I never could figure out what I wanted to say about gender and sports. It’s been a topic at the top of my academic passions since before I was even out of the closet, but almost every time I try to write something the thoughts I have are so abstract that there’s no good way to say them. Where do you even begin to talk about the misogyny, transphobia, dog whistles, and distractions that all go into the mainstream talking points about trans athletes in sports over an issue that on every pro level has only ever been theoretical?

And yet, despite trans athletes being basically non-existent, trans women in sports remains an evergreen issue for the right wing propaganda machine. Among others, Angel City’s Elizabeth Eddy is one of the latest athlete to try to salvage what’s left of her career by coming out as transphobic a la JK Rowling with one game left on her contract. In a New York Post op-ed, she criticizes the NWSL’s lack of a clear policy on gender eligibility, suggesting that the league require that players have been born with ovaries or adopt SRY gene testing, controversial practices that would have effects spanning far beyond banning trans athletes.

There are so few trans athletes in sports that making it the “issue” in women’s sports that people waste time on is almost always just used as a dog whistle to start curtailing the rights of trans people in other areas of life whether it be use of public facilities, documentation, or access to care. Eddy’s rant in the Post takes issue with an issue that does not exist. No trans woman has ever competed in the NWSL, and the only two transgender players in NWSL history were both either non-binary or trans masculine. There’s an avenue for dialogue about what trans inclusion policy should look like, but when the talking points are that ‘trans women aren’t women’ and ‘there are scores of men waiting to dress up to dominate women’s sports,’ it’s impossible to have any productive conversation.

Who the policy would endanger is stars like Orlando’s Barbara Banda, Kansas City’s Tabitha Chawinga, or even Eddy’s own teammate (at the time of her op-ed) Prisca Chilufya. All three are cisgender African-born players who have faced targeted harassment and scrutiny for allegedly being intersex and not conforming to the typical standards of western femininity. Chromosome testing, as Eddy suggests the NWSL adopt, already has a deeply problematic history rooted in Nazi officials hurling claims that men were “pretending” to be women for athletic prowess. Before being reinstituted over trans hysteria this year, World Athletics (previously known as the International Amateur Athletic Association) abandoned its original chromosome testing regiment entirely in 1999 for being too cruel and too frequently upending lives of athletes unaware they carried an intersex gene after identifying as cis women all of their lives.

Perhaps the biggest problems with the conservative movement’s attempt to use the question “What is a woman?” as a “gotcha” question for queer individuals and their allies is that they themselves can’t define what a woman is that doesn’t exclude at least some cis women or admit to a wider range of sex and gender than their own binary belief. Trans athletes already exist in such few numbers that gender exclusion policies in practice are two-fold instruments: first, to make it easier to tear down trans rights in arenas outside of sports, and second to perpetuate racism and patriarchy to discriminate against cis athletes like Banda and Chawinga, or track athlete Caster Semenya, who may fail to meet the narrowest conservative definitions of womanhood.

The other half of the debate on trans athletes, and perhaps the crux of what I want to get at, is that the effects of medical transition are maybe the biggest misunderstanding a cis audience typically has of the trans experience. While I was competing in cross country and track during college pre-HRT, I was careful how I defended trans women in sports and doubted whether it would ever feel “fair” to compare myself to other women (I still enter races as non-binary primarily to avoid becoming too much of a controversial news headline). I’m offering only an anecdotal account, but the first year especially, any attempt to run on a consistent basis felt like one step forward and three steps back and I dealt with frustration as my “easy” pace in college became not-so-easy. Now, for the first time in my life, I go on runs with my friends who are in similar shape feeling like we are exerting a similar effort. For the first time in my life, I can work out with other women without holding back. Occasionally, I’ll run with one of my former (cis man) teammates and it feels like he’s running circles around me even though I’ve been the one actually running more consistently.

While I was a pretty average runner for Division 1, my 5k PR of 14:20 was a considerable jump ahead of what the women’s collegiate record was of 14:52 (Jane Hedengren of BYU recently pushed this mark further down to 14:44). Right now I couldn’t fathom getting within two maybe three minutes of that, even if I fully jumped back into the level of training I was doing in college. Granted with sub-optimal training and on somewhat of a slow course, in June I struggled to run 19:40, and I lost to a friend who had been running similar mileage and was a D3 All-American in the women’s 800m in college by about 20 seconds. A couple months earlier I finished the Cherry Blossom 10 miler over a minute behind my (cis woman) college teammate. They were results that, all things considered, made sense.

Despite the claims straight from the 1930s that men are pretending to be women to win at sports, no one is arguing that there shouldn’t be some sort of requirement for trans women to medically transition before competing as a woman in higher levels of sports. Before the current political climate pushed athletics organizations worldwide to blanket ban trans athletes altogether, the guideline for the NCAA and IOC was generally a set amount of time HRT and maintaining a sufficiently low level of testosterone, recognizably a standard that while perhaps reasonable enough for the circumstances, would have benefited from a bigger body of research.

