AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
There’s something you hear over and over again in the debate over transgender athletes in school sports, or rather something you don’t hear.
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CORNISH: Have you had a single example of a transgender child trying to gain unfair competitive advantage?
JIM JUSTICE: No, I have not.
CORNISH: Last month, West Virginia governor, Jim Justice, signed a bill banning trans women and girls from school sports. But when we asked him about it, he could not cite a single example of a trans athlete in his state gaining an unfair advantage.
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CORNISH: Then why sign such a bill?
JUSTICE: Because evidently, it is out there and…
CORNISH: You heard the same thing in Louisiana…
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BETH MIZELL: I’m not aware of any, Mr. Chairman. I’m not aware of any.
CORNISH: …Where State Senator Beth Mizell called a bill banning trans female athletes preemptive.
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CLEO FIELDS: So it’s not a problem in Louisiana now?
MIZELL: Not in Louisiana.
CORNISH: And in Georgia, a lawyer from the conservative Christian advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the driving forces behind many proposed trans athlete bans, struggled to answer this question from state Senator Elena Parent.
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ELENA PARENT: How many girls in Georgia have been denied opportunity because of transgender athletes?
MATT SHARP: Yeah. So obviously, there’s not a lot of statistics on that, but I go back to the…
CORNISH: The lawyer, Matt Sharp, mentioned one case from several years ago in Connecticut.
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PARENT: So there are none in Georgia?
SHARP: Again, I don’t have any…
PARENT: OK, thank you.
SHARP: …Hard data on that.
CORNISH: It’s not just those three states. Back in March, the Associated Press reached out to lawmakers in more than 20 states who had proposed bills to ban transgender female athletes from school sports. In almost every case, sponsors of those laws could not cite a single instance in their own state or region where trans participation caused a problem.
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JUSTICE: But in my opinion – and this is just how I feel – absolutely I think that it would disadvantage girls that are trying to compete and have worked so hard. And so I just can’t do that.
CORNISH: CONSIDER THIS – there’s evidence that the attention on trans female athletes might be a solution in search of a problem. And to many in the LGBTQ community, it’s just another chapter in a familiar story.
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CORNISH: From NPR, I’m Audie Cornish. It’s Thursday, May 27.
It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. Even though several lawmakers have failed to cite examples of trans female athletes, there are a few notable cases. And we mentioned one, the one out of Connecticut.
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LINSEY DAVIS: Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, dominating the competition at the girls track and field championships in Connecticut.
CORNISH: A couple of years ago, two trans girls performed really well at the state track and field championships. Some cisgendered athletes filed a lawsuit challenging the state policy that allowed trans athletes to compete in the first place.
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CHELSEA MITCHELL: I definitely think that the current policy is very unfair and that there needs to be something done to restore fairness.
CORNISH: Now, that was one of them, Chelsea Mitchell, on Fox News about a year ago. Just last month, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the students involved had graduated, and so the issue was moot. The cisgendered athletes involved have signaled they’ll appeal. And the same debate has erupted in Idaho, which passed the nation’s first ban on transgender student athletes last year.
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MADISON KENYON: What I’m fighting for is to preserve the integrity in women’s sports and to make sure that it’s a fair playing field.
CORNISH: Madison Kenyon, who runs track and field at Idaho State. She raced several times against a transgender woman athlete named June Eastwood from neighboring Montana. Kenyon finished pretty far back in the pack, so it’s not like Eastwood bumped her off the podium. Still, she told NPR…
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KENYON: To step on the field and have it not be fair and to get beat by someone who has advantages that you’ll never have no matter how hard you train, it’s so frustrating.
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CORNISH: Idaho’s ban on trans female athletes is on hold until a U.S. appeals court rules on the issue. And we’ve got a link to a report about that by our colleague Melissa Block that’s in our episode notes. But throughout these debates, arguments about fairness have gotten more attention than arguments about science. And that’s what Joanna Harper is focused on.
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JOANNA HARPER: My official title is Ph.D. researcher at Loughborough University.
CORNISH: Harper is a scientist in the middle of a debate between those who want to ban trans athletes and those who want blanket inclusion so that any person who identifies as female can play women’s sports. Harper says the science points to a middle ground.
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HARPER: In most sports, after hormone therapy, it is perfectly reasonable to allow trans women to compete against cisgender women.
CORNISH: Harper explained why to NPR’s sports correspondent Tom Goldman.
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TOM GOLDMAN: The therapy, Harper says, can make the playing field more level even though trans women still can retain advantages like strength and size after transitioning. She believes hormone therapy should be required at high levels of sport, and that restriction angers some on the other side.
HARPER: There are people who consider me a traitor to trans people.
GOLDMAN: What she is is a pioneer in transgender research, which Harper never intended to be. Seventeen years ago, she started taking pills to add estrogen and block testosterone as part of her transition from male to female. She also prepared to change athletically. At one time, she was ranked among the top male distance runners in her native Canada.
HARPER: Within nine months of starting hormone therapy in 2004, I was running 12% slower.
GOLDMAN: Which both bothered her as a competitor and intrigued her as a scientifically curious person. So she started collecting data. She got race times from eight transgender women before and after hormone therapy. One of the effects of reducing testosterone is reducing hemoglobin, which carries oxygen-rich red blood cells throughout the body. It provides fuel for endurance athletes. And with less, the athletes slow down, which is what happened in Harper’s study. Collectively, the women were more than 10% slower after therapy.
