Thank you so much for being here! I am a full-time freelance writer and paid subscriptions to this newsletter allow me to continue to do this work. With your money, I’m able to hire an editor for more involved posts. I am also able to cover more games in person (and now that Boston has several pro women’s sports teams, that happens more frequently!). Your paid subscription also grants you access to a Discord server and events like our book club.
Also, it’s Trans Day of Visibility and I’m tired but you could choose to buy a paid subscription to support independent trans journalism and that would be cool. If you want to upgrade your subscription, you can do that here:
It’s Trans Day of Visibility and I don’t have a lot to say about it. I don’t want us to be visible right now; visibility without protection has brought us nothing but danger and persecution.
Last week, the International Olympic Committee officially banned trans women from women’s sports, and brought back sex testing. This is a complete reversal of their 2022 framework that recommended governing bodies move away from exclusionary policies. It also punted policy-making to the individual federations that govern each sport. That framework included no enforcement mechanism, so the International Federations simply ignored the recommendations and began passing their bans anyway, sport by sport, led (as always) by World Athletics and track and field.
And now here we are, with the IOC adopting the sex testing that World Athletics has been using, despite the fact that the scientist who pioneered this method of sex testing has said that it should not be used in a sporting context.
OK!
There has been lots of ~discourse~ in the wake of this policy that perhaps we should give up on sports and concede that we lost. That we should focus on more important fights. There have been trans journalists saying things like, “I’m not even saying trans women should definitely be allowed to compete, but…”
What upsets me the most about these arguments is that the right has been crystal clear that winning on sports bans is their first step towards winning on all their other anti-trans legislation. When we concede on sports, we concede on the entire genocidal project.
Riley Gaines literally told the New York Times this. First sports, then everything else.
This is Ms. Gaines’s intuition as an activist, too: If people accept the premise that transgender women do not belong in women’s sports, then they have conceded that transgender women are not fully, truly women.
As she sees it, more sweeping restrictions of transgender people flow from there, including the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that states can ban gender-affirming care for minors and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee’s change of its eligibility rules to bar transgender women from competing in Olympic women’s sports.
“The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” she said. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”
Her longer-term goals include the restriction of transgender medical treatments for adolescents, and ultimately the legal and cultural dismantling of the belief that transgender people exist.
Look at how the anti-trans bills have worked: first, states passed trans sports bans. Then they passed healthcare and bathroom bans. The sports bans always come first. When you make a group of people a threat in one area, it's easier to make them a threat in others.
I don’t really know what we do next, but you’ll never convince me that the answer is to rollover and accept that the human rights of a marginalized group are worth giving up because it’s “just sports.” If I thought literally anything was “just sports” then I wouldn’t have the career that I do. Sports are a microcosm of our world, a reflection of the larger culture. They drive views on identity, politics, and human rights. They’re a thermometer for the state of the word. They can drive change, too.
When we say we are willing to concede on sports, we are playing right into the right-wing playbook. It's all connected. Don't look away.
If you want to read/listen to people who are much smarter than me when it comes to sex testing and policy, I have some recommendations:
Reo Eveleth is the person I always go to first on this stuff. They wrote a comprehensive explainer about why the science just doesn’t support sex testing.
Reo and Julie Kliegman were on the Burn It All Down podcast to talk about the new IOC policy
And Reo and Sydney Bauer were on the Good Game with Sarah Spain podcast to discuss the IOC policy
Here’s more links and reading from the world of queer sports:
Subscribe to Season Ticket Holder to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of Season Ticket Holder to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
Upgrade