--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're talking about the movement to ban trans women from sports. Support for this show comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again. With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: So, more than half of US states are working to ban, or even criminalize, trans athletes playing sports. This is a really complex issue, and I think it's worth breaking down what's happening here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Dr. Rachel Levine made history last week when she became the first openly transgender person confirmed by the Senate for a position in the federal government. On this vote, the yeas are 52, the nays are 48. The nomination is confirmed. But she was confirmed by a narrow margin after a contentious confirmation hearing that featured tense questions on transgender rights.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: And while things got a little tense here in D.C., they're straight up brawling over transgender rights across the country. And one of the most prominent arenas for this fight is sports?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last night, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem signed an executive order to limit participation in women's sports to those assigned female at birth. Which might sound straightforward enough, but the reality is a little more complicated.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: And it's worth explaining because these trans bans in sports specifically are happening all over the dang country. Caitlin Burns wrote about it for Vox. So more than half of all state legislatures have proposed bans on trans girls and women playing girls and women's sports. And these bills affect people from elementary age all the way through college.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: More than half of the states? What's the deal? Is there some sort of pressing concern here?
--:-- Katelyn Burns: There's been a panic kicked off by mostly conservative media. Well, for decades, America has been a world leader in providing athletic opportunities to women and girls on the same footing as boys. But now opportunities for women are being shoved aside for a new priority, transgender athletes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There have been a small handful of trans women who have found success at lower levels of sports and they're receiving outsized media attention. Terry Miller and Andrea Yearwood are both transgender high school sprinters. transitioning to female. They took home first and second place, respectively, in a girls-qualifying race for regionals.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: We've seen Fox News devote countless segments now to this issue over the course of the last several years. Boys and girls are physically different, and men, we tend to be more physically ready. We're faster, we're taller, we're bigger, we're stronger. So it is unfair. To the point where it's become a real political issue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Transgenders participating in women's sports will destroy women's sports. In fact, there was an article in Politico during the presidential campaign about how the Trump campaign was debating whether they should use this issue in the presidential campaign. Ultimately, they decided not to. But if you look carefully, more recently, like Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, and part of his speech was about trans athletes.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Young girls and women are incensed that they are now being forced to compete against those who are biological males. It's not good for women. It's not good for women's sports, which worked so long and so hard to get to where they are. But in essence, this is like their new version of the bathroom bills.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In its so-called bathroom bill, HB2, North Carolina's legislature demands that citizens use the restroom corresponding with the gender on their birth certificate, not the gender with which they identify. That became really politically unpopular. So they've moved on now to this trans athlete issue that they feel like they have a winning message on.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: What do these bills actually do first of all? They single out trans girls specifically. So those are trans kids that were assigned male at birth and transitioned to female. And basically, they have deemed that anybody born with a penis is athletically superior to anybody born with a vagina, regardless of circumstances.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they just outright ban these kids from playing with other girls. So like in one state in Minnesota, they would actually make it a crime for a trans girl to play girls, high school or college sports. And the crime is equivalent to like possessing a small amount of marijuana.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: And why focus on trans girls, young people who have transitioned from, you know, boys to girls specifically? That's where people are worried about an unfair advantage?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so there's actually an interesting backstory to why these bills only focus on trans girls. People who have paid attention to trans issues for a few years now may remember this wrestler from Texas named Mack Biggs.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: I'm not going to lie. These girls, they can wrestle. Anybody can wrestle. No matter who you put across the mat, it don't matter. It just comes down to technique and who has the most heart. Mack is a trans boy. He was assigned female at birth and transitioned to male during high school. And he was a wrestler. And he was on testosterone. And Texas State High School Sports Athletic Rules stated that you must play sports in accordance with your birth certificate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that means Mac had to play in the girls' division of wrestling. And you dominated in the girls' tournaments. You were undefeated your junior year?
