, here’s my anecdote, at my high-school and every school we played against, the varsity and JV teams were full every year. You couldn’t just switch to soccer if you didn’t make the track team because the soccer team was already full and try-outs were extremely competitive. Also, it’s not guaranteed that someone who’s good at track will even be halfway decent at soccer. If they lose their spot on the track team, it’s not at all a given that they’ll even make it onto the soccer team.
I consider it less of a hardship for a transgirl to play on the open team than for a cisgirl to not play high-school sports at all.
The study by the UK sports council linked in post 350 includes the following points:
• The science shows that trans women retain physique, strength and stamina advantages;
• There is no magic solution that balances trans inclusion in female gender-affected sport with competitive fairness and safety;
• Therefore some sports will have to make a conscious choice prioritising either inclusion or fairness and safety.
Strength, stamina, physique advantages are significant IMO. I’m not sure if you were drawing a distinction between teenaged trans-girls and transwomen in your post…I’m not sure if this study looked at teenaged trans girls or only at transwomen.