Transgender Compromise
The Right and the Architects of Trans Inclusion Agree that Trans Girls Can't Play
The passage of “the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act” by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has, understandably, garnered less coverage than other legislative and administrative crises raging around the United States. At the point where nearly 500 pieces of anti-trans legislation have been introduced since January it has become difficult to distinguish the trees from the forest, but attention has been rightly focused on Missouri’s brazen attempt to de facto ban gender affirming care for children and adults through unprecedented regulatory revision, currently blocked pending a legal challenge, and a bill advancing in Florida that would allow the state to forcibly take trans children from their families. Much hangs immediately in the balance, since both would put lives in tangible danger, whereas the federal bill is all but assured to wither away in a Democrat-controlled Senate.
Yet anti-trans sports bans have long sat a bit oddly alongside bills mandating aggressive discrimination and censorship in schools, criminalizing health care providers, and attempts to erase trans people from the law, making it impossible to change gender markers on birth certifiates and driver’s licenses. These nakedly repressive bills seem to require equally authoritarian hands in the legislative process. Montana’s Speaker of the House and GOP majority seem hellbent on stopping duly elected member Zoey Zephyr from speaking in that chamber after she gave a strong speech against a bill banning gender affirming care for youth—one now signed into law.
Bans on trans athletes, especially those that focus on trans women and girls, have benefited for years from being framed by their partisans as more reasonable, or perhaps the only reasonable form of anti-trans discrimination. They invoke the platitude of “fairness” in competition, the genuine history of women’s unequal access to participation, and an ostensibly scientific conversation about sex differences and their relationship to athletic capacity. With the exception of the wish to cordon off trans youth’s access to transition as somehow qualitatively different from adults, no subject has seemed to garner more defense from liberal pundits and feminists, some who argue that progressive political movements should side with the far right, if only for a tactical advantage. This might explain why sports bans are the single most successful type of anti-trans bill to date; 19 have been signed into law in the US in three years.
The argument for this kind of transgender compromise has come to a head with the Biden administration’s opposition to the House sports bill, including the rollout of a long-anticipated policy on trans participation in sports under Title IX, the law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education settings, including K-12 and collegiate sports. Matt Yglesias succinctly summed up the political argument for transgender compromise on Twitter, opening a thread on the policy announcement by claiming “Joe Biden is trying to win re-election.”
The proposed policy, housed in the Department of Education, is perhaps superficially bizarre but emblematic of the futility of transgender compromise. On the one hand, the policy forbids blanket bans on trans participation in sports, since to categorically bar trans girls or boys as a class is textbook sex discrimination under Title IX. (In 2020, the Supreme Court’s conservative decision in Bostock v. Clayton, authored by Neil Gorsuch, established that anti-trans discrimination counts as sex discrimination under Title VII, which concerns employment.) On the other hand, however, the policy encourages the development of stronger rationales for anti-trans discrimination. “The Department's approach would allow schools flexibility to develop team eligibility criteria,” explained a press release. That “flexibility” would permit some trans students to be banned or disqualified from participation, so long as the criteria for their exclusion authored by a local school district, or state body, met two “reasonable” standards: “(i) be substantially related to the achievement of an important educational objective, and (ii) minimize harms to students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied.”
It’s not difficult to imagine hypothetical criteria that might conform to this standard: a ban on trans girls only, not all trans youth, or only those categorized by certain metrics as male or female; disqualification from some but not all types of sport; and exlcusions rationalized through pop-science concepts of athletic advantage conferred by assumed endogenous testosterone levels, height, muscle mass, or some combination of them. It’s also not hard to imagine that such a ban would require extensive medical testing or examination, the burden of which would fall on trans athletes to shoulder.
Ironically, the proposal was announced the same day as the Supreme Court refused to intervene in a lower court’s injunction of a West Virginia sports ban, reinforcing the sense that blanket-bans are unlikely to survive legal challenges. The new Title IX policy, however, is designed precisely to withstand such challenges. Transgender compromise, the hallmark of rational liberalism, is the kissing cousin of far right anti-trans bans. If implemented, this policy would likely save and strengthen the mission of excluding trans youth from sports. This policy makes right wing efforts more formidable by serving up to them in writing the precise means to fulfill their goal of keeping trans kids out of sports; it merely prescribes that they can only keep out some, and not all of them. Instead of genital inspections of children perhaps mandated by crass state laws, federal policy will put the stamp of scientific sophistication on its surveillance of young people’s bodies.
