A Reasonable Solution to the Transgender Athlete Debate

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Serena Williams would beat you in tennis.

I think that's fair to say.

How dare you?

I know.

I'm just, I recognize it as a very confidential male.

How dare you?

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I have never written a book.

I should confess that at one point I bought

like book writing software.

downloaded it to my computer because I wanted to do a book about Jeremy Lynn.

I was about ready to say that.

I feel like you have a a Lynn sanity book in you.

Yeah, unfortunately, it's the most predictable thing and also the most accurate thing is that I have a lot more to say about Lynn's sanity.

Well, I might need you to do a Linsanity book.

I remember begging, I mean, truly begging Jeremy and being like, hey, man, will you authorize this biography I want to do of you?

This was literally March 2012.

And I have never had a more awkward awkward phone call with someone I still consider a friend.

Because he effectively, and I didn't want to misquote him here, but I will quote the one word I remember, which is no.

And I was like, I deserve that.

Oh, man.

I deserve that.

Yeah, I didn't really have the same level of difficulty.

Somehow, you doing the treatise on transgender athletes was less stressful.

Okay, so real quick, I just want to start by pointing out that I find our country's political messaging war around gender to be very stupid.

Because nobody should want to control what another person's gender is this much, right?

I mean, whether you're male, female, trans man, trans female, intersex, non-binary, whatever, wherever you are, however you self-identify, however you express yourself, it's just as good a textbook definition of personal freedom as you will find in this country, which loves freedom, allegedly.

And you may recall that last month in episode 7 of Pablo Torre Finds Out, we put into perspective the vanishingly small number of trans female athletes who are invading women's sports.

Supposedly, you met Ember Zelch, this incredibly charismatic but deeply mediocre backup softball catcher who happened to be the one and only trans girl playing varsity sports in the entire state of Ohio.

This was back when Ohio first tried its wave of anti-trans bills.

Ember still has never hit a home run.

That is my update for you, but watch that episode.

I think it's useful.

Today, though, I wanted to get to a more outwardly tricky question, an offshoot of that episode, because our treatment of Ember's story did not address this, and I think it's useful.

How are we supposed to deal with the fact that some trans women, like Leah Thomas, the pen swimmer, actually are elite athletes, actually are really good at sports, actually are winners?

Is there a reasonable policy that could control who gets to play which sports.

And so today, I promise that we will build to one solution with Katie Barnes, the author of the excellent new book, Fair Play, How Sports Shape the Gender Debates.

But first, I really needed to understand how the left got here, how they wound up losing so badly, and why it's failing to persuade America in a very stupid political messaging war about our most basic freedoms.

You are somebody who is, and I want to say this very clearly, you are a journalist and not an activist.

That is correct.

And you are not entirely predictable, which is part of why, beyond you being my friend in real life and someone who got to read your book early on, this is just me humble bragging.

I got to read Katie's book before it came out.

But

it's something that struck me because, holy,

there is stuff in here that does not fall within the realm of orthodoxy, of what the left, capital T, capital L, would want you, dear reader, to think and feel about this subject.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

And I issue that in many respects, mostly because I'm a journalist and not an activist.

The place I want to start is, though, with the messaging war around all of this.

The people who are,

yeah, conservative on this issue and are

trying to pass bills that ban trans athletes.

They are so much better

at playing the political game than the other side of the aisle is.

And your book deals with this.

What is your sense of how

big that disparity is when it comes to the strategy around how to enact laws around this topic?

I think for a lot of folks, the issue of transgender athletes emerged recently.

Seems like it came out of nowhere.

And all of a sudden, it was this huge, big deal.

Whether that was through Leah Thomas swimming at the University of Pennsylvania and winning a national championship in 2022 or the ongoing discussion about legislation that has passed across the country now in 23 states.

It seems like, oh, this is a thing that came out of nowhere for me.

What's happening?

But before then,

there was this dust up over a piece of

paper.

It's a dear colleague letter from the Obama administration in 2016 where they just said, for schools here's guidance on how you're going to support transgender athletes and students

and that was published in May of 2016 it was signed by representatives from both the Department of Justice and the Department of Education it never went into effect because 23 states sued

we welcome you both here to Newsmax Prime we heard from Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick a bit earlier, but it's worth a second listen to some of his other comments this morning on the prospect of the Obama administration insisting that bathrooms be made and locker rooms be made available to transgenders.

