How do you enforce who is “girl enough” to play sports? In my home state of Washington, the most extreme proposal of its kind is before voters on the November ballot. Measure I-638 would require all girls—but not boys—to be medically sex certified before they can play sports.
In a country rife with sexual assault, young girls would have to undergo invasive inspections of their genitals, or pay for a DNA or hormone test, as part of their school sports physicals. Doctors say genital inspections are not only medically unnecessary to play sports, they can traumatize and physically harm young girls.
Attacks on trans girls are feints to throw us off balance and distract from the real issues impacting all Americans, like the costs of groceries and gas, healthcare, and housing. If we really cared about safety and fairness in sports, we’d be breaking down barriers facing girls at every level, protecting them from sexual violence and harassment, and paying professional women athletes on the same scale as their male counterparts.
But they don’t want us to focus on the real issues in women and girls’ sports. It’s no surprise that the man who is bankrolling Washington’s I-638 is a mega-millionaire and major Trump donor. He has no background in women’s sports, yet he claims to be speaking on behalf of women and girls in need of his protection. We don’t need to be “protected” by people like him, and we can speak for ourselves.
Every day I keep becoming more and more a Jacobinite… neither state nor corporation must dictate our lives!
fairness in sports
Sports isn’t fair, it can’t and never will be. Pretending it can be is just yet another distraction.
It used to be “gay marriage”.
And it will be again after they’re done eroding trans rights. And then they’ll continue with civil rights, etc.
Aren’t they already doing all 3 at once?
It’s that and it is also a “divide and conquer” strategy that is aimed squarely at the rights of all women. The Heritage Foundation makes this abundantly clear by going after all women’s sports now.
In the state I live in (which serves to simply be a route between east and west and nothing more) It’s a literal nothing-burger issue. But year after year, it keeps coming back because of Kathleen Kauth and Governor Piggy Pillen all to cover up the fact that his tax cuts are killing the state.
Megan Rapinoe is so iconic
what matters is the disempowering of the state to make decisions about such private matters and transfer that power to relevant communities
