[cross-posted on After Atalanta]
In a continuation of my last post in which I crib from GLAD lawyer Jennifer Levi's thoughtful social media posts, I offer here an explanation of why and how trans athletes became the target of the right.
First, I keep seeing left of center posts/headlines/discourse that highlight how few trans girls/women are competing in sports. I don't love this framing. The underlying premise of inclusion and access does not have a tipping point.
Perhaps what it is meant to show is how the right is weaponizing this issue. This is both reasonable and true but not really very profound in its assessment. Look at some of the groups and people doing the work of banning trans athletes and you will also see agendas which are racist, and anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic, and anti-LGB as well.
If I have not already recommended Judith Butler's Who's Afraid of Gender? (though I am pretty sure I have), go read it. Some of what Butler says is what Levi echoed in a recent posting contemplating the hatred and violence and targeting of trans people. But Levi touched on something else too: women's own fear of violence and structural inequity.
Excerpt:
"Male violence is not a theoretical concern, but a documented fact that shapes society. The statistics are unambiguous. Women navigate the world with constant awareness of this threat, holding keys between fingers when walking at night, constantly assessing their surroundings for potential danger, and being taught from an early age situations to avoid. [...] Alongside this violence exists the stubborn persistence of sexism. Despite decades of legal reforms, wage gaps persist, women remain underrepresented in leadership positions, continue to shoulder disproportionate burdens of unpaid labor, and remain victims of male violence at alarming rates. Yet, even with all that, society struggles to maintain focus on these realities and legislatures have stalled out on finding or even trying to find solutions.
For women, there's something deeply humiliating about acknowledging how entrenched these barriers remain despite advances in formal legal equality. For men, acknowledging sexism often triggers defensiveness. And for society as a whole, addressing systemic sexism requires sustained, unglamorous policy work that rarely generates the emotional engagement that drives political movements."
Levi then argues that trans women, who are referred to as men, become the repository for all these individual feeling and systemic failures.
When I read that, I was struck by how perfectly it aligns with the anti-trans athletes movement. The athletes are described as being men, and the movement describes itself as saving women's sports, and protecting women. I will add that I see Levi's framing as also explaining the overwhelming whiteness of that movement, though she does not explicitly touch on race.
First, so many of the anti-trans athletes folks (in the US) cite Title IX repeatedly in their materials. Title IX is for women--as they define that category--they say. There would be no women's sports without it (not true and super ahistorical). Trans women in sports is the proverbial step backward for them.
What they don't say is that the equity Title IX requires has never been achieved. Women's sports are not even close to achieving equal media coverage or pay or respect. That is a hard pill to swallow.
Celebrations abound during March Madness or Title IX anniversaries or every four years for the Olympics and/or FIFA World Cup but try sitting in a meeting with an athletic director and showing him--with actual facts--that his program is not in compliance or convincing an investor to back a women's soccer team or a company to advertise during the Women's College World Series. Has anyone even tried to have a conversation with ESPN (who loves to tout its support of women's sports) that the ongoing platform they provide for Stephen A. Smith or their firing of Jemele Hill is hypocritical and misogynist? The systems that are preventing equality are fully on display.
But rather than working to dismantle and interrupt these structures, these so-called women's sports advocates point to a trans woman, call her a man, and say "this is the problem." That is their MO. It is their only play. And it disguises the real problems in women's sports; the ones that exist because the systems are made by and for men.
Why is the anti-trans movement in sports (and elsewhere) so white? Because the promise of equality and safety has never been made to Black women and other women of color. In the last post I noted it was because Black women have never been able to define femininity and thus had a discordant relationship with standards of womanhood in which their own experiences are ignored. But Black women's safety has never been centered in societal and political discussions of violence against women. Women as a category is presumed to include all women, but it does not.
And access to and success in sports for Black women, similarly, has never been prioritized. The statistics about who has benefitted from Title IX show that it is white women. Whose bodies, hairstyles, uniforms, personal style, and private lives are scrutinized, criminalized, mocked? Disproportionately it is Black women athletes who are subject to these indignities. There may be dismay at this, but there is no illusion that this is not how the system was intended to function. Black women in sports are more likely to see that it is not trans women who are to blame for how they are treated.
Convincing white women of this is a more difficult task.
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