The transgender sports debate is another example of rights in conflict | BIDLACK | Notice

If you read my columns from time to time, you’ve observed that one of the things I love about Colorado Politics is the range of issues, both geographic and metaphorical, that are covered. One of my favorite sections is the Out West Roundup, which highlights various stories from the Western United States that we all love.

This week’s issue brings both good news and bad news, depending on your political views. It’s worth a quick read, go ahead and check it out and I’ll be waiting here…

Is everything ready?

OK, let’s start with the history of lynx habitat. It appears that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials have put the finishing touches on a plan to protect the habitat of the Canadian lynx population, largely in the southern Rocky Mountains, where habitats are the more directly threatened by climate change. Officials appear to be rushing as quickly as possible, based on the unstated but fairly clear notion that the new Trump administration will seek not only to end protection efforts, but even roll back those already in place.

Could you tell me what the Canadian Lynx has ever done for me? Well, they feast on rabbit populations that, without an apex predator, would quickly reach dangerous levels. Rabbits don’t know the difference between wild plants to eat and a farmer’s field, so it is in our long-term interest to protect these predators. We’ll see what the new Trumps do, but I’m not optimistic.

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I want to spend some time here on another issue raised in Roundup, that of transgender access, an issue that the Wyoming Legislature is tackling. As part of their apparent overall effort to restrict trans people, well most Allas existing, Cheyenne GOPers are going after what many consider the lowest hanging fruit on this issue: participation in girls’ sports. According to GOPers, vast hordes of six-foot-tall boys are pretending they’re girls so they can dominate girls’ basketball. I’m exaggerating, but frankly, not by much.

And I admit that this particular issue, sports participation, was something I struggled with, at least until I did some basic research. I can’t help but wonder, in my increasingly cynical view of people’s motivations, that having effectively lost the issue of gay rights in our society, those who wrap themselves in the flag and march with Bibles have turned to trans rights as their next target. It turns out that most people don’t really care about working with an LGBTQI person, so let’s go after trans people?

But won’t anyone think of the children? (bonus points if you recognize the Simpsons reference).

The first thing I saw from the other side was trying to declare that, well, there really is Isn’t that such a thing? as trans, but rather these are people who have “chosen” to pretend to be the “opposite” sex indicated on their birth certificates. The Wyoming legislators mentioned above are trying to find ways, as they hypocritically put it, to bring “uniformity” to school sports. Republican Rep. Martha Lawley’s bill would ban all public funding to any school that does not ban trans people from playing school sports. But it goes even further to the extent that it to forbid Wyoming sports teams from playing against out-of-state teams that had a transgender athlete on the team.

These far-right people seem to think that being trans – as they unsuccessfully said about gay people a generation ago – is a problem. choice. Somehow, a 12-year-old child makes a conscious decision to “pretend” to be the opposite sex in hopes of gaining an advantage. In fact, of course, no one “chooses” to be trans. Being trans is a much harder life than being non-trans.

Yet the far right continues to claim that these children are simply trying to game the system. Thank goodness, they might think, for the Wyoming legislature’s proposed ban on these evil children.

Which, understandably, made me wonder how much of a problem this actually was. We see a lot of screaming but how much real are trans athletes there? Well, let’s do the math.

The answer depends on who you ask. A researcher in the field said there were certainly fewer than 100 such athletes in the entire country, and a spokesperson for the ACLU, which is heavily involved in this issue, said they had located a grand total of five high school trans athletes in the United States

Five.

But that doesn’t mean the issue isn’t unimportant, because it touches on one of my oft-spoken themes, rights in conflict. There have been other examples of this problem. Several years ago, when I was still officiating high school and junior high football and basketball games, there was a case in Texas involving a seventh grader being allowed to play football. He was, unfortunately for the young man, a 12-year-old who stood six feet tall and weighed over 300 pounds. Some parents from other teams opposed it, fearing that a football player more than three times the size of their own child would pose an unreasonable and dangerous risk, and they wanted the heavier child banned. As there was a weight limit of 135 pounds for seventh grade, the young man was banned from youth football.

So, were the other kids’ parents bigoted and mean or were they just looking out for their child’s well-being? Reasonable questions. Are there reasonable answers?

As is so often the case over the past eight years of writing these articles, I have no correct or definitive answer. But I can suggest that, based on the numbers alone, we have time to think about it rationally and look for a solution that is, if not completely fair to everyone, at least the “least bad” solution.

But I will end with this: If you felt sympathy for the young boy in Texas, think of the same sympathies for the trans child who is just trying to fit in, in his own skin, at school and in our society.

Hal Bidlack is a retired political science professor and retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught for more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.