Montana HS assocation debating transgender policy

In Montana, we have shades of Minnesota.

The controversy last fall over the transgender policy in Minnesota has moved westward. The Montana High School Association has written a policy to address the participation of transgender student athletes in sports.

The association will vote later this month on the policy. A difference between the Montana and Minnesota situations is the voting. In Minnesota a board of 20 voted on the policy. In Montana all the member schools--179 of them--will vote. Passage of the proposal, which is considered a change in policy, requires a 2/3 majority.

This is my first concern. That's a lot of people in a fairly conservative state, and the conservative religious groups--as they did in Minnesota--have mobilized. The rhetoric and misinterpretations are similar. There are the "privacy concerns"--again, not those of transgender children, but of cisgender children. There are the outrageous statements based on complete ignorance, arguably willful, regarding transgender lives; including this one from a recent podcast by the Montana Family Foundation: “Will your high school be forced to put boys and girls together in a hotel room overnight? What about sharing a locker room? And what about putting a 6-foot-5, 220-pound guy on the girls’ basketball team? They may have to if the Montana High School Association gets its way.”

This does not sound like the libertarianism that Montana conservatism trends towards. 


The policy does not address locker rooms or accommodations. What it does say is that transgender students seeking to compete on a team consistent with their gender identity must "apply for eligibility" which will be determined by a panel consisting of "medical experts," members of MHSA, and a student advocate (unclear exactly who gets to fill this position). This group makes a recommendation to the association's executive board which makes the final decision.

Concerns about the policy itself:
There is nothing in the policy that sets clear guidelines on locker rooms or shared hotel rooms during travel. So, as in Minnesota, we have a lot that can go wrong in terms of outing transgender children as well as ostracizing and isolating them from teammates. 

Also, the policy does not have guidelines that state what this committee will be looking at. What are the criteria? I fear this is more of the "case-by-case basis" trend that I discussed in the New Jersey bathroom case. This means that in addition to a committee sitting in judgement about a child's gender identity, there is nothing guiding that decision, meaning that children who come to the committee are putting themselves at risk of rejection on terms they have not been made aware of. Perhaps this will change if the policy does indeed get passed; but right now everything seems too vague for comfort.