Let's look and listen.

The battle line has been drawn in a way that the president does not know the line he crossed this time.

When you take on mom and dad in their homes and the president threatens their children, he has made a huge mistake.

There was already this like sort of tit a tat back and forth between the Obama administration and states.

But then when the Trump administration took over, they rescinded that guidance almost immediately and in fact used Title IX to specifically force at least one school, Franklin Pierce University, to change their transgender athlete policy.

In a late-night decision, the White House reversed guidelines issued under President Obama.

And it was really the first time that we've seen Title IX like really weaponized in that way.

For the very, very basic

sake of definitions here, like what is Title IX?

I got this.

Title IX is 37 words of legislation passed in 1972 that is an education access piece of policy and law that says every student is protected from sex-based discrimination in their schools, including in programs and activities.

The activities bit is important because that is what created girls' sports.

So you see litigation from arguing on both sides of Title IX saying that Title IX is the reason why transgender girls should not be able to participate in girl sports.

And then you also have people who are in favor of inclusion arguing that Title IX is the reason why transgender girls should be able to compete in girl sports.

And just to be clear, this apparent contradiction is all possible because of one specific word in the writing of Title IX,

sex.

Title IX says that no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.

What Title IX does not say there, you may notice, is the word gender, let alone transgender, which may be completely unsurprising given that Title IX passed more than 50 years ago before we broadly distinguished a person's gender, how they self-identify, again, from their sex, meaning their physiology.

But what the Trump administration did in contradiction of the Obama White White House was very strategically argue that the word sex does not protect gender

from discrimination at all.

So, the question of what does sex-based discrimination mean, and who is protected under the law, and what did they mean in 1972, and what does the Equal Protection Clause of our Constitution mean?

Like, there are all of these core questions

that are about the validity of identity and how the law is going to be applied in our schools for all students.

And so to go back to your original question about kind of how we got here and how the

right was able to sort of outmaneuver, you know, the broader progressive movement and the equality movement more specifically when it comes to LGBTQ equality.

A big part of it is that the issue emerged from the right and what makes it so challenging to talk about and why it's made it challenging from a messaging perspective,

is that if somebody is using language like biological male to describe a transgender girl, that

you know brings up an image that is not reflective of who many, like who transgender girls are, especially when we're talking about school sports.

And what I mean by that is you can see in political ads, and especially in Kentucky,

these ads were running in the midterms in 2018 and then also in 2020, I believe, in particular.

You see images of cisgender boys running alongside cisgender girls.

All female athletes want is a fair shot in competition, at a scholarship, at a title, at victory.

What if that shot was taken away by a competitor who claims they're a girl, but was born a boy?

Andy Bashir supports legislation that would destroy girl sports.

And that's not who Andrea Yearwood is.

That's not who Leah Thomas is.

That's not who Juniper Eastwood is.

It's not who Ember Zelch is.

And it complicates having this discussion because we're not all talking about the same thing.

I am conjuring up scientific authority, objective reality, in contrast to your soft and mushy cisgender stuff, which is not as, you know, it's not as intuitive to the

average independent voter, let's say.

Right.

And the reason I bring that up is because specifically, I'm just going to just skip forward a few years.

Is at the, we're talking about Andrea Yervoid.

As this is happening, Andrea was a freshman in 2017.

She continues to run.

In 2018, she is joined by Terry Miller, who is also a transgender girl in the state of Connecticut, who is running.

And the two of them win a lot of races and they win a lot of championships over the course of their high school careers.

Two high school track stars who took first and second place at the Connecticut State Championships now finding themselves at the center of a controversy.

Both young women are transgender and competed on the girls team.

That's not sitting well with some parents and student athletes though.

They've started a petition to change a rule.

It's something that's getting a lot of coverage, especially beginning in the spring of 2018 and the winter of 2019 when Andrea Yearwood and Terry Miller go 1-2 in the 100-meter race in the outdoor championships in 2018 and in the 55-meter race in the indoor championships in in 2019 just garners a lot of attention, primarily in more conservative media outlets.

You see athletes that they beat start appearing on Fox News with more frequency.