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Yeah, and then I was undefeated my senior year. Two seasons and not getting beat once? Yeah, I was pretty happy about that. Yeah, I came happy. Nobody came close to beating him ever, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's obvious why. Like, he was developing into this man's body with testosterone like any other boy would, right? I mean, it was blatantly unfair to the girls that he was competing with that he was wrestling against them after transitioning.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: The state would not let him wrestle with other boys. And now that why you see all these states now come out and say well we only focusing on the trans girls. And it's because they want to avoid a MacBags situation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I imagine Mac is an example that conservatives love to talk about. But what are the examples of trans athletes that conservatives love to talk about?
--:-- Katelyn Burns: The two most cited examples are there were these two trans sprinters from Connecticut who are both trans girls and they competed against other girls in the sprinting events in track and field in high school.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: High school runners are going toe-to-toe this weekend at the New England Regional Championships in Boston, a chance to get in front of college coaches and maybe even earn a scholarship. But Connecticut junior Selena Soule won't be competing in the 55-meter dash. She was edged out of the top six spots in part by two transgender runners, Andrea Yearwood and Terry Miller, both male at birth, now identifying as female.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: And they were less dominant than MAC was. By the end of their senior year, they were losing to some of their cisgender competitors. And cisgender just means that your gender identity matches the sex that you were assigned at birth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this is the example that is almost always cited. Their participation in girls sports in Connecticut has actually prompted a lawsuit where several of their cisgender competitors and their parents sued the state of Connecticut High School Athletic Association over this policy.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: And the Trump Department of Education also jumped in on the side of the plaintiffs to try to get the state to change their trans inclusion policy. It's frustrating and in a way demoralizing when you're at the start line of a race and you know what the outcome of the race is before it even happens.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But actually, over the course of the lawsuit, the cis girl that was still in high school athletics actually beat one of the trans girls in an important meet. So like, we know it wasn't impossible for the girls to win.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: And I understand when you're looking at this from the outside, and this is the only example that you've heard. You jump to the cuckoo's and, well, yeah, of course they're winning because they're quote unquote boys. But they're not the only trans girls playing sports in high school.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you never have heard of another trans girl being as dominant as them. So I think it's a little bit misplaced to just look at this one example and decide that this is the one example that defines the whole issue.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: The issue itself is much more complicated than just one set of athletes from one state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it sounds like there's the reality, there's the conservative narrative, and then there's these very real bills that are in more than half of the states. Are these bills going to pass or is it just some sort of Republican fever dream?
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Several of them already have passed. Last year, Idaho, they instituted a similar ban. They were the first that has already been put on a temporary block by a federal court while litigation is pending. And also recently, Mississippi passed a similar ban that was signed into a law. And then last week, you had Arkansas and Tennessee also pass those bills.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I do think these will get passed and this issue will end up getting settled in the courts.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: I don't want to make this a red state, blue state thing, but you're naming a lot of red states here. But you also mentioned that this has happened in more than half of the states. Is this something that breaks down on party lines or is there any bipartisanship to be seen?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you look at the polling on this issue, it is not friendly to the trans side. The vast majority of conservatives believe that trans girls should be banned from sports. Independents lean that way. And even 40% of Democrats think it's okay to ban trans girls from girls sports.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: So if you look just at polling, trans inclusion is just not very popular. But I think in the legislature, there aren't very many Democrats that are supporting these types of bills, like actual Democratic elected officials.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think the reason why is these legislatures are hearing from trans kids and their parents.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: My name is Grace Walker. I'm a senior at a high school in Minnesota, and I'm captain of my school's tennis and cheer teams. When I was in sixth grade, I expressed some interest in, well not interest, I'd say disinterest, in my identity. I pulled away. I felt like the body I'm currently in is not the body I was meant to be in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I talked to my parents and they put me on something called puberty blockers, essentially a wall that stops testosterone from either being produced or spread throughout the body.