Purpose of participation bans is to erase transgender athletes

The Supreme Court can issue rulings in a million cases, and it won’t make transgender people disappear.

That’s what this is about. Not who gets to participate in sports or protecting women or preserving Title IX.

Erasure. Permanently removing transgender women from every social space so bigots and people who don’t care to be educated no longer have to look at or think about a group of people they don’t understand or who make them uncomfortable, while making all women adhere to a prescribed idea of femininity.

That’s abundantly clear in the rabid pushback in the two cases before the Supreme Court on Jan. 13 that challenge bans of transgender athletes in Idaho and West Virginia.

In fact, the West Virginia ban applies to one athlete, who was 11 when the ban took effect in 2021.  

Yet the Trump administration, the right-wing legal machine and celebrity transphobes have all weighed in, hoping to use the cases as a means of pushing transgender women and girls even farther out of public view. While each case centers on an individual athlete’s appeal of one state’s ban, their defeat could be used to uphold participation bans in 25 other states and call other protections for transgender people into question.

“Our hope is certainly that we prevail,” said Joshua Block, who as senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Projects will argue in the West Virginia case.

“But we also hope that, regardless of what happens, this case isn’t successfully used as a tool to undermine the rights of transgender folks more generally. In areas far beyond athletics,” Block added.

But that is the goal. It’s always been the goal.

Transgender people have always existed

Transgender people have existed since time began and will continue to do so regardless of what the Supreme Court decides. So, too, non-binary people. And women with differences of sex development. Women with Swyer Syndrome. Women with hormonal imbalances. And so on and so on. Gender does not and never has fit neatly into two boxes, as any biologist or geneticist worth their salt will tell you.

For much of the 21^st Century, the International Olympic Committee and NCAA recognized that. They had protocols allowing athletes to participate as their identified gender, and no one raised a fuss. Cisgender women — those born with XX chromosomes — weren’t crowded off the podium or the playing field. Locker rooms remained safe spaces — except from predatory coaches, the overwhelming majority of whom are cisgender men.

The transgender girls and women who participated in sports were doing so for the very same reasons as other girls and women: To have fun, to play with their friends and to benefit from the life lessons sports provide.

“All I’ve ever wanted was the same opportunities as my peers,” Becky Pepper-Jackson, a shot putter and the plaintiff in the West Virginia case, said.

Yet after Americans realized that attempts to paint gays and lesbians as predators and threats to the moral order were nonsense (and hypocritical), the right wing shifted its twisted obsession to the transgender community.

Transgender people a miniscule part of population

According to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, just 1% of the U.S. population is transgender. That means most Americans don’t know someone who is transgender and, thus, don’t have personal knowledge to counter the narrative that transgender women are a threat to other girls and women, be it in bathrooms or athletics. The anti-trans mob has doubled down on this by playing fast and loose with science, extrapolating the athletic results of cisgender men for those of transgender women when that is akin to comparing apples and oranges.

Worst of all, they’ve been able to make the transgender community into a bogeyman for people unsettled by a changing world and looking for someone to blame.

They are not, of course.

No one is forcing kids to transition. Transgender people aren’t lurking in bathrooms, waiting to assault people. Transgender women athletes aren’t stealing trophies and opportunities from other women en masse.

All they want to do is exist.

“This is unfair to me and every transgender kid who just wants the freedom to be themselves,’ Pepper-Johnson said. “I’ve had my rights and my life debated by politicians who’ve never even met me.”

Other women harmed by transgender athlete bans

You know who else it’s unfair to? Any girl or woman who doesn’t look or act like the stereotype pushed by the right wing and transphobes. In states with bans, there are already cases of girls with short hair or who are tomboys having their gender questioned or being asked to “prove” they were born female.

This “defense” of women’s sports also undermines them, making the implicit argument that women’s sports are less worthy because those who play them are inferior to male athletes. (This is also why no one ever makes a peep about transgender male athletes.)

And don’t get me started on those who are fixated on the small number of transgender athletes but have nothing to say about actual Title IX violations and the disproportionate investment in women’s sports.

Even if the Supreme Court upholds the bans, even if it provides cover for bigotry, transgender people will continue to exist. It might take years or even decades, but their humanity will eventually be recognized and these bans will join other legalized discrimination in the dark corner of history where they belong.

The Supreme Court can set that in motion by striking down these bans. Or the Court, like those who would see transgender people marginalized out of existence, can keep denying reality. 

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.