Connecticut is one of many states that, in the name of inclusiveness, allow biological males to compete in women's sports leagues.

But is it detrimental to female athletes?

You probably know what I think about this, having been a female athlete, especially in high school.

Now, that's what three high school track and field stars argue in a new lawsuit to overturn the state athletic conference's transgender policy.

According to their complaint, this reality is discrimination against girls that directly violates the requirements of Title IX.

Because schools are permitting males to compete as girls and women, girls and women are losing competitive opportunities.

To American girls, those born with XX chromosomes, the message is give up.

You can't win.

Joining me now exclusively.

I'm so happy to see them all.

It's like a Connecticut reunion here.

The high school track and field field stars behind this lawsuit.

And it becomes a topic that

folks who share those political perspectives begin to really focus on.

Barbara E.

Hart is one of them, who's a state representative in Idaho.

And so she wants to write a bill.

And she reaches out to organizations that she describes as pro-family groups, direct quote, to help her write that legislation.

They don't have sample legislation on this topic.

This isn't something that there's a lot of legislative energy around at this time.

And you could also see that because there aren't bills really on this topic in this way yeah at that time yeah eventually the alliance defending freedom reaches back out to barbara ehart and says oh hey we have some thoughts on this bill what do you think she says i like what you have here i'm going to use it and she introduces hb 500 in the state of idaho Literally the day after the Alliance Defending Freedom announces their lawsuit that they filed in Connecticut on behalf of at that time three named cisgender girls plaintiffs suing the state high school association based on their trans-inclusive policy.

Thank you, Mr.

Speaker.

Friends, I bring you forward this House Bill 500, whose intent is simple.

Its intent is to continue to protect girls and women in sports and to provide those opportunities that we have had for almost the last 50 years.

Every girl deserves a chance to pursue her dreams and excel in athletic opportunities and to force biological girls and women to compete against biological boys and men will only leave us spectators in our own sport.

So I just got to point out here again, Alliance Defending Freedom.

What a name.

It is quite a name.

And so what is their background as an organization?

They're a conservative legal conglomerate.

A conservative perspective on a number of issues.

And I just want to pop in here to say that there is nothing wrong with that basic idea, right?

Welcome to American politics.

But I also do need to point out that the Alliance Defending Freedom is also one of the most hyper-organized and strategic legal interest groups in the United States.

Since 2016, actually, the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate group because it, quote, has supported the idea that being LGBTQ plus should be a crime in the U.S.

and abroad and believed that it is okay to put LGBTQ plus people in prison for engaging in consensual sex.

End quote.

Again, welcome to American politics.

Which I also say because former Vice President Mike Pence is an ally of the Alliance, as is Senator Josh Hawley and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, allegedly.

In fact, in its 30 years of existence, Alliance Defending Freedom has argued more than a dozen cases in front of the Supreme Court, as one of their many many ads points out this is why alliance defending freedom exists the arizona supreme court ruling in favor of a pair of christian artists a finland court dismissed all charges of hate speech supreme court sides with a former student of georgia quinnette college nevada church is scoring a major victory in court lovel wedding photographer has won her federal lawsuit we must protect title ix and women's sports for the next generation parents don't lose their and it is that last part by the way their strategic messaging around saving Title IX from biological males that reshaped our national conversation and our national legislation around trans people in sports, starting with the aforementioned HB 500, House Bill 500 in Idaho.

There's a very clear, when you look at the bills that have been filed, there's a very clear before HB 500 and after HB 500.

HB 500 was not the first bill filed in state legislatures that looked to restrict eligibility for transgender athletes or looked to affect eligibility for transgender athletes or affect the ability for high school associations to set their own policy on that topic.

But this one was different.

ADF has said publicly that this is their model legislation.

You can see if you look at you know, Alabama's version, Tennessee's, Mississippi, West Virginia, they are structured similarly.

They look the same.

The language is very similar.

Folks who were in more conservative political spaces were beginning to be more interested in transgender athletes, specifically transgender girls.

And so you can see the emergence of this issue over the course of really 2017 until HB 500 is filed within folks who have more conservative political perspectives at various touch points and how that was not reflected in terms of coverage from more left-leaning outlets or interest from Democrats in terms of matching the Republicans' emotional investment in this topic.

Well, that's it.

But that part, right?