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: So up until about eighth grade, I still had almost the biology of a sixth grade, fifth grade boy. I didn't go through puberty. My voice never really dropped. Once I was in eighth grade I was put on HRT so hormone replacement therapy which means that on top of taking puberty blockers I introduced estrogen to my system.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When I was growing up as a biological male, being on athletics never seemed like an option or a route that I ever wanted to take. Almost immediately post-transition is when my view of high school athletics specifically drastically changed.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: I suddenly saw this group of overly welcoming and bubbly girls who really were on a team just to be on a team and make friends. The first time I ever went to practice, I was overwhelmed with joy. It was this amazing environment full of a bunch of girls who really, again, were just there to make friends and be themselves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I walked out in this uniform that my parents never would have let me wear. It's a short skirt and a tight top. And suddenly I was surrounded by a bunch of girls. I was hesitant about explaining myself because I know there is controversy around transgender females in athletics.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: So when I stood up there and I'm like, hi everyone, my name is Grace and I want to let everyone here know that I am a trans female. I had some more people question it more than anything, just like, okay, sounds good. I mean, welcome. Cool. I never really had much pushback and I'm so, so thankful for that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Having a group of girls just say, oh, okay, sounds good. It felt odd, but it felt relaxing. It was a weight off my shoulder for the first time in a long time. I was like, oh, okay. I am like every other girl here. No one's seeking me out. No one's saying, oh, this person is different. It's, oh, it's Grace. She's on the girls' tennis team.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: I am lucky enough to go to a school where it is very inclusive. So to be able to go to these practices just as myself felt liberating because it was the first time in a while that I was myself in public. And I was myself surrounded by other people. It was amazing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When it comes to athletics, I have never seen people defend women's sports more than when transgender women are included in that sport.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: I am a fairly basic, decent, but basic tennis player. I play for fun no way shape or form am I ever really going to go pro. My athletic ability does not reflect that of a man. My blood work BMI testosterone or body none of them reflect that of a man.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, at the same time, whenever I went to a game or a match, I had my blood work on hand. If someone ever questioned and said, that female has too much testosterone, I could prove I didn't. I have less testosterone than many biological females.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: So this idea of fairness, if I were to be put on the men's team, no way would I do better than a man. Absolutely not. Recently in my state of Minnesota representative Lucera has proposed a bill that would criminalize transgender females or transgender individuals as a whole by playing in athletics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So essentially being a trans female and playing on a girl's team you will get a petty misdemeanor. I've never had a teammate have any pushback or concern so for me to then talk to them and say oh oh, by the way, there's a chance I may not be able to play in the future because I don't want something on my permanent record.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: I think it always kind of takes them back because one, they're suddenly reminded of the fact that their teammate is transgender. So they have a moment of like, oh my gosh, I forgot about that. Oh my gosh, what? And the second one is anger. It's just, wait, why now? What's happening now? Like, what?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because I don't think my teammates really see me as the trans female in sports. They see me as Grace. Athletics have been nothing but kind to me. I truly believe that I would not be the person I am today without them.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: I believe my academic career got better. I believe my social life got better and my mental health. They made me the person I am today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The science of trans sports in a minute on Today Explained. Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio?
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model. According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data. And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more. You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Kalen: Kalen, we spoke in the first half about the movement to ban trans women from sports, and I want to dig into some of the arguments for this, because on the surface, I imagine this seems like a simple equation for people, like boys should just play boys sports and girls should just play girls sports.
--:-- Kalen: But what do we actually know about the athletic ability of trans women?
--:-- Katelyn Burns: We actually know very little. Trans bodies have been ignored in sports sciences for the longest time or trans women's bodies have just been assumed to be male so the the male data must also correlate for trans women.
--:-- Kalen: There's a lot of like assumptions and incomplete data that goes in behind these but when you get Twitter randos in my mentions arguing about this most of their arguments come down to penis strong vagina weak, right?
--:-- Katelyn Burns: On average, cisgender men tend to be more athletic than cisgender women. But I think our culture also takes that to an extreme.
