All Your Questions About Trans Kids in Sports, Asked and Answered

Once I was a child, sports were the place where I discovered my friends and my community, in addition to my confidence and sense of self. I loved sports because they allowed me to challenge myself, but mostly because playing them was after I could hang around with my buddies and just rejoice.

Now, as an adult athlete and transgender man on Team USA, it’s been heartbreaking for me to see how trans kids in sports have change into the goal of legislators across our country. The thought of including trans and nonbinary people in sports has been positioned as “political” when in truth it is just not.

Sifting through all of the knowledge presented as a “debate” on social media could be overwhelming, and every single day I speak with parents, coaches, and sports fans who’ve questions on transgender athletes and specifically trans kids in sports. That’s why I’m here to reply your questions in a judgment-free zone.

All young people must have the chance to play the sports that they love and never should compromise any a part of themselves. That’s why I work each day to be sure that every young person—irrespective of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression—can experience the lifesaving power of sports.

Do trans kids have inherent, unfair benefits in sports?

No. Transgender kids, like all kids, vary in athletic ability, size, strength, and speed. There are lots of aspects that go into determining if someone shall be a great athlete, including coaching, access to camps and skill development, proper nutrition and rest, high-quality equipment, mental toughness and resilience, and support and encouragement from family, in addition to basic capabilities like agility and coordination. In his 2020 expert testimony about transgender athletes, Joshua D. Safer, MD, a staff physician within the endocrinology division of the Department of Medicine on the Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center in Recent York, stated that an individual’s genetic makeup and internal and external reproductive anatomy usually are not useful indicators of athletic performance.

In actual fact, a recent literature review commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport checked out all relevant studies about trans women in elite sports from 2011 until 2021 and located that the present scientific findings don’t support banning trans women and girls from women’s sports.

In accordance with the 2020 Human Rights Watch report “They’re Chasing Us Away From Sport,” women and girls in sports have been subjected to scrutiny over their appearance, bodies, and performance for a long time, spanning back to the Nineteen Forties. For elite women athletes, these tests included mandatory genital and gynecological exams; “nude parades,” during which women needed to display their nude bodies in front of a panel of judges; and assessment of secondary sex characteristics. These humiliating practices were stopped within the Nineties, but similar invasive inspections for K–12 children have been introduced within the language of bills and, in not less than one case, change into law. Nobody needs to be okay with adults inspecting the bodies of young kids.