New Hampshire’s law on transgender student athletes was never about safety. (Getty Images)
My freshman year in high school, I decided to play for the football team. A couple of practices into the season I was given the nickname “Legs” – and not because I was fast. Picture a couple of hot dogs inside buns and that’s what my legs looked like with thigh pads. That’s how skinny I was.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there was one drill where we had to pair up and take turns carrying each other up a hill, piggyback style. I was far from the most popular kid in school, but during that drill I was a king. Who wouldn’t want to partner with the kid who weighed about as much as a school backpack filled with textbooks?
As you can imagine, I didn’t make it onto the field very often come game day. But during our intrasquad scrimmages, I took a lot of big hits from kids who outweighed me by a hundred pounds or more.
Honestly, I didn’t hate it. I grew up playing flag football and backyard pickup games, so I knew the sport well even if I wasn’t built for it. But the next year I decided to give soccer a try.
I’ve thought about my experience playing youth sports quite a bit since July, when Gov. Chris Sununu signed House Bill 1205. That’s the new state law that blocks transgender girls from competing in girls’ sports.
On the day he signed the bill, Sununu said, “HB 1205 ensures fairness and safety in women’s sports by maintaining integrity and competitive balance in athletic competitions.”
I’m not sure whether the governor actually believes that, but if “fairness and safety” and “competitive balance” were truly the goals then he wouldn’t stop with designations by sex. There would be height, weight, and strength requirements for participation in every sport and every league. But, of course, that would be ridiculous.
Can you imagine bans and protests because a basketball player, male or female, was a foot taller than the next tallest kid in the league? How about a Little Leaguer who throws 20 mph harder than anybody else on the field? How about a high school lineman so big and strong that they toss aside defenders like couch cushions?
Where is the “fairness and safety” there? Where is the “competitive balance”?
But we don’t ban kids whose physical development far exceeds (or falls well short of) that of their peers, and we don’t protest their participation. As long as they qualify by age, we accept that sometimes there will be kids who have physical advantages.
At the same high school where I tried to be a football player, there were two girls on our JV baseball team. They were welcomed, and like the rest of us they were good at some aspects of the sport and less skilled at others. When I played Little League in southern New Hampshire, one of the best all-around players in town happened to be a girl – the only one on her team. And every year that I played Little League there was always one pitcher who threw so hard that the opposing hitters considered it a major victory just to foul off a pitch, never mind actually getting on base. If you made it out of the box without getting beaned, that was a winning at-bat.
The point is this: If you want to support a ban on transgender girls playing girls’ sports, be honest with yourself about why – because it’s not about safety or competitive balance. If this was about safety, we wouldn’t allow kids to play contact sports at all, especially the more we learn about concussions and the degenerative brain disease known as CTE. And we’re not exactly rushing to create safeguards there. Consider this from the national Pop Warner football site: “While leagues can continue the current structure where a player is placed in a division based on his or her age and weight they may also instead choose to register players based on age only. Currently, an estimated 75-80% of youth football nationally follows an age-only structure.”
If we truly care about safety in girls’ and boys’ sports, there’s a much broader (and more honest) conversation to be had than whether a transgender girl should be allowed to participate on a girls’ team.
But in truth, HB 1205 was never about safety. It is about fundamentally rejecting and marginalizing transgender people, the same way societies throughout time have rejected and marginalized groups and communities – people – they make no effort to understand. It is a law built out of fear and ignorance, the same human failings at the heart of recent protests at school ball fields and the accompanying hatred and cruelty directed at a couple of New Hampshire kids who can play only by judicial order. Legal tensions aside, it’s clear those kids just want to be part of a team, to have fun.
There was a time when we knew that’s what the games were all about. And we knew it even when our parents seemed to forget.