Saving Women’s Sports from Trans Women?
A perspective from one of the invisible men watching this fight unfold inside his local legislature building
CW: Gendered bodily functions mentioned, various forms of transphobia in a lawmaker setting
I had taken my lunch break from work so that I could arrive a little early to the protest, but there was already a swarm of people everywhere outside of the Legislature Hearing Room door.
I was visibly trans enough that, when I tried to enter the giant room where the hearing would be held, someone claiming to be an employee tried to stop me from coming in. He claimed there were no seats left, despite my wife having told me in a text that they had saved me one.
I waited until he walked away, then peaked into a room still containing several empty chairs. My wife was waving at me frantically. It wasn’t just that they wanted to hang out with me. The speakers needed to see the Invisible Men in this debate. The big question was whether those who saw us would understand what they were seeing. We often get mistaken for trans women when convenient to an argument.
Speaker after speaker came forward to detail the dangers that trans women posed to cis women in sports.
Pseudo medical professionals who clearly had no experience with patients on E (Estradiol) talked about “scientifically proven masculine level strength” remaining after medical transitions, while a fellow protestor who was a trans woman incredulously whispered from behind us:
Strength? I can’t even open my refrigerator door at this point!
We all laughed. The strength changes on HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) are very real. Though I am much stronger after over 8 months on T (Testosterone), I’m extremely clumsy because I keep forgetting that I’m stronger now. Cracking an egg while cooking, for example, has had some very messy results for me, as an adjustment is required to match the increased force that my hand can produce with the same amount of effort as before.
Most speakers stated that they were Republican, until the very end.
A middle-aged “liberal feminist” joined them for the final transphobic speech. After reminding us of her pedigree as an “LGBT ally” by saying “love is love” as her beginning to a speech that had nothing at all to do with sexuality or romance, she began to tell us her personal high school sob story of a trans person who robbed her of a chance to be the winner she deserved to be. Cue tears. She described the “unique hardships” of being a “woman” that gave cis women an unfair disadvantage. When she mentioned menstruation, I cringed. At the height of my own period dysphoria, I didn’t need the reminder that most cis people gendered periods as an exclusively and intrinsically feminine phenomenon.
“Guys can have periods, too,” I whispered, half to myself.
Also, there are lots of women who don’t have periods for various reasons, regardless of whether they are transgender.
As she described this villainous, deceptive trans opponent that she continued to ruefully hate half of a lifetime later over a single high school defeat in sports, it occurred to me that she might well have mistaken a trans man for a trans woman. She may have actually benefitted in sports from a school that allowed students to choose the team that matched their real gender, the gender that they experienced on the inside. The person she was describing could easily have been me, had I embraced my true gender presentation at a much earlier age.
I have a little high school sports secret of my own.
I never told anyone this when we were young because he was my friend and I didn’t want him to be embarrassed.
I regularly played one-on-one on the weekends with my cis male equivalent in the high school sport we shared in common. We were in the exact same position in our respective gendered teams in the same school. I kicked his butt pretty regularly, despite being a mildly asthmatic “girl”. He liked to play with me because I challenged him to be better. I liked to play with him because I didn’t have to hold myself back around him. I could use all of my pent-up closeted queer anger to play as hard as I needed to play. It was good for my soul.
If I had been allowed to choose between the masculine and feminine teams, despite being an AFAB (Assigned Female at Birth) on no drugs or T, I still believe I would have performed much better on the masculine team and might actually have had a higher rank. I certainly would have been more motivated to play. Even if I hadn’t performed better, even if I had never made the masculine team, I would have been so much more comfortable in that environment.
Why? I was used to playing this sport with boys and men.
This was the game I started playing with my father in some of my earliest memories of life. I was comfortable with the masculine way of playing. Playing with girls and women was much harder because I had to be careful not to be too rough with them for social reasons. I had to play differently. Their style was different. Their strategy was different. This wasn’t really about physical strength. It was about the difference in form. It was about the difference in behavior. It was about how we were socialized to play. To play with both men and women, I had to know how to code-switch between two different sports cultures.
It all felt confusing to me. I felt like I had to re-learn how to do everything around them. It was exhausting. I remember our coach training us in a way that focused on our bodies being “prettier” instead of getting as strong as we could get. Endurance and flexibility were valued over strength. We deliberately lifted with lighter weights than necessary and did more repetitions. The attitude felt counter to everything I was raised to do when I played.
The worst part was the way the girls talked! I didn’t know how to interact with them! I couldn’t relate to anything they were interested in. I just sat alone and tuned them out until it was time to play. I felt miserable around them and dropped out of the sport after two seasons, despite being one of the higher ranking varsity team players in my freshman and sophomore years.
No worries. It worked out.
I got a job and made some money instead by working the hours I would have played in that sport. I probably would have stayed and continued to play if I had been allowed to play alongside my friend on the boy’s team. I certainly would have been more relaxed there, despite already having a crush on a quarter of the boys on that team. Were those really crushes or gender envy? That’s a topic that’s well explored by KP_the_writer here.
Unlike the speaker in this hearing, I don’t have any hard feelings about my high school sports experience now that I’m in my late 30's. Enough has happened in my life since then that I don’t generally think about high school sports much, at least until I listened to all of the transphobic rhetoric of that Legislative hearing.
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