No wonder, then, that the policy has been decried by some critics as a “betrayal” of trans people by the Biden administration. Following the lead of critical trans scholars of law, like Dean Spade, and lawyers challenging anti-trans bills in court, like Chase Strangio, I would make a different, if equally critical, observation. Rather than a capricious exception to, or failure of allyship, I’m not sure what else the administration could have done. Compromise was always a likely outcome because Title IX genuinely forces the problem in this way. By tying gender equity to the convergence of fairness and participation, the liberal project of regulating school sports is intentionally designed to rationalize manifest unfairness. Transgender compromise is precisely the kind of policy “solution” to an ostensible “transgender issue” to which liberal statecraft is designed to produce, not an error.
The announcement of this proposed policy and its strange agreement with House Republicans are reminders that the state is hardly intended to be a trans emancipator.
To explain why far right moral crusaders, liberal pundits, and politicians actually agree on excluding trans girls from sport, but not on the means to realize that end, requires examining how the production of fairness has long relied on targeting certain girls to discipline girlhood as a whole. The story lurking underneath bans on trans athletes is one in which the open targeting of trans femininity and Black femininity have long coordinated to produce and secure fairness for everyone else. In that sense, neither right wing blanket-bans nor liberal transgender compromise are exceptions, but the rule.
This is the story of why some girls can’t play.
Why is the concept of a trans girl playing so intolerable that she must not only be excluded from participating, but even punished for it? And why does the targeting of trans femininity specifically secure gendered fairness and enjoyment for everyone else? The answer requires a brief detour to the history of anti-trans therapy, where trans play was first converted into a target.
The gatekeeping model of trans medicalization designed in the 1950s and 1960s produced a requirement that people requesting access to hormones and surgery prove no psychotherapy had already stopped them from being trans. In this sense, trans medicalization directly incorporated a form of reparative therapy as the guarantee that those granted access to transition really deserved it. For adults, that guarantee could run the gamut from being forced into uncomfortable psychiatric sessions to obtain a letter, all the way to enduring brutal forms of conversion therapy including electroshock, the administration of massive doses of drugs, and, in a few cases, lobotomy. For children, however, genuinely trying to stop them from being trans through therapy remained an explicit and elaborate norm until incredibly recently. The University of California, Los Angeles opened a gender clinic in 1962 emblematic of this approach. As I discuss at much greater length in the fourth chapter of Histories of the Transgender Child, only after exhaustive, relentless attempts at inducing desistance—sometimes over years—would any teenaged patients be permitted to transition socially and with hormones. The UCLA clinic never officially offered surgery and saw itself instead as conducting broad research into deviant populations, so it enrolled a relatively wide swath of gender nonconforming and gay children without worrying much about the distinctions between them.
The insistence on behavioral intervention through psychotherapy stemmed from the prevailing conflation of childhood with the etiology of gender and, by extension, being trans. In a letter to a fellow doctor in 1971, the endocrinologist Harry Benjamin remarked that “According to [Robert] Stoller and [Richard] Green of U.C.L.A., young transsexual children may indeed be helped by psychotherapy. As you say, it is useless in the true transsexual adult.” Because children were seen as far more plastic than adults, developmentally unfinished and still open to behavioral imprinting, the theory went that early and relentless psychotherapy might succeed in forcing children to give up their gender, something that had been written off as impossible in adults. Of course the theory proved entirely untrue in practice, but that didn’t stop clinicians from trying.
The typical psychotherapy practiced on children worked on two levels: verbally punishing or citing children for expressing the ‘wrong’ gender behavior, and forcing effeminate gay boys and trans girls to fear and accept adult men as their proper role models. Stoller’s clinical theory of the origin of the trans self was lifted from an earlier psychoanalytic understanding of homosexuality. He contended that trans girls had been exposed early on, quite literally, to “too much mother,” creating a primary identification with femininity. Clinical success would involve inducing Oedipal conflict to spur effeminate boys and trans girls to reject their mothers and learn to imitate their fathers instead—or, more practically, the male therapist.
