Riley Gaines is Right on Women's Sports
Winning was easy, until it wasn't - my time on the boys teams in the post title IX early days
In my definitively left-leaning days, I looked forward to Katie Porter’s appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher. I found her smart, politically savvy, and funny. But her appearance last Friday was a testament to just how trapped in the amber of our times she, and many like her, have become.
Specifically, her dismissal of former U. of Kentucky swimmer turned advocate for biological boundaries in women’s competitive sports Riley Gaines as a grifter looking for “likes and clicks” - one without a legitimate argument - was disappointing.
Sadly, Katie Porter isn’t the only high profile woman who is taking the side of trans-rights activists, who are committed to a legal reimagination of the language in Title IX, which reads “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance, that relates to sex-based equality.” They want the rule to be applied on the basis of gender rather than sex. Should the trans-rights activists succeed, transwomen would be allowed to compete with and against biological girls and women, regardless of whether they have gone through male puberty or not. These same activists have successfully scared women, especially those who identify as liberals, into silence on the issue via the threat of lables like “transphobic” and “TERF.” Both carry serious social stigmas in liberal and left leaning communities. But biology is not a social construct; and bodies that have gone through male puberty are very different from female bodies. No amount of “girl power” platitudes can equalize the differences or overcome the sports related physical advantages after puberty.
I know this from my own experience as a onetime slightly better than average child athlete, born just 2 years after the passage of Title IX, in June of 1974. I never became an olympian or a national champion. I didn’t even play sports in college. But I did play all through high school. And because youth sports for girls hadn’t yet grown in popularity such that the needed equal opportunities were present, I played with and against boys both before and after puberty. As such, my example isn’t that of an elite female athlete like Riley Gaines, losing out to Lia Thomas for big stakes. My story hints at the potential impacts on average girl athletes should they be forced to compete with post pubertal transwomen.
To the beginning!
My parents were a standard issue middle class married couple living in the American Midwest. My dad played golf in college and became a lawyer. My mom was a cheerleader who worked in medical records and later stayed at home. Our town of 10,000 was 30 minutes outside a midsize capitol city. I was their second child. As a baby, I liked our family cat and my big brother, who was 4 years older than me. He’d wanted a brother named Jay but he got me instead. Lucky for him, I still wanted to do all the things he did.
The thing that my brother did was play sports. First pee wee baseball. Then Little League baseball. Then youth basketball. I hated watching his games from the sidelines with the other sisters and mothers. I wanted to be on the field playing with the brothers. At around 5 years old, I was made the batgirl for his Little League team. Finally, a seat in the dugout!
As noted above, Title IX was so new, there weren’t yet enough girls to create girls only sports leagues in my town. So at 6, I, along with a handful of other girls started playing on pee wee teams with the boys. Most of us girls were little tomboys, like Amanda Whurlitzer from the Bad News Bears - with short, feathered hair and chewed nails. We spent recesses playing kickball with the boys and several of the other girls also had older brothers they liked to chase around. We were all as good at sports as the boys our age and most of us excelled on those boys teams. I turned out to be a better natural athlete than my brother and my teams were often better than his had been.
In fact, in 1984, when I was just 10, my Little League baseball team, The Optimists, won our league championship. I played second base, and batted 3rd in the lineup. 1st base was helmed by my friend Jeanie, who was our leadoff batter. Jeanie’s stepdad was our coach. He was happy to have us on his team and we were lucky to have him as our coach. He championed our success and was proud to guide the team with 2 girls in 2 important positions to the trophy.
As successful as I was in youth baseball, it wasn’t my main squeeze. Basketball was my true love. I was a rabid fan of Isiah Thomas and the Indiana Hoosiers, thanks to their 1981 NCAA championship win, a game I was allowed to stay up extra late to watch. I talked obsessively about the game and about Thomas to my 1st grade peers – none of whom cared a bit.
Around this time, my dad had a small slab of concrete poured in our backyard and a basketball goal installed. I spent hours imagining I was Isiah or Michael or anyone with 5 seconds on the clock and the game on the line. I loved the game more than any local boy my age and I almost certainly spent more hours shooting and practicing and dreaming than any of them did. As a result of my total devotion to the game, my youth basketball teams were the teams to beat all through those elementary years. I wasn’t just good for a girl. I was one of the best players in town in my age group.