--:-- Kalen: There was a study from a couple of years ago that one in eight men believed that they could win a point off of Serena Williams in a tennis match.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Drake has a line about this. He could beat Serena if she was playing with her left. At least he says if Serena's playing with her wrong hand, I could win.
--:-- Kalen: They have to be an incredible tennis player to pull that off. Okay, I have a hard time buying that argument. Sorry, Drake.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Whoa, whoa. I think this is all tied back into how people are looking at this specific issue. And it's people genuinely believe penis strong, vagina weak.
--:-- Kalen: Behind that is an assumption that there is no difference between cis men's bodies and trans women's bodies.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: I know from personal experience, having been through a gender transition myself, that that is not true.
--:-- Kalen: Like you were a runner before and after your own transition and you went from running like seven minute miles on your seven mile runs to like not being able to break 10 minutes after a good time on hormone therapy.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Um, I also got in worse shape so there's that. But also like we know there are changes like there are trans women who were incredibly strong before their transition who can't even open like a pickle jar now.
--:-- Kalen: We know for a fact that changes happen when trans women begin their hormonal transitions, but we don't know exactly how much change happens and how that affects sports.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: And it's only just now starting to be studied.
--:-- Kalen: I mean, for anyone who finds all of this confusing, tell me how this even works in practice. I mean, how does a teenager on a high school tennis team go from maybe playing like boys tennis one year to playing girls tennis the next year?
--:-- Katelyn Burns: First of all, it depends on the state that they're in because every state has different rules. There are some states that won't require any sort of hormonal intervention.
--:-- Kalen: So in practice, that means that they could just start their social transition without any hormones and just jump from boys to girls team.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: So that means like physically, maybe you haven't changed, but you're identifying as a different gender. And now all of a sudden you're playing on a different team.
--:-- Kalen: Right. And this is maybe something that scares a lot of Americans.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: And that's why polling is so in favor of banning trans athletes. This is the common perception of how this all works.
--:-- Kalen: If you look at like South Park did an episode on trans athletes, and this is exactly how they claimed it is that a man can show up at a weightlifting competition one day and claim to be a woman and set all these world records and go on living as a man now that I'm ready to smash the other girls.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Is this also the plot of the movie She the Man?
--:-- Kalen: Do you know when soccer trials start Noon. You play? Absolutely. Center forward. You know it, bruh. Yes. And ladybugs. Oh, ladybugs. Oh, my God. I love that movie.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Has that movie aged poorly?
--:-- Kalen: Um, I don't I haven't seen it in ages but I remember watching it on repeat as a child because I just wanted to do it myself.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Well, he's willing to try what could get him arrested no you're crazy Chester it'll never happen Chester put a boy on a girl's soccer team don't worry if it's too tight you'll get used to it meet our new ladybug Martha give her a big the ladybug reception all right after the game.
--:-- Kalen: Is Rodney Dangerfield in that movie? He is. Oh, RIP. He's the coach. He's the one that comes up with the idea. He can't get any respect.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: But yeah, like this is the common perception of how it works. And in some states, you can actually do that. Like you have to take administrative steps to make this happen. You can't just show up and say, hey, I'm a girl for the tennis season.
--:-- Kalen: I think it works at younger ages and doesn't work as you sort of move up in age and level.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: There are other states that do require like a year of puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy before participating.
--:-- Kalen: So they'd have to take a year off from sports to make sure their testosterone levels are in line with the guidelines.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: So they're literally testing kids to make sure they're man enough or woman enough.
--:-- Kalen: Yeah. That seems uncomfortable, if not reasonable.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Does that solve the more moderate end of objections people have around trans women and sports or are there other things to consider?
--:-- Kalen: There are more like nitty gritty sort of biological arguments that happen within this space as well.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: So you say, you know, you have people who go, well, even if we limited it to hormone treatment or hormone levels, there are still changes that trans women's bodies go through in male puberty that can't be reversed.