Since traditional talk therapy doesn’t work well with children, UCLA clinicians opted for play therapy. They drew on a model of child therapy developed by Melanie Klein, who asked her child patients in England during World War II to draw pictures, or play with toys, and then interpreted their play behaviors within a Freudian framework. With a stronger behaviorialist impulse than a Freudian one, UCLA clinicians in the 1960s turned the scene of play into a high stakes form of punishment and reward. The rubric was a simplistic as forcing trans girls into picking “masculine” toys over “feminine toys,” speaking with a low voice as they played, not crossing their legs or otherwise moving effeminately, and inducing them to act as aggressively and angrily as possible, all modeled, reinforced, and policed by the therapist. The most famous published outcome of this school of thought was Stoller’s colleague Richard Green’s 1987 book The Sissy Boy Syndrome, in which Green argued that childhood femininity was a pivotal symptom of future homosexuality—a symptom to be targeted (Green’s career focused much more on effeminate boys than trans girls, although the distinction between them remained blurry).
While UCLA is far from organized sports, this form of anti-trans therapy developed a powerful message communicated to trans girls beginning in the 1960s: your play is being scrutinized and your playfulness will be targeted as a proxy for gender. It’s not hard to gleam the contempt that underwrote this approach to therapy in Stoller’s notes from an initial therapy session with a five-year-old child in 1963. He concludes his first impressions by saying: “I would not want him for my son.”
The production of trans feminine play as a legitimate target is an important caveat to the broader post-WWII history of play, where the activity itself and, eventually, a “right to play” was tied to childhood. Psychology, the behavioral sciences, sociology and anthropology increasingly agreed that children are not just generally playful, but that play is vital to healthy human development. Play was universalized as a good in itself for children, to the point where limitations on children’s play, or the withdrawal of the ability to play, became a focus for child advocates. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted in 1990 explicitly includes as Article 31 “the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child.” But this universal trajectory of play buries the negation of so many children whose play has long been cast as developmentally improper, like trans girls.
Today’s attacks on trans girls in sports might be critiqued as a violation of a universal children’s right, but the clinical targeting of gender play in therapy suggests that the universal was actually constructed out of exclusions in the first place. The logic of trans misogyny in sports requires the exclusion or punishment of trans girls precisely to protect the fantasy of a universal athletic girl who can play fairly. Countering that logic means answering a question too often missing from the moral panic over trans girls in sports: why do trans girls like to play? What rewards do trans girls find in play, in sports, and how might the exercise and extension of their bodies thrive not in some universal sense, but as emancipation from a history of gendered punishment?
One of the first cases to vault trans girls in sports into political visibility took place in Connecticut. In 2019, the parents of several non-trans girls who ran high school track filed a lawsuit to force the state’s Interscholastic Athletic Conference to rescind a policy that allowed trans girls to compete. At the time there were only two trans girls in the state competing. Predictably, the plaintiffs framed the case as being about fairness, invoking Title IX. One of the teenaged girls who did media around the case, Chelsea Mitchell, was framed as “the fastest girl in Connecticut” until she had to compete against trans girls, who allegedly enjoyed some unbeatable biological advantage that robbed her of first place titles. Unfortunately for Mitchell, that wasn’t quite true: in the very same USA Today op-ed (reprinted by the Alliance Defending Freedom) in which she claimed she could not fairly compete against trans girl runners, she also boasted that she had placed first in a recent competition.
The allegations proved easily to defeat in federal court. A defense attorney pointed out that “fairness” under Title IX has never been defined as “winning an equal number of trophies,” but rather means equal access to participation. Title IX does not force equal outcomes or guaruntee first place finishes, but rather ensures that no one is denied the chance to compete. The specter of physical advantage was legally irrelevant and after the two trans girls competing in 2019 graduated, the presiding judge simply dismissed the suit.