The emotional investment, what they realized, their core insight, now

to just say this even more straightforward, was

there is emotional resonance.

There is political power in the idea of now we have the story of victimization.

We have the story of our girls, our daughters, the biological girls, as they have framed it, right?

Deliberately losing out to these con artists who are cheating them out of what is rightfully theirs, their experience, their scholarships, their lives.

And that, their insight, which was a winning one, is people are going to want to hear us out on that.

And we can win over that undecided.

Well, I think in general, sports is emotional.

And we view sports through our own experiences, whether that is from being a spectator or being, you know, somebody who had a very, you know, typical varsity point guard career.

I love how this topic inevitably goes to you humble bragging about your high school basketball career.

My incredibly mediocre high school basketball career.

But.

you know, a lot of people had mediocre high school football careers, basketball careers.

Like nobody, by nobody, I mean very few, very small percentage of us go on to have meaningful collegiate professional Olympic careers.

That describes such a small amount of the athletic experience.

And yet we love sports.

We have careers, you and I, because of how much you and I love sports, how much people love sports and care about sports.

And so when the topic is framed, as a number of these pieces of legislation do, which they are literally titled, Save Women's Sports, right?

It implies that women's sports are under threat, that there is the possibility of them going away, and that there is something inherently wrong with transgender athletes participating in, you know, girls and women's sports in particular.

Although it is worth noting that

You know, some of the states have also restricted the ability for transgender boys to participate in boys sports.

And so it's not always just about transgender girls.

And also, you know, as somebody who is non-binary, I'm just like, we're not even talking about non-binary athletes.

We can't even get out of here.

No, we don't have time for you.

There's just so much happening, but we're so fixated culturally on one particular part of this experience.

And by the way, this speaks to like the vocabulary war, right?

I think about this all of the time.

There's a funny thing happening where people get mad at.

a request for they them pronouns, right?

That is like such a winning, again, a broadly winning political argument.

This pronoun bullshit, get that out of here.

But it's like at the same time, I thought you guys wanted like us to not be the same as your girls.

Like we're literally saying, can you call us a different pronoun?

And you're like, no, get the f ⁇ out of here.

It's like, but wait a minute.

Why didn't, what happened to the...

But also culturally, it's about, for me, as a writer, and I do talk about this,

it's about respect, right?

Do we respect people, even if we don't fully understand them?

Are we willing to engage in a meaningful dialogue to better understand each other and where we're coming from and the experiences that we all have?

Or are we not?

So when language is used that is undermining the validity of identity of trans people, such as the use of biological male, it's done purposefully.

If I said, well, I, Katie Barnes, don't believe that the gender binary is particularly useful.

And so therefore, everyone that I come in contact with will be they, them, because that's what I think is right.

That's me imposing a particular worldview onto everyone else that I come into contact with.

And oftentimes when we're talking about, you know, whether or not gender identity is real, whether or not transgender people are real, like that is where a lot of the energy is focused on.

And when we're reducing trans people

to,

you know, these really tough legislative experiences or questions about, you know, biological advantage or just biology generally and like what's going on in your birth certificate and what's going on underneath your clothes.

Like that's a really dehumanizing conversation and strips trans people of respect and dignity that we afford to most cisgender people.

And I think it's important to say that as a part of this conversation, but I think it is something that is often lost in a discussion about how we got here and what appropriate policy should be.

Because, you know, for me as a journalist and like what I like, honestly, what I hope most everyone takes away from fair play is that transgender people are people who have experiences and hopes and dreams.

And yes, some of them play sports.

And that's a part of, you know, those hopes and dreams and experiences as well.

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I want to ask before we get to the specific policy which you just provided a great segue towards, what should

the other side of the aisle have done in anticipation or in just reaction to how this war has been waged politically?

From my reporting, it's hard for me to say what should have been done.

What my reporting does show is what did not happen,

which was there was not necessarily a response.

2019 was a pretty clear year in terms of the Alliance Defending Freedom filing that Title IX complaint, and there wasn't a great response.

And folks who are in that movement said that.

It did not happen in 2020.

It did not happen in 2021, even as there was an explosion of legislation on this issue.

And that's something, again, that I think folks, you know, again, maybe want to talk about Leah Thomas.

