This is not an advocacy piece, but an analysis of the ongoing debate about trans athletes’ participation in sports.
The baseball color line, the granularity of sports divisions, and NIMBYism
Consider this: If, hypothetically, it is a scientifically proven fact that black athletes possess a genetic advantage over white athletes in baseball, will you support integration or will you think this factoid should justify segregation?
For me, and I think for most people, the validity of eugenics should be a nonstarter regarding whether to support integration in baseball. So, is the current debate any different?
There are some non-trivial nuances between breaking the baseball color line and the integration of trans athletes in women’s sports.
The baseball integration is largely driven by not only political demand but also market demand. Baseball was at the time the most popular spectator sport in the US. The debate about trans athletes in women’s sports is not about a single sport, and most women’s sports are, for better or worse, not overly popular as spectator sports, and thus the participants make up a much larger share of stakeholders and do not have the same luxury of deferring the decision to the ticketholders/market.
Also, unlike the major leagues of baseball, women’s sports are largely created in the shadow of men’s sports — to be a sanctuary for women to take part in an otherwise men-dominated activity. The exclusivity of women’s sports is thus a major part of their founding philosophy, and it is rational for refugees of sanctuaries to be selective of who can be let in. This is why this debate is predominantly about trans women in women’s sports and not trans men in men’s sports.
At its core, this defense is a form of NIMBYism, but I am not using the term disparagingly. To advocate a certain political position not out of fundamental morality, but out of self-interest, is, to me, a defining tool of a democratic society for resolving internal conflicts.
I am not saying that NIMBYism is good or bad, but it is an integral part of how American democracy handles discourse. With that in mind, it is perhaps as illogical to try to convince an anti-trans woman athlete to be supportive of trans integration as it is to convince a farmer to give up his farm for the railway. Instead, the only viable pathways for enabling trans integration, would be either to convince anti-integration woman athletes that their self-interest is not being threatened, or that there is something bigger at stake than their self-interest.
But neither of these pathways is viable either. The first approach would taint the argument by hinging upon the validity of these “biological fairness claims,” which I have established above with the baseball example as a problematic red herring. The obsession with ensuring “biological fairness” in sports is a Sisyphean task anyway. Why aren’t there weight classes for swimming as there are for boxing? Because there is no market demand for it. That’s one reason. But I won’t belabor this point, as I consider it a dead horse. And, the second approach is anti-NIMBY and therefore undemocratic in a puritan sense.
Once stripped down to its principles, the debate is very similar to the debate on bathroom laws. Women do not want to share bathrooms with trans women because of a perceived threat. This perception of threat need not be substantiated by data or science to be justified. The historic decision to separate men’s and women’s bathrooms was not the result of a scientific and data-driven debate that doing so will make bathrooms safer for women. It was a decision informed by social constructs, just like gender, and sports.
This is not like climate change or evolution, or any number of other scientific debate that has been politicized in the US, and the typical liberal optimism, such as the arc of the moral universe will bend toward justice, or that the truth will prevail, may be misguided here — because, for many social issues, the “truth” is observer dependent at best, and entirely contrived at its worst.
Gender is a social construct — so are all sports
Both gender and sports are contrived, and there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to this debate — at least not in the sense that “if we deliberate long enough we’ll find the correct answer.” The answer depends on public opinions, specifically, about not only how the public views and defines gender — which has been given a lot of airtime — but also how the public defines sports — which has not been talked about, if at all.
There are some discussions about the purpose of women’s sports, but they are mostly about the importance of the aforementioned sanctity and the importance of biological fairness, and not about the reason why we have sports in the first place.
I did not grow up in the US. In Hong Kong, the only sports on TV were NBA and the English Premier League. Sports stars are a foreign import. When I was on the swim team in primary school, and then later on the track and field team in secondary school, I have only ever viewed sports as just another extracurricular activity that my parents wanted me to do, so I could be fit and make friends.
Maybe the competitive element in my personal experience with sports was dashed because the most famous sports leagues were foreign to me, that by not having athletes who look like me on TV when I was a child influenced me into not thinking too much about doing sports as an integral and defining part of my upbringing or of any of my friends’.
The emphasis on competition in sports in the US is what I think is supercharging the debate on trans athlete integration. I would doubt a community 5K would elicit much controversy for allowing trans athletes to take place.
If the main focus for sports is on community building and inclusion and public health, instead of about competition and “winning,” then there probably won’t be any boomer jokes about participation trophies. We give everyone at a 5K a medal or a T-shirt already, and you don’t hear people complaining about that. But I concede that not all sports are created equal.
A debate, to me, in the purest sense, is only valid when it is not about facts, but is instead about opposing perspectives, because otherwise, the debate should be replaced by a deliberation process where all parties should work together to seek the single universal truth. But this is not the case here, and the tendency of both sides to insist framing their position as “fact-driven,” e.g. by reiterating what they consider to be definite definitions gender and biology, etc., may be barking up the wrong tree. Because this is ultimately not about what is gender and what is sports, but how we view gender and how we view sports.
A cynical epilogue
There are also knock-on effects of these flagship political debates, especially for the US, where these debates can be weaponized for political gains. In the current US political culture where the airwaves are dominated by bad faith partisanship and straight up contrarian viewpoints, it is worth considering not only the outcome of the battle but also of the war. Is it possible that conservative pundits are putting the spotlight on this debate as a war of attrition because they see it as a way to drain the political capital of those on the left?
This is a very demoralizing and cynical read on the situation, but it is not something that should be ignored or trivialized. The political culture of the US has been breeding this demoralization and cynicism for a while and is unlikely to change in the short term. This also breeds a side effect that is a tendency to give up on considering systemic changes without even trying. To many, it is a non-starter — but it shouldn’t be — to consider if there is an inherent need for society to have competitive sports. Many sports as a collective enterprise have been harmful and exploitative toward minorities. Are spectator sports a net good for society? Or are they more like fast food and fast cars — an indulgence that society tolerates? These conversations should be in the background of this current debate, for they may offer not only an alternative approach to the debate but may offer a vision where the current debate would be unnecessary.
Maybe this has something to do with America not having seen revolutions or radical transformations or even a constitution amendment for a much longer time than most other countries in the world. Maybe that has made Americans passive in the face of systemic problems. By taking smaller and smaller bites in the name of not biting off more than they can chew, their jaws have grown stiff.