--:-- Kalen: I'm six foot two. I'm always going to be six foot two, but not all trans women are six foot two and not all cis women are shorter than six foot two.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: So if you're going to ban trans women from basketball and your argument is, well, trans women tend to be taller, are you going to ban all the tall cis women from basketball too, that actually doesn't make sense to me.
--:-- Kalen: I talked with Joanna Harper, who is perhaps the leading scientist in the world on this issue.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: And she was talking about, you know, trans women's hearts tend to be larger than cis women's hearts, right? There's all these, like, implications that come along with that.
--:-- Kalen: But she said, what people don't realize is that the refractory rate inside the heart also changes on hormone treatment.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: So when you start estrogen, you're like the muscles around your heart change and they end up pumping less blood through your heart.
--:-- Kalen: So like there are all these things that we just don't know about transition and trans women's bodies that we think we already do because we're making the assumption that they're quote, biologically male, right?
--:-- Katelyn Burns: They get glossed over and sort of wrapped into these larger cultural assumptions, and it translates to bills that just want to outright ban trans girls from girls' sports.
--:-- Kalen: And for all the real estate this issue is occupying in our politics and culture right now, how many trans women athletes are out there? Do we have any idea?
--:-- Katelyn Burns: This is a two-sided answer, because what I'm going to say is there's more than you think, and also there's not enough.
--:-- Kalen: And when I say there's more than you think, it's that the only trans athletes that ever get attention are the ones that find success.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: I mentioned the two Connecticut sprinters. There's also CeCe Telfer, who won a Division II Women's Hurdling Championship in college.
--:-- Kalen: There's Veronica Ivey, who won back-to-back world championships in one event of women's masters match sprint racing.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: These are the people that tend to get the gobs of attention and outrage, but you don't hear about just the everyday trans women and girls who are out there and are just completely average.
--:-- Kalen: So you don't hear about the trans woman who tried to qualify for the Olympic women's marathon team last year and finished 200th place.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: You wouldn't look at her performance and go, oh my God, how dominant was that? Like, you'd be laughed out of the discussion if you brought her up, right?
--:-- Kalen: It's like, all the attention that you have are on these handful of trans women who have won. And there was an article in the New York Times that reported that according to the NCAA, out of about 200,000 women who play NCAA sports in a given year, only about 50 of them are trans women.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: But you've only ever heard of CeCe Telfer who won a national championship. So if you've only heard of CeCe Telfer, you're going to think all trans women are winning sports.
--:-- Kalen: If we allow more trans women to play, soon they'll be winning all of the sports. But you don't realize there are actually 49, I guess, trans women behind CeCe Telfer who aren't doing anything in their respective sport.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: And one other thing is that people don't realize that trans women have been allowed to compete as women in the Olympics in some form since 2004.
--:-- Kalen: And we've never had an out trans woman even qualify for the Olympics in any sport.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: So despite the amount of attention this is getting, there just aren't that many trans athletes out there.
--:-- Kalen: Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Do you think all the attention this is getting could actually lead to some greater understanding of this issue or is it going in the opposite direction?
--:-- Kalen: I actually don't have a lot of hope on this issue.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: Yeah. I don't think the current social media environment that we have is conducive to having a fact-based conversation that would overcome the sort of outrage and common assertions that are made in this issue.
--:-- Kalen: A lot of it is driven by right-wing media. If you look at Facebook, right-wing media sources are literally driving hundreds of thousands of comments on this, millions of comments even.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: And it's just not an environment conducive to settling what is really a nuanced conversation that really needs to be had.
--:-- Kalen: And where does that leave these trans kids?
--:-- Katelyn Burns: It leaves trans kids in front of their legislators begging for equal rights.
--:-- Kalen: Vox contributor Caitlin Burns. She hosts a podcast called Cancel Me Daddy. It's a show that attempts to demystify the panic around cancel culture.
--:-- Katelyn Burns: I'm Sean Ramos for him. This one's Today Explained. Thank you.