There were nine states that had already passed into law some version of what we saw with HB 500 by the time Leah Thomas dove into a pool for her senior year of swimming.

And then, of course, that doubled the following year to 18.

And now we're up to 20, 23.

And there are, you know, two states, Ohio and Wisconsin, that could bring that to 25.

And then also, you know, we talk about sports being very emotional.

One of the things that was talked about to me from a number of folks is that within queer and trans movements for equality,

sports is not exactly our forte

in terms of the community's expertise.

That's not to say there isn't a long history of queer and trans athletes.

No, no, no, but I get it.

But it's a site of pain for a lot of people.

And one of this horses

in the book, who is a lesbian,

recalled going to her board and saying, we want to do some more sports work.

And the board was primarily gay men.

They're like, well, of course you do.

You're a lesbian and we hate a gym class.

And so there wasn't this recognition of what was about to happen.

And then as it was happening, you know, the sports legislation then was also beginning to be paired with legislation that affected access to health care for transgender youth.

And while we've had all this discussion about how so few transgender youth are playing sports, well, all transgender youth need access to health care in some way, shape, or form.

Marshalling a response to then what has become a true legislative crisis for trans people specifically was tremendously difficult, especially when you don't have the funders who fund this work lining up and writing blank checks.

That was not happening.

And that's where I have sympathy.

for the movement and all of its failings as it watched this lead on the scoreboard politically get run up by the right.

because the question of like, well, what do we do here?

What is our policy proposal for who gets to play sports at what levels, and so forth and so on?

That's why I now bring you the topic that you're exhausted by, but is the one that I have to imagine everybody is like actually demanding, like, we need an answer here.

Yes, the one question I get asked probably the most is: is it fair and what is fair?

Yes.

And so,

is it fair and what is fair?

First off,

the science of advantage.

We should not be numb to the idea of competitive advantage following human physiology, following biology.

And so practically, this means hormones, this means testosterone.

So how do you explain this stuff for people who, again, don't have the sophistication or the nuance or maybe the inclination?

The first thing is

sketching out what we know, right?

We know that there are physiological and metabolic benefits conferred upon those who go through testosterone-driven puberty

because there is a general performance gap, especially in power, speed, and strength-based sports, between elite men.

and elite women.

Yes.

Meaning that the fastest woman in the world is not nearly as fast as the fastest man in the world.

And also that the fastest woman in the world can be beaten by relatively less faster men.

We know this.

Times don't lie.

Right.

However,

we also know that

not all trans people will go through testosterone-driven puberty.

Meaning specifically transgender girls.

There are those who have access to gender-affirming care and choose to begin their transition before puberty and through access to puberty blockers and then cross-hormone therapy do not go through testosterone-driven puberty.

Prior to testosterone-driven puberty, there are not significant differences between

boys and girls.

and also just anyone of any gender who is participating in sports, right?

Even though we sex separate very young.

So that's another thing that we do is we sex separate very young.

And when we talk about testosterone-driven puberty, we often culturally boil that down to boys being better athletes, boys being better at sports.

That's the cultural messaging.

So what ends up happening is that culturally,

we talk about our sports and from the perspective of any person who's assigned male at birth has a better athlete than any person assigned female at birth in all circumstances at all times.

From the beginning of their life on this planet.

Correct.

And we also know that that's not true, right?

Like Serena Williams would beat you in tennis.

I think that's fair to say.

How dare you?

I know.

I'm just, I recognize it's a very controversial alpha male.

How dare you?

Right.

But like, you know, Maya Moore would also beat you in basketball.

It's true.

And that's fine.

It's okay.

She would also beat me.

So.

This is tough to come to terms with.

I'm sure.

But I think one of the things that gets lost in that discussion is that sports are also fundamentally skills.

So this is an important part.

It's a very important part.

Skill, intangible, not just sheer physical talent does happen to matter.

Right.

And especially when we're talking about younger athletes, right?

Like, I don't know.

I just, I grew up in the middle of nowhere.

in Indiana.

And

when you played against somebody who was going D1,

you knew.

Like, you knew.

There's that raw athletic talent.

There's also the development of a skill.

Right.

And we allow for the investment in that skill development.

Right.

So what I mean by that is it's perfectly fine for

so-and-so to have a quarterback coach beginning at age nine if your family can afford it.

