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A few notes on women and girls who are trans in sports. There is a relentless effort to situation trans people as a threat to cis people in sport and elsewhere. There simply is no threat.
The foundation of these arguments are based on two dangerous and faulty premises. First, that men and boys are always better, stronger, faster and more skilled than women and girls. Second, that sex categories are binary, fixed and easily identifiable at birth.
Both of these premises are rooted in misogyny and white supremacy. The interest behind these narratives is not in "protecting women" but rather protecting the power of the state to control people's bodies and constrain people's identities.
Women and girls who are trans have been competing in women's sport at every level of competition all over the world for decades. There is simply NO dominance of trans women athletes because the myth of biological superiority is just that - a myth.
Our bodies are extremely varied and experience shows that precious few trans people participate in sports at all and those who do have a range of abilities (just like cis people).
Though dozens of states are gearing up to ban women and girls from sports at the K-12 and collegiate level just because they are trans and are doing so under the deceptive rubric of proposed laws like the "Save Women's Sports Act", they do not care abt women's sports.
Not one lawmaker who is pushing these bills - conceived and drafted by far-right groups like ADF, Heritage and ALEC - has ever pushed for financial investment in women's sports, equal pay for women athletes, development of women's coaches.
Every major women's rights organization including @nwlc and @WomensSportsFdn opposes these laws. Elite women athletes like @mPinoe and @Candace_Parker oppose these laws. You can read about their opposition here: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/nwlc_ecf-stamped-hecox-amicus-12.21.2020.pdf and here: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/athletes_in_womens_sports_brief.pdf.
These bills are simply the evolution of the long-term strategy to ban trans people from equal educational opportunities and to cultivate the idea that being trans is itself a threat.
In litigation against the one anti-trans sports bill that passed last year - Idaho's HB 500 - proponents of the bill argued in court that the law in fact "protected" trans people because we are better off being forced into our assigned sex.
At core, proponents of these laws support the eugenic impulse to stop people from being trans altogether. If you have a reflexive concern about the integrity of women's sports when trans people participate, it can be helpful to pause and learn the history here.
There is nothing close to trans dominance in athletics but there is a long history of state power being used to control the bodies of all women and weaponize notions of bodily purity and coherence to punish anyone who does not conform to binary norms of sex difference.
