Idaho was witness to a sorry political stunt this week. Gov. Brad Little signed an executive order designed to underline the fact that he is opposed to transgender kids participating in sports.
The order doesn’t do much of anything substantive. This is all about politics.
Little is likely to have to compete in the closed GOP primary soon against a challenge, almost certainly from his right, and Republicans almost unanimously favor banning transgender athletes from playing on teams that match their gender. Now, Little can’t do much of anything to give those voters what they want — on one hand, an Idaho law banning transgender athletes from participating in sports and subjecting female athletes to invasive biological sex exams has been held up by the courts, and on the other, so has an attempt by the Biden Administration to interpret Title IX rules to ban discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
What he can do is issue an effectless executive order, as he did Wednesday, officially directing schools to follow the law. What’s next, an executive order declaring that police should arrest people who commit drug trafficking? An executive order saying firefighters should put out fires?
But the well-publicized executive order does what it’s meant to do: insulate Little from charges that he’s been soft on the issue if he seeks another term as governor. And Idaho’s tiny community of transgender kids — somehow the cruel obsession of Idaho’s political class for years now — find themselves once again used as pawns in someone else’s attempt to win an election. Oh well.
It’s an especially cynical move from Little, a policy wonk who understands this stuff well enough to know better.
What’s fair?
What is the fair set of rules for transgender participation in sports? I don’t know. You don’t know. And anyone who tells you they know is lying.
The current state of the evidence is that there isn’t much of good quality.
“Overall, current limitations of this field include a lack of long-term studies, small sample sizes and the use of no or inadequate comparison groups,” concluded one recent review of the body of evidence. “Future directions should investigate a broader range of markers related to fitness, and muscle health and functioning. There is a need for well-controlled longitudinal studies on (gender-affirming hormone treatment) in non-athletic and athletic trans people to address the current limitations and provide more robust data to inform inclusive and fair sporting programmes, policies, and guidelines.”
“As trans people have been stigmatized for many decades, there is little research in the field and the evidence base is not definitive. Our understanding of the impact of (gender-affirming hormone treatment) on physical performance is based on retrospective data with no prospective longitudinal controlled studies,” concluded another .
In short, we don’t know much about how gender-affirming care influences athleticism, and what we suspect is highly contextual to specific aspects of specific sports, not performance in general across all sports. If we were approaching this rationally, we would regularly update policies as the truth emerges.
But this is the kind of thing politicians are uniquely bad at and totally unqualified for. Point them to the p-value of a finding in a study and ask them to interpret it; the only response will be head-scratching and blustering.
Yet among our political class, it seems that experts abound. And they have hit on a very simple solution: ban all transgender athletes. This is because their primary motivation is pandering, not finding a just solution.
And all athletes have lost out because of this, not just transgender athletes. All female athletes in Idaho still have a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads: If the courts allow Idaho’s law to go into effect, anyone can challenge them to prove their biological sex and they will have to undergo invasive examinations or forfeit. No similar requirements exist for males.
And something that’s been lost, maybe forever, in the politicization of this issue is the possibility of a rational, evidence-based set of policies governing transgender sports participation. Instead of a carefully considered policy with some stability, young athletes can expect the rules of the game to be whipsawed indefinitely by politics, elections and lawsuits with no end in sight.
Nuance goes out the window
Might it make sense that Olympic weightlifting, wrestling and cross-country each would have different sets of rules for transgender participation? Weightlifting emphasizes peak muscular power, wrestling high-intensity endurance, cross-country long-term endurance. There’s some evidence that hormone therapy can influence all of these in different ways, and the baseline difference between the sexes also varies.
Maybe transwomen cross-country runners are fair to compete after a year, but it takes five years to make weightlifting fair. Maybe transmen climbers are fair to compete right away, while a transwoman basketball player will never be a fair competitor if she went through male puberty.
Maybe.
These are the kind of nuanced decisions that should be debated individually by experts and regularly updated as new information arises. And that is exactly the kind of things sports regulatory bodies are well equipped to do, having previously made decisions about issues like what protective equipment should be used in football, establishing concussion protocols and making minute changes to the rules of dozens of sports. (Can you imagine the mangled mess if the Idaho Legislature tried to write concussion protocols into state code?)
The Idaho High School Activities Association had a pretty good set of rules before this whole saga, which required two years of gender-affirming care before participating in sports. That balanced what was then the even more scant state of the evidence with other values like inclusion, promoting youth sports participation and fairness.
Most importantly, it was easy to tweak those rules. They weren’t written in state code. They weren’t in case law. The politicians weren’t involved.
Whatever the rules are going forward, they’ll have nothing to do with science. They’ll have nothing to do with the truth. They’ll depend on political posturing, and athletes will be whipsawed as power shifts between the parties and the rules change along with elections.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.
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