And that's, that is also a type of advantage.

Yes.

Right.

But we accept that advantage as fair.

So each athlete is unique in that they bring their own set of physiological advantages and disadvantages and also the external advantages and disadvantages in terms of when did you start playing?

How much money has your family been able to invest?

What kind of school do you go to?

Do you go to a school that has money and resources?

Do you go to a school that has the kind of sport that you want to participate in?

It does remind me that it would be a very funny policy proposal to ban like all of the NBA players whose parents are NBA players.

Right.

And so some of that is genetic, right?

In terms of

if your parents played competitive professional basketball, whether we're talking about, you know, maybe they played overseas, maybe your dad actually did play in the NBA, maybe your mom played in the WNBA.

Yep.

Right.

So it would stand to reason that you're probably taller than average, which is an important indicator of whether or not you will be successful in the NBA, right?

And also

you have access to different resources to develop that natural athletic talent.

No doubt.

So that's all that bucket.

For the record, there is not a movement to ban the children of professional athletes from professional sports.

No, there's not.

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So then the question becomes: okay, well, if you are someone who experienced testosterone-driven puberty and you are a transgender girl or a woman, and you want to participate in girls and women's sports, and we know that there are physiological and metabolic advantages conferred upon those who go through testosterone-driven puberty, how successful is testosterone suppression?

Yes.

And

that is an open question that's being studied, Right.

And so what we know is that testosterone suppression does affect muscle mass.

It does not reduce muscle mass down to a typical cisgender female level.

We know that there are some metabolic indicators that are affected, but again,

not down to what we would expect to see in a typical cisgender woman.

But what we also know is they are not the same.

physiologically as what we would expect to see in cisgender men.

It's not a magic command Z undo button.

No, it doesn't undo it in terms of testosterone-driven puberty.

You know, if you are somebody who is tall, it doesn't necessarily shrink you down to the height you might have been had you not gone through testosterone-driven puberty.

But I thought it was interesting in one of my interviews with Leah Thomas, she said she did shrink an inch,

and that her feet shrank.

But so this speaks to the part of the function of a population that is tiny and is constantly under legal attack:

is that there just aren't a lot of studies, it feels like.

No, there's not a lot of data specifically around transgender athletes.

So, a lot of what we are extrapolating in terms of the differences of sexes in athletic performance is from studies of elite cisgender men and cisgender women.

And then, we do have some studies that look at the effects of testosterone suppression on certain athletic outputs.

So, for example, there's a study that looks at

members of the military in various stages of transition, both transgender women and transgender men,

and how various cross-hormone therapy and in the case of transgender women, testosterone suppression affects their push-ups, sit-ups, and mile time.

And for transgender women, their push-ups, you know, they...

come down to a level that's reflected in cisgender women.

Same thing with the sit-ups.

The mile time does not, but the study was kind of cut short.

And so with longer time on suppression that may have happened, it also may not have happened.

There's a study out of Brazil that looks at testosterone suppression with some folks having suppressed their testosterone up to like 14 years, which is actually one of the longest times that we have from a data set perspective on VO2 max, grip strength, and a couple of other physiological indicators.

And it's mixed, right?

Like in terms of how testosterone suppression affects your VO2 max and your grip strength and what remains, what does not remain.

Like, we don't have longitudinal data on transgender athletes and

starting testosterone suppression at various levels of puberty and how that affects athletic performance.

But, but, look, so I want to

essentially try and do a brief summary then of the nuance you just laid out, which is to say that there are many drivers of athletic performance, right?

And that goes to skill and

size and speed and all that stuff, money, all that is in this multivariate equation.

Let's say that testosterone, that

puberty in that way is not the entire story, but it is a relevant influence upon one's athletic performance.

What do we do with that?

It is my perspective that when it comes to placing restriction on the eligibility for transgender girls and women in the women's category, when we should begin to care about that is

when there are real stakes involved.

And what I mean by that is scholarships and money.

So division one, division two, college.

There can be restrictions.

And it's worth noting that there have been restrictions.

Yes.

Like there was a very clear policy that the NCEA was using beginning in 2011 that required transgender women to suppress their testosterone for one year before being eligible to compete in the women's category.

It is worth noting that for the most famous example of a transgender woman competing on the Division I level successfully, Leah Thomas, she suppressed her testosterone for over two years.