Trans athletes want more scientific research on the physical effects of HRT; research that is now even more unlikely to be conducted with funding cuts to the NIH and any study that “promotes gender ideology.“ The body of research that does exist, however, is rather consistent in finding that feminizing HRT has a significant effect on bone density, muscle mass, and aerobic capacity, with a few studies even suggesting that trans women might be at a slight disadvantage in certain high endurance sports. No cis man is going to go through potentially years of medical and social transition to claim superiority at sports just to discover they now struggle to open a pickle jar. For that matter, if right-wing propagandists were confident that the body of research would vindicate their viewpoint they’d welcome more comprehensive research (as is so often the fatal flaw of right-wing propagandists).

Take Lia Thomas, perhaps the highest profile and most controversial example of trans athlete participation in a women’s sport to date. Critics are quick to point out that she “only” was ranked in 554th in the 200 Free in 2018-2019 in the men’s division and that her times in her senior year were only around 6% slower than her freshman year, compared to the typical 10% difference between elite women and elite men. This ignores that the 554th figure was cherry picked data and she was also 65th in the 500m Freestyle (the event she won at NCAAs) and 32nd in the 1650 freestyle, but even more importantly it gives no benefit of the doubt the level of improvement of an 18 or 19 year-old underclassmen would be compared to their 22 or 23 year-old super-senior year selves in college. If not for being trans, Lia’s improvement in her performance would have been impressive, but not necessarily that surprising. In 2019, Thomas was a 3x runner-up at Ivy League Championships, each time losing only to senior Brennan Novak from Harvard, who himself finished a respectable 8th that year at NCAAs in the 500 free. In all likelihood, by the time she was a fifth year senior in 2022, she was bound to be nationally relevant no matter what division she competed in, but because of covid and her transition, we didn’t get to see the middle of her NCAA career or the work that she was still putting in to be the best swimmer that she could be.

I wasn’t ready at the time, but sometimes I think about the world that I started HRT earlier and finished out my own collegiate career competing as a woman. It would have been more controversial. I’m not sure if I would have ended up experiencing more or less athletic related anxiety. But ultimately I think I would have made a few all-league teams and snagged a couple podium finishes… because that’s roughly what already happened. Sure, I would have been one of the better runners in the Patriot League, but only because I was already one of the better runners in the Patriot League competing in the men’s division. I don’t think my career would have been all that different. I certainly wouldn’t have magically turned into a national caliber athlete overnight. If you want to be an elite athlete as a trans girl on HRT, you better have been an elite athlete before transition too.

You’re probably never going to be able to prove or disprove that trans women competing with cis women is “fair,” at least not while there are as few elite trans athletes as there are. After all, sports are inherently not fair. If being trans is an advantage at all (and I am anecdotally very skeptical), is it more of an advantage than say being born tall or with a certain body type or even just born with good hand-eye coordination? Whether it’s bone density, lung capacity, height or any number of factors conservatives may point to argue for keeping trans athletes out of sport, none of these factors exist on a binary. Lia Thomas is six feet tall. So is Katie Ledecky, Gretchen Walsh, Missy Franklin, and a slew of other notable American swimmers.

While Elizabeth Eddy’s op-ed is disheartening, the response in the NWSL community is a reason for hope. In the week after, Angel FC’s team captain Sarah Gordon responded with a strong statement in a press conference blasting the remarks as “transphobic and racist” and expressing that her teammates “are hurt and they are harmed by the article.” Similarly, Meg Linehan, The Athletic’s women’s soccer lead, released an op-ed in response criticizing the NWSL’s lack of a gender inclusion policy not because they should bar trans athletes from (theoretically) competing, but because it fails to protect Black, queer, and gender non-conforming players from targeted harassment. Being a fan of sports now a days means wading through homophobic and transphobic backlash if a team so much as hosts a Pride Night, but among NWSL circles, where any random game from Orlando to New York will always feel like a Pride Night, there is little toleration for these bad faith attacks. Not when there’s bigger problems facing women’s sports– like changing the salary cap rules so Trinity Rodman and other big stars can get paid their worth and not leave the league for Europe (Go Spirit!), or the WNBA’s own on-going lock out to fight for fairer compensation.

Meanwhile, outside the professional and NCAA levels, the Supreme Court is hearing two separate cases tomorrow concerning whether states can unilaterally ban trans athletes from competing in high school sports. The fact that we’re talking about high school sports at all as a major political issue with everything else going on in the country feels like an affront to whatever is left of meaningful discourse. We’re talking about kids. Kids who are not taking away your daughter’s college scholarship because they aren’t competing on the next level period. Kids who sometimes are taking away your daughter’s state title… because of not being allowed to compete in the boys’ division. The need to protect trans high school athletes is very real. The limelight the topic is being given is a distraction.

Trans athletes are a subject that demands nuance, but the administration knows that by painting the issue as black and white they’ll be able to chip away at the afforded civil liberties for any and all marginalized groups. There’s no argument to be had about trans athletes if the only rebuttal is calling every trans woman a man and refusing to see her as even a person. There’s no argument to be had when the right doesn’t care about women’s sports to begin with.

Sports are for everyone. Trans athletes deserve the chance to compete and have their accomplishments celebrated, cis athletes deserve to not have their accomplishments questioned and doubted because of narrow and regressive definitions of womanhood, and trans fans deserve to see themselves represented on an elite (and amateur) level. Most of all, we all deserve a government who does not use a problem that doesn’t exist as a strategy to take away civil liberties and distract from even greater evils. We all deserve better. I hope one day we’ll get there.