There will be no truce anytime soon on the cultural battlefield of transgender rights, but the Biden administration gets credit for drafting reasonable standards to try and bring some fairness and clarity to school playing fields, where there are no easy answers.
When boys and girls declare themselves to be girls and boys, while other children struggle with their gender identity, they all need psychological support, not senselessly cruel policies that, for instance, force them to enter only the bathroom associated with the sex of their birth.
But it is simultaneously true that U.S. law known as Title IX for very good reason safeguards equal treatment for girls, including in competitive sports. Here, transgender rights and cisgender rights compete in ways that LGBTQ advocates often fail to honestly acknowledge. To allow all post-pubescent transgender girls to compete against other girls in track or swimming or basketball is to effectively deny girls what federal law is properly designed to protect.
That’s what happened when Connecticut let transgender girls run in women’s track; they went on to set record after record. It’s what happened when Penn’s Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, dominated the pool in competitive meets. As an analysis by Duke Law School points out, biological boys and men routinely outperform biological girls and women. To use just one example, in a single year, the world’s fastest women in track are outperformed thousands of men and boys around the world.
The Biden administration tries, as it were, to split the baby — saying schools can issue no categorical bans against transgender sports participation, but allowing for restrictions if and when they can establish that they serve “important educational objectives,” such as fairness in competition and reduction of injury risks. The factors include the sport, students’ age and competition level.
Ergo, a second-grade boy who identifies as a girl couldn’t be begrudged a place on a girls’ basketball squad — but a muscular high-school transgender girl might not be able to play linebacker on an all-female tackle football team. Makes sense to us.