Right.

And

so it's also worth noting that a transgender woman being able to compete in the women's category and be allowed to win, for some people, that is seen as a failure of policy, that the policy should be designed to make sure it doesn't happen.

And so for me, as I write in fair play, when it comes to Division I, Division II, some restriction, okay.

Yes.

Professional, some restriction, okay.

Same thing with the Olympic level.

Those are places where we already have an elevated level of scrutiny for those athletes, whether or not you may believe that that is appropriate.

It does exist in terms of testing for

doping, in terms of

various eligibility.

There's also such a high bar to clear, because again, sports are skills.

You have to be good enough to be able to compete.

And so there are already barriers to entry in that way.

Barriers, by the way, that have existed for over a decade in the NCAA's cases you referred to, that

I think it would almost be

surprising to learn that if all you learned about this topic came through the political news cycle.

Yeah, I think it definitely comes like people think that there are just no policies.

Correct.

That if you conclude that there is no way of creating a policy at all, it's either it is, again, quite binary.

It's yes or no.

And in fact, there have been real world politically successful policies when it comes to how to regulate, yeah, the elite levels of sports

and you know the olympics also has yeah a policy yes the point being if you're gonna draw a line somewhere in terms of where do we regulate testosterone where do we make people jump through hoops from a policy perspective to be included to get access to sports you're saying d1 d2 elite sports olympics

That that's the cutoff.

Yeah, for me it is.

So what that means then in practice is K through 12,

you should be able to participate in school sports wherever feels good for you.

Club level sports at that age as well, right?

Because you can play travel soccer outside of your school system similarly in terms of being able to participate and compete in a way that works best for you.

When we're looking at club sports at the college level, which is essentially pay to play, same thing.

Intramural level sports, you should be able to play wherever it is that you want to play adult recreational community sports play where you want um and you know so we should be allowed to participate in sports in a way that is communal and fun and at those levels even though yes i understand that high school it does get a little bit messier for me

like when i say messy i mean in terms of you know i don't want to cheapen anybody's experience in terms of saying your championship doesn't matter of course it matters like i played for a sectional championship.

I still think about it.

I'm still bitter about the loss.

Like it was a defining moment.

There's the humble brag.

I was waiting for it.

It was a defining moment in my high school career.

Yes.

And you mean that it's in the book.

I mean, all I mean it seriously.

Yes, this is real to you.

Yes, as it is to so many people who played for a state championship on their football team or who loved, you know, running track with their friends

or who won track championships or who swam in a final with the opera and maybe they got on the podium.

Like I understand that for so many athletes, no matter when that experience started or finished, the competitive part of you like really loved that experience, probably, hopefully.

I hope it was a good one.

And that was important.

And so not cheapening that at all.

And also

high school athletes are minors.

And for me, morally and philosophically, I cannot get to a place where we are requiring medical intervention for children to compete in school sports.

I think perhaps where

policy is actually messiest

is in those club sports that are feeders.

And I'm not saying that I personally am in favor of restriction for those club feeder programs, but I understand that that can be a different.

kind of conversation.

And we should allow for that too.

Well, if the standard you're setting, I mean, this is what we're calling for, right?

Is a, and this is very difficult, right, to set a policy that is consistent across all of these divisions and groupings.

But what you're saying is, if the standard is stakes and money, what do you do with the pre-professionals?

With those club feeder kids, with the ones who are prospects.

I mean, I think of Bryce Harper.

You know, at age 16, one of the great baseball prospects you've ever seen.

Like, and again, this speaks to the scouting of elite athletes happening ever sooner.

And

this can feel, I understand, dystopian,

but

it's also something that does entail those stakes that you're describing.

Yeah, but I also think that,

you know, how our youth sporting apparatus has become

so focused on money and scouting of talent.

Like to me, that is, that is a separate issue, issue, right?

Like that's not a transgender athlete issue.

That is a question of who are our sports for?

What is the experience of sports?

Like what should that experience for youth be?

Should we opt into the dystopia?

Right.

Like, you know, there's a lot of discussion.

There's really great writing and wonderful studies, you know, done around the professionalization of childhood.

Like, and that is a whole separate thing.