One of the two Connecticut teens at the center of the plaintiffs’ complaints was a seventeen-year old Black trans girl. It is impossible not to read the lawsuit in light of the long history of anti-Black iconography framing Black girls as improperly feminine, if not masculine, cast as threatening to the purity and innocence of white girlhood. Framing a Black trans girl as “biologically male” implied that she wielded a physical advantage to takeover track and field away from its rightful participants. The paranoia of the formulation, one repeated constantly in the media today, cannot be overstated: it is what authorizes and maintains a culture of sexualized and racialized violence against trans girls by pretending they are its perpetrators. If a trans girl on a track team is ontologically masculine in a girls’ setting, then there is no compensatory punishment too harsh to remove her. This is the logic of trans panic so often at the heart of trans misogyny: the fantasy that the presence of a trans girl or woman is per se threatening, and that the imperiled subject of that trans panic is therefore entitled to preemptively strike, to attack and neutralize a threat without anything having actually happened. No wonder, then, that so often those who campaign on having lost their rightful athletic titles to trans women seem to have invented something that never took place.
In Connecticut, that panic and its misogyny traded in the vast policing of Black women athletes, particularly at the international elite level, where accusations of sexual duplicity have harassed competitors and let to invasive medical examination and absurd sex testing. No doubt the idea that a Black trans girl was “stealing” first place from white girls follows the structure of this fantasy, such that her removal from participation is imagined to secure the white girls’ fairness. Given how genuinely few trans girls compete in organized sports in states where they are being banned, the implementation of laws passed since 2019 are unlikely to involve many actual trans girls. I suspect that anti-trans sports laws, if implemented, will largely be utilized to “challenge” the sex and gender of Black girls, much like such challenges have targeted Black women competing on the international stage from countries like South Africa and Uganda.
What is made unthinkable in this trans misogynistic and anti-Black framing is trans girls, particularly Black trans girls, as genuine athletes, or happily at play. Girls’ sports become about the enjoyment and fears of putatively cisgender and/or non-Black girls, as if trans girls and Black girls don’t meaningfully play sports, or play, period. Trans girls, and above all Black trans girls, have been dismissed as unworthy of extending their bodies in the world, of taking pride and enjoyment in themselves, and exploring embodiment outside of highly moralized, policed, or medicalized frameworks.
This is a form of harm that cannot be remedied by better policy. It demands so much more.
In a moving 2021 essay in New York Magazine, P.E. Moskowitz outlines how to think differently about trans femininity and sports, describing how, after transitioning, tennis became an important way to experience trans feminine embodiment on positive terms. Coming out of a deep dissociation, Moskowitz writes of “a void” that stood in place of a body: “I was without mass, without presence. Mine was a body you could walk through.” And while therapy clarified why trans feminine embodiment might feel that way, “it did not save me from the feeling itself.” What began to shift that feeling was exercise and sport: first, yoga, then tennis. “One of the first times I experienced gender euphoria,” Moskowitz explains, “was when I finally smashed a serve into the far left corner of my opponent’s service box and watched the ball leap over his head.” Moskowitz employs this meditation on the importance of trans sport to offer a different angle on sports bans:
These bills are not, as many assume, motivated simply by an abstract phobia of trans people. By attempting to ban trans kids from playing sports with the gender they identify with, the states wish to litigate which people have the right to find safety, ecstasy, power, and purpose in movement, and which people are relegated to the shadows…They are subjecting children — who often lack a language to interpret their experiences — to the violence of disembodiment, the lifelong pain of being severed from one’s body.
Moskowitz affirms what is anxiously concealed by trans misogyny: that trans girls come to sport for the same reasons as other girls, though perhaps with a greater intensity and need because they are culturally “severed” from their bodies from a young age. That severing is not inherent to trans femininity. Rather, as the targeting of play and feminine behavior in the 1960s reminds, it is one outcome of a project invented to steal trans girls’ bodies from them at a young age. In playing sports, trans girls might seek the transformative experience of being creatively embodied, of finding their capacities stretched and rearranged, of exploring what their bodies can do, both open-endedly and through regimen. And they might work to undo the target placed on their bodies in the mid century. This is not the terrain of universal childhood play, but the unspeakable truth of a culture that has secured the fairness of universal girlhood on the backs of denying trans girls and Black girls the very possibility.
