The Sports Arena Has Become Conservatives’ Favorite Anti-Trans Battleground
The ‘debate’ over trans student-athletes relies on ancient — and false — ideas about women’s weakness
In the early 2000s, I used to debate feminism with straight men. It’s a losing game, and I don’t advise you to try it, but I was in college, so chalk it up to youthful experimentation. The men I spoke to did not have the most advanced grasp on the matter, and tended to stall out at the “women aren’t worse than men” portion. By saying women were equal to men, they’d ask, wasn’t I really saying women were the same as men? Weren’t there some things men were just better at? I’d ask what they meant, and they’d sputter, and finally, inevitably, each man would produce the same example: sports. Men were better at sports. They were stronger, and faster, and that was just nature, so clearly, this whole “gender equality” thing was a lost cause.
Flash forward to 2021, where trans-exclusionary radical feminists (better known as TERFs) are focused with messianic zeal on trying to exclude trans women and girls from female sports teams. This has been framed, by proponents, as a feminist mission. An op-ed by the New York Post argues that trans girls’ “physical advantages” will lead to cis girls “losing out on prestigious sports victories (and…