Transgender athletes and their desire to play with their friends, which at school level is what we're we're talking about.

For pretty much everybody, except for that minority we're currently wringing our hands about.

Right.

Like that, that is the focus, right?

And,

you know, should they be denied that because

of a

construction around Joanna Man that is our own making and also the apparatus around youth sports.

that is ever focused on capitalism that again is of our own making.

That sells the dream that everyone's kid is a future pro.

Right.

And I think for me, right, when I look at the landscape and I say, here are where I see those stakes, it disrupts that a little bit.

It's asking us to be honest.

It's pretty radical.

It's saying like, not every kid is going to be an Olympian.

Truly, what you're saying is our conception of youth sports is the function of a delusion.

Everybody might be LeBron James.

I think for me, it is more about having a more complete conversation and asking us to have more nuance, which is really hard.

But the reality is that this topic requires us to have nuance.

It requires us to be thoughtful in how we are drawing these lines, right?

Because when we draw these lines, when we place these boundaries, whatever they are, then we have to police the boundary.

And so, what does that look like?

Because from a, like when it comes to policing, who is eligible for girl sports?

And it's worth noting that every single piece of these, of this legislation that has passed into law has a mechanism for challenging a student's gender.

And so if you're challenging, if you're able to file a grievance and challenge another student's gender, like that opens us up to a lot of questions.

At what point do you challenge?

What spurs a challenge?

What is the suspicion?

Do you have a suspicion anytime your child loses?

Is a suspicion a girl with short hair, a girl with big muscles, a girl who's tall?

And who does that affect?

Because that's going to affect cisgender girls.

It's going to affect anyone who subverts gender.

For me, I just raise the question of, are we okay with that?

Is that a place where we want to be when we're talking about young people playing sports?

And I understand that a lot of people would rather focus on the Olympians playing sports.

You want to have a conversation about, you know, should we have a transgender woman competing in Olympic weightlifting?

Want to focus on an athlete like Leah Thomas.

We want to have those conversations.

But the legislation that is now law in almost half of the states of our country makes no such distinction.

And in fact, does the opposite by being as broad as humanly possible.

So then we have to talk about kids and the science around youth.

And

all I'm saying is, let's just have a more complete conversation and let's all be more informed.

So when we're having this discussion, we can actually have it about the same things.

If we're talking about, I don't know, the concerns of a democracy, maybe we should actually figure out who the people are that are being affected by the policies we pass.

And in this case,

the overwhelming majority of the people affected are kids who

just want to play sports and hang out with their friends.

Well, and I think the reason that the overwhelming majority of people who are affected by this legislation are kids who want to play sports with their friends is because that is the overwhelming experience of all of us who play sports.

Yes.

Right.

Is that 96% of us don't play college sports.

And of that 4%,

an even smaller percentage are playing Division I.

And of that percentage, an even smaller percentage are going on to play professional sports or to be Olympians.

We need to hear each other and have the courage, I think, to confront some of these questions and to be willing to have a complete conversation, be willing to grapple with nuance.

And like, I'm an eternal optimist.

That's why I wrote this book in the hopes that folks would be willing to do that.

And it's been my experience that most people are if, you know, we can cut through.

all of the rhetoric and actually give people information, which is ultimately what I strive to do.

You're never going to get over this high school basketball thing, are you?

Oh, no, never.

We didn't even get to the buzzer beater conversation that I just like love bringing up.

Um, Katie Barnes, uh, retired point guard, thank you for your journalism.

Oh, thanks for having me, Pablo.

Appreciate it.

Today, what I found out is why the whole conversation around trans athletes is so deliberately broken.

Because one group in particular did a really good job of breaking it.

There was a mixture of strategic and well-funded and honestly, just impressively coordinated messaging and legislation in order to wage a religiously motivated war against not just transgender people, but the idea of gender entirely.

But the other reason why all of this is so f ⁇ ed up is because the correct policy around how to regulate hormones, testosterone, and therefore transgender participation across all sports at all levels is so deeply nuanced.

You listen to Katie Barnes provide one solution, and I don't know yet if I co-sign

that solution entirely, but I believe that Katie's policy is certainly a reasonable and undeniably thoughtful one.

And if we can just agree on that,

that basic understanding to me is serious progress.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark Media production.

And I'll talk to you next time.