There was another girl in town, my friend Kendra, who was no slouch either. We were placed on the same team in our local youth league probably for camaraderie purposes but maybe to keep most of the teams all boys. This always created an interesting tension on the first day of practice because there would be boys on our team who had not been hipped to how good we were. They would be bummed because with two freaking girls, they thought they would lose for sure. Then they saw us play and realized they’d hit the elementary basketball team jackpot. From ages 9-12, Kendra and I played on teams that dominated our town’s youth league. We won almost all our games every single year. We made boys cry out of shame at losing to girls. I would laugh at those criers too because I was a catty little 11-year-old and they were stupid to think a team with girls might NOT be good enough to beat them.
It never occurred to me that this ease I experienced at outshining boys on the basketball court would ever change.
But then we all turned 13. I was still a genie with the ball. I’d even begun to receive college recruitment letters after my performance in an U14 AAU tournament before the start of 8th grade. But around that age, my level of basketball badassery began diminishing when boys entered the room. In fact, boys who weren’t even that sporty could smoke me. Even Jeff, the physically awkward Star Wars nerd who preferred soccer to basketball and wasn’t that good at either could suddenly outrun me, outshoot me, and outplay me.
Jeff had received the gift of male puberty. All those boys I used to beat with ease had. And I would never be able to compete with them again. None of us girls would.
The full effects of male puberty were so pronounced that our high school girls varsity coach invited those formerly floppy and still comparatively unathletic guys, who never played official competitive sports, to scrimmage us as we prepared for the state tournament. I’m sure our coach, a subtle masochist, would have preferred we scrimmage the boys on the varsity basketball team so we could really get our butts kicked. But the state athletic rules prohibited this. That meant the team our coach put together was made up of a whole slew of Jeffs. And those Jeffs beat us with less than full effort all the time. They even cleaned the clock of our best player, a fierce scorer and a physically dominant player named Jamie, who sported a mullet and liked to drop two-foot-long loogies out of her mouth before sucking them back up without letting them break for the ground. She was a brute! And she went on to become a state all-star and play division 1 college basketball. But she was no match for those Star Wars nerds. They kicked her around too – albeit a little less completely than the rest of us.
So were the advantages biology procured on regular, athletically disinterested young men when they passed through puberty. And it’s not just my lived experience that demonstrates this. There is a copious amount of research, (a sampling can be found here, here, and here,) that shows no amount of hormonal intervention or suppression can completely undo the physical advantages that male puberty procures on a body. Any argument that transwomen who have gone through male puberty have no advantages over natal women in sports competitions is simply false and ideologically motivated and should be dismissed as unserious.
Instead, we should address the tension we have between competing values. Those who argue for the rights of transwomen in women’s sports are prioritizing the value of inclusion over the value of fairness and attempting to force other women to share in that prioritization and accept its consequences. Some supporters of transwomen even argue that since some same sexed bodies are better built for athletic success than others, sports are inherently unfair. This may have some truth. But like fairness, the idea that a state of perfect inclusion can be achieved is a chimera. To include and effectively prioritize the desires of some transwomen (and I say some because not all transwomen are staking the ground on this issue) in women’s sports requires excluding and minimizing the concerns of many natal women, including the full exclusion of those whose religious beliefs preclude them from cross-sex competition.
In short, the solution to this problem is certainly not so eye-rollingly obvious as to warrant the kind of dismissal Katie Porter directed toward Riley Gaines on Real Time. I fully support the inclusion of gender non-conforming children in youth sports leagues. For the most part, pre-pubertal children are relatively physically similar and the stakes of competition are lower and more recreational in nature. But as it stands today, I can’t get behind allowing post pubertal transwomen or girls to compete with and against natal women. After puberty, maintaining fairness and equal opportunities at competitive success for natal girls and women requires the exclusion of male sexed bodies from women’s sports. Moreover, in sports where contact occurs, natal girls and women are at far greater risk for injury when facing male bodied competitors. I remain open to changing my mind should new medical advances completely undo the athletic advantages of male puberty. Similarly, I wish fellow liberals (and for now I do still count myself one) like Katie Porter would turn off their binking neon virtue signals and acknowledge that arguments for maintaining biological sex-based boundaries in sports might be driven by something more than a desire for likes and clicks.