Combatting misogynoir and trans misogyny in girls’ sports arrives elsewhere than the futility of transgender compromise. It arrives at the recognition that trans girls, Black girls, and Black trans girls play to become alive in their bodies, something owed to them in a culture that libels their girlhoods and secrets away self-actualization under the threat of punishment and retribution for daring to exist. To play like a trans girl is in part to defy the demand to disappear the trans feminine body. And that is not something I have seen anyone outside of trans circles celebrate or lift up. The possibility that girls come to sports not defensively, in need of aggressive policing, but rather in defiance of the many patriarchal weights that bear down on their bodies, hearts, and souls, is one reason that trans girls must not only be allowed, but encouraged to play. On that, there can be no compromise.
As usual, your historical perspective sheds new light on today's politics. Seems like the exclusion of trans girl athletes is another instance of how Black children in a racist society are perceived as more adult than white ones, excluded much earlier from the innocence and vulnerability of childhood.
Your remarks on the gender-policing of play made me think about "always already" trans self-narration. Self-doubt about being a real trans person if we didn't play with the "other" gender's toys as a kid.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with this article, and pretty strongly.
Let me start by pointing out that I have no horse in this race. There are arguments to be made for both positions.
First though, it is important to emphasize that nobody is banning or proposing banning transwomen (or transmen) from sport. They are absolutely welcome to participate in sport (absent some new rule I have not yet discovered). Rather, the debate concerns in *which* group of students they can participate. Framing this as a ban on trans people is misleading.
Next it appears you are failing to properly engage with the opposition when writing things like, "exclusions rationalized through pop-science concepts of athletic advantage". The physical advantages enjoyed by males (at least post pubescent) are incredibly well-documented, and easy to see - hardly a product of 'pop science'. You can see more about this at the end of my comment.
In fact, this is in some sense the most troubling part of the debate. I think it is more than reasonable to acknowledge the physical advantages enjoyed by males (at least, enjoyed in the average case - that's an important point), and yet still argue for a more inclusive approach to sports that welcomes transwomen to participate in sport with biological women.
Unfortunately I have yet to encounter somebody making this argument. I have yet to see somebody both (a) acknowledge the differences in speed, strength and athleticism between women and men (again, in the average case, not necessarily in every case), and yet (b) still argue for permitting transwomen to compete with biological women in sport.
We could, after all, look at the male biological body as just another example of a genetic benefit (here meaning a benefit only as it pertains to sport), similar to how we might think of (let's say) fast-twitch muscle fiber genes.
We don't partition women's sport based on these types of genetic differences, or physical advantages - why not treat XX/XY-based differences in the same way?
Indeed, one of the clear ways out of the woods is to just let all students participate in sport together, and stop segregating sport by women and men. That's a very reasonable response to the debate, though of course it would essentially mean the end of competitive sport for biological women (the more competitive the sport, the greater that sport will feel the effects of male physical advantages).
I'll also add that one telling aspect of the debate - if the folks who wanted transwomen to participate in sport only with other men were motivated by transphobia, they would equally condemn all forms of trans sport participation. However that is not what we see - most of the condemnation is reserved for transwomen, because of course that's the group that gets an advantage. Transmen put themselves at a serious disadvantage, and that's why people don't care very much.
However any one of us may think about this issue, many Americans see transwomen participating in women's sport as deeply unfair to biological women. I don't believe this concern is driven by contempt, or hatred, or any other ugly emotion (though of course in some cases, it might be - I just don't think it is generally true).
Addendum: You can find all manner of research on the topic of the physical differences between men and women, and almost none of it is politicized or objectionable. This type of research also doesn't require much analysis, with which somebody might try to hide or manipulate the truth.
Without cherry picking, I started looking at data around bench press differences (men on average can bench press almost twice as much as women):
https://www.strengthlog.com/bench-press-strength-standards-lb
Here is information on squats - it recommends men start at 287 lbs, while women start at 141 (of course this doesn't necessarily mean women *can't* squat as much as men, but it strongly suggests as much). The difference here is again almost 2x.
https://gunsmithfitness.com/blogs/news/how-much-should-i-be-squatting
These are just a handful of examples, and the data here is extremely consistent. Men are also taller, have stronger & longer bones, etc. Now, in some margins the advantage might be smaller, and in some larger, but there is a consistent theme here.