HARPER: And that’s an important number because that’s the difference between serious male distance runners and serious female distance runners – 10- to 12% sort of range.
GOLDMAN: In 2015, she published her data in the first paper on transgender athletes. She then wrote the book “Sporting Gender” and helped sports organizations like the International Olympic Committee craft policies in the middle – inclusive of transgender female athletes and restrictive by requiring them to undergo hormone therapy. Dr. Eric Vilain, a Washington, D.C.-based geneticist and expert on sex differences, said Harper’s research has been groundbreaking.
ERIC VILAIN: Looking at data on trans athletes, I don’t see that there is any kind of fear to have that suddenly the world of sports is going to be topsy-turvy and very unfair for all women out there.
GOLDMAN: It’s harder to assess the impact with younger trans athletes. High schoolers develop at different rates, making it tough to create one-size-fits-all rules. Plus, the numbers are so small. Harper says transgender people make up less than 2% of the population, and trans kids are one-sixth as likely as cisgender kids to go out for school sports. Still, the debate rages, and Harper’s goal of pulling people toward the middle continues. Since 2019, she’s been at Loughborough University, a prominent sports science school in England. Harper says the science of transgender athletes still is in its infancy. She’s broadening her research to different sports, fueled by a personal mantra – more data will lead to better policies.
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CORNISH: NPR’s sports correspondent Tom Goldman.
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CORNISH: To people in the LGBTQ community, the recent wave of anti-trans state laws in the form of trans female athlete bans or laws outlawing gender-affirming health care – it’s all part of a movie they’ve seen before. We’re talking about the culture wars of the 1990s, when religious conservatives warned of a, quote, unquote, “gay agenda” and President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, a law that barred federal recognition of same-sex marriages until the Supreme Court overturned it in 2013.
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YANCE FORD: It was really sobering to see how easily a nation could be turned against a community that had so little power.
CORNISH: Yance Ford is one director of a new documentary miniseries called “Pride” on FX. Ford, a trans man, did an episode for the series all about the culture wars of the 1990s and what those years tell us about today. At the time, Ford was just in college.
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FORD: And I remember not having the word transgender. I didn’t have a word for how I felt and for who I knew myself to be.
CORNISH: Ford’s documentary of that era highlights a pivotal moment – Pat Buchanan’s speech at the Republican National Convention in 1992.
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PAT BUCHANAN: There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself.
CORNISH: It came to sound like the opening salvo to the culture wars over the rights of gay Americans.
FORD: And it signified Buchanan’s successful push of the Republican Party further to the right. Buchanan knew that he was going to be able to add several planks to the Republican platform, and most of his planks, unfortunately, were anti-queer, anti-poor, anti-people of color. So it was really important, I think, to give our audience a sense of where that phrase first came from and in the context in which it emerged.
CORNISH: You have activists in the documentary talking about their experience at that time. One of them, Olga Talamante, talks about the idea of feeling some relief after the election of Bill Clinton.
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OLGA TALAMANTE: There was a sense of relief and a sense of excitement. Yay. So we got a Democrat – let’s put it that way (laughter) – in the White House. I think there was a level of complacency where we did not keep up the on-the-ground pressure.
CORNISH: Can you talk about what kind of president Clinton came to be when it came to LGBT rights?
FORD: I think that for Bill Clinton himself admit (ph) that he was wrong about gays in the military, he was wrong to sign the Defense of Marriage Act, says everything that you need to know about his impact on the LGBTQ community during his presidency and frankly, the damage that his support of those policies and positions did at the time.
CORNISH: The U.S. has a president in Joe Biden who has tried to be forthright in entering the conversation, especially about trans youth. I think in his address to Congress, he said something along the lines of, you know, I see you.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: To all transgender Americans watching at home, especially young people, you’re so brave. I want you to know your president has your back.
CORNISH: How do you hear that moment, given what you’ve learned the last time around?
FORD: That moment has to be seen through the prism of the four years of the Trump presidency and its assault on the rights and the lives of the LGBTQ community. And President Biden saying out loud to transgender youth, I see you, is a good first step. But we are starting from such a low point that President Biden needs to do more. He must do more.
CORNISH: Is there another risk of complacency? I mean, many people have argued that that happened for other kinds of progressive issues under Obama.
FORD: I would say yes, 100%. I don’t think, however, that complacency is an option during the Biden administration. And I think it’s because – what we see now, all of these trans bills are being introduced around the country, is because the culture warriors who would have us disappear are very agile at locating power, accumulating power, and then using that power to attack us.
CORNISH: It feels like this is a different time, even for LGBT activism, meaning you have trans activists on magazine covers. And the kind of mainstreaming and focus and the idea of it seems kind of less foreign than it was in the ’90s. What are some of the things that are different about this moment that you think are new things to consider?
FORD: Well, I think that visibility and the fact that members of the LGBTQ community, we make the culture, right? We make popular culture. The challenge is that people want the things that we make, but they don’t want us. And so we can have as many magazine covers, as many award-winners, as many history-makers as possible. You know, Demi Lovato came out as nonbinary. That’s going to be a huge impact on so many young people who identify as trans or nonbinary. And yet the rights and the access to health care for those young people will still be threatened because there is not an equivalent political presence or political force from our community that would help to protect these kids and would have as big an impact in policy as we do in culture.
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CORNISH: Yance Ford directed Episode 5 of the “Pride” series on FX.
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CORNISH: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I’m Audie Cornish.
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