M. Gessen is a Pulitzer Prize winning opinion columnist for the NY Times. Gessen, who grew up in Russia, is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns so it’s not a surprise that Gessen has devoted today’s column to the recent Supreme Court decision on trans athletes.
I read the article and it’s really no different than the sort of thing you might see argued by trans activists on social media. Whether they are taking cues from Gessen or the other way around I don’t know. In any case, it’s not terribly convincing.
Read the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on transgender athletes — the majority’s decision, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the dissent, written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor — and you will see the members of the court arguing about something more fundamental than the law. They are arguing about who should be seen, whose story ought to be heard and who deserves to be protected…
Kavanaugh and Sotomayor are looking at different athletes: He is describing cisgender girls, and Sotomayor is focusing on one of the plaintiffs in the case, a West Virginia high school student named Becky Pepper-Jackson who was excluded from middle school sports after her state enacted legislation banning the inclusion of trans girls in girls’ sports…
Kavanaugh’s argument stresses that everyone deserves to compete on a level playing field. People assigned male at birth have an inherent physical advantage, he writes; they are, on average, taller, bigger, faster and stronger than people assigned female at birth. Making members of these two groups compete with each other is unfair. Pepper-Jackson can join the boys’ team or not participate at all.
Sotomayor’s argument is also based on the idea that everyone deserves to compete on a level playing field. Pepper-Jackson began taking puberty blockers at age 10, the justice points out, ensuring that she never went through male puberty. At 12 she started hormone replacement therapy, which brought about a typical female puberty. Sotomayor’s colleagues, she said, had reached their decision without considering whether Pepper-Jackson actually had an athletic advantage over other girls.
Of course the SCOTUS decision in West Virginia v. B.P.J. applied to more than just one girl. The decision upheld the W. Virginia law banning trans girls from competing with girls. Twenty-seven states have similar laws, all of which would have been overturned if this decision had gone the other way.
It’s possible that states could still pass more narrow laws banning, for instance, trans girls who went through male puberty. But it’s not as if M. Gessen or any other trans activists would have settled for such a law. It would have been fought in the courts too and a new argument would be put forward.
In other words, Gessen is not, I think, telling us what she really believes. Gessen is using this one fringe case to undermine support for a much broader argument that would be much harder to defend, i.e. allowing anyone who decides they are female to compete with actual girls, regardless of what physical advantage this gives them. It’s a clever way to argue but not a particularly honest one.
What’s somewhat surprising is how many commenters disagree with the Pulitzer Prize winner’s argument. Here’s the top comment with 1,400 upvotes.
“They are arguing about who should be seen, whose story ought to be heard and who deserves to be protected.”
I appreciate M. Gessen’s argument, but my probably much less appreciated argument is people who were born female should not lose their sports opportunities to people who were born male but who then proceeded to temper as much of their maleness as possible to compete against people who were born females. It’s just a fact of life that sometimes people are excluded from groups they want to belong to.
Here’s the #3 comment:
It is not reasonable to deny basic biology. And there is a difference between a “right” and an assertion of privilege, which the author conflates. Just because a group “wants” something, that does not make it a right. In fact, no legislation is denying those who are trans the right to vote, be employed, or live where they want. Rather, the SCOTUS opinion relies on the states and local governments to determine if hormonally manipulated men, and that’s what they are, should be allowed to participle with women. We don’t allow drugs in sports (save for the ridiculous Extreme Games) and this is a logical application of that policy – it is not a civil rights issue.
More people picking this apart:
80% of Americans including 40% of Democrats agree with this decision. So does the NCAA. So does the Olympic committee. So do half the states in the Union. Even the three liberal justices who dissented dissented only on the basis that they felt the can should be kicked down the road for additional consideration. All three acknowledged that the word sex in Title IX is appropriately applied only to biological females.
Another point which Gessen ignores. Why is any child being given puberty blockers at age 10?
I am a lifelong gay progressive who has always supported civil rights laws that protect trans folks in housing and employment. However when one’s biology is pertinent, such as men having an unfair advantage in competing in women’s sports, biology trumps identity. Women fought hard to have women’s sports and I won’t silently watch their rights get dismantled. Meanwhile, largely unmentioned is that this child was given puberty blockers at age ten. That appalls me. It is time to call that medical malpractice.
From Massachusetts:
With all due respect, this a lot of overthinking as far as the vast majority of the public is concerned.
We should all be capable of being kind and respectful to transgender people without being asked to deny a reality that’s dictated by biology: men are on average are much stronger than women. This endangers women who compete against men in sports. Even my gay friends and relatives (I have many) seem anywhere from perplexed to dumbfounded that they are being asked to ignore the fact that men are stronger than same-sized women.
We have the data to prove the strength difference courtesy of the sport of powerlifting, where men and women who are the same size do the exact same three lifts with the exact same form, and the winner is whoever lifts the most total weight. As it turns out, women strength athletes on average have 55% of the upper body strength of same-sized males, and 72% to 73% of the lower body strength. So, do we really want to make women compete against biological males? Personally, I am not okay with seeing women bulldozed in order to comply with an ideology that is increasingly on the fringe of society.
People just aren’t having it.
The transgender population represents 0.3% of the population. (Williams Institute, Census Bureau).
It’s unfortunate that trans women cannot compete in women’s sports. But that’s all it is. One of life’s individual disappointments. I was washed up as a ballerina when I hit 12. You move on.
If you’re biologically male, you are not a woman. Are we supposed to upend eons of biology to accommodate this tiny segment?
We’re now supposed to refer to pregnant women as pregnant people to accommodate that even smaller segment of pregnant transgender men. This is ridiculous. The whole issue consumes an outsized proportion public attention
Again, looking beyond this one hand-picked individual, the broader less here is to grow up. You can’t always get what you want.
I wanted to dance. I paid money for a dance class. The teacher pulled me aside and told me to leave and not come back. There was no talk of a refund.
Why? I’m tall. Broad shouldered. I have massive hips. My calves are the calves of a mountaineer. I move as slowly as the “ox” teachers used to call me.
And I’m XX. Female. But I just don’t have the body to be a dancer. So I gave up on my dream of being a dancer, and became a long-distance walker. I’ve walked miles, trekked up to 20,000 feet. Carrying my own pack. My body works really well for those tasks.
And I’m okay. I was hurt but the teacher told me a truth I had to hear sooner or later. If I were a different kind of person, I could take that teacher to court and make my temporary emotional pain a headline issue. I didn’t. That’s not what mature people do.
I could go on all day but the consensus is very clear.
I’m a life long liberal who despairs of this SCOTUS.
However, like my fellow 66% of Americans, I agree with this decision.
Not mentioned is that the court ruled 9-0 that in the 1972 civil rights law that established Title IX “woman” refers to exclusively to females.
One final comment just because this line in the opinion piece really bothered me too.
The sentence: “At 12 she started hormone replacement therapy, which brought about a typical female puberty.” is misleading to the point of mendacity.
I’m not a biologist, but I can state with confidence that a “typical female puberty” entails developments to organs and reproductive systems that the plaintiff does not possess.
Gessen might win another award for this piece, but the readers can tell it’s junk.
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