Today's entry continues the discussion of problems associated with allowing transgender females to participate in athletics at the grade school, high school, and college levels.
First, genetic males have an inherent advantage versus genetic females in virtually all American sports. I am unfamiliar with archery, but in all other sports, genetic males as a population will outperform genetic females. Second, I want to point out that participating in and especially excelling in grade school, high school, and college athletics have both material and non-material consequences. The non-material consequences include social networking, boosts to esteem and self-perception, notoriety, and an expanded public footprint in general. Material consequences involve the possibility of securing one of the roughly 200,000 athletic scholarships available to American students.
Unfortunately, higher education in the United States is an expensive undertaking compared to other Western democracies. Roughly two percent of American high school athletes ameliorate costs via athletic scholarships of some kind. I make no argument that the social perks and athletic scholarships resulting from athletic success are the way things ought to be. I am simply arguing that it is the current reality.
While not every family strategy is as cynically bottom-line oriented as The Sopranos, neither are most U.S. families living Disneyesque lives. It is beyond naive to ignore the material and non-material benefits if genetic males compete in women's sports. People can make the case that the social "rights" and mental health of trans children should take precedence over the issues inherent in bumping genetic females down the self-esteem, publicity, and scholarship ladders. I have a hard time, however, viewing genetic males in women's sports as separate from spotlight and financial advantage grabs.
The material consequences of genetic males in women's sports could, in part, be circumvented if all transgender women were disallowed from playing women's college and professional sports. That at least would shut down the most egregious material resource hijacking. But this avenue is highly unlikely to be voluntarily taken by the necessary parties at this time, which means that some kind of legal imposition will eventually be required. This would create a formal two-track system; one for genetic males and another for genetic females. A two-track system would be anathema to the legal and societal goals of the U.S. transgender population.
Malcolm Gladwell, Human Nature, and My Experience
Some might argue that the mental health and lifepaths of transgender Americans are too important for anyone to try to manipulate gender for personal and financial gain. All I can do is roll my eyes. Maybe it's the years of gambling, maybe it's my inestimable cynicism, perhaps it's because I've seen too many cringeworthy reality shows, but I don't view gender choices as above the attention-seeking and capitalist fray. People will do anything for material and non-material gain.
In his books, Malcolm Gladwell often discusses the effects of age-at-school-entrance. Parents who wait until as late as permissible to enter their children into school systems provide their children with the advantages of size and an edge in athletic prowess. There are consequences.
I grew up in the hardscrabble small mining towns of southeastern Pennsylvania. In the 70's and 80's, Pennsylvania had one of the most expensive state college systems in the United States. I believe when I graduated from high school in 1975, we were the second most expensive state.
It was routine for working class families with promising athletes to hold back their sons a year and have them repeat a grade, preferably before reaching seventh grade. This provided the families with the chance for their sons to stand out athletically and acquire college athletic scholarships. I've seen the athletic benefits of these familial strategies up close and personal. I've witnessed the older Gladwell examples have crucial successes. I've also seen younger athletes displaced in their athletic cohorts by these Gladwell cuckoos, sometimes with remarkable effects.
My point is that since I've witnessed routine grade-failing by parents in the service of material and non-material gain, don't expect me to believe gender swapping is too noble a pursuit to go unsullied by the same kinds of goals.
Framing with Numbers
I want to throw some ballpark numbers at you in an attempt to frame the scale of the issue and put everything in some kind of context. The numbers are not hard and fast, but they are useful. Some of these estimates come from statistical modeling rather than direct surveys. The estimates from the Williams Institute think tank at UCLA, for example, used modeling.
Basically, about .7% of teens in the U.S. consider themselves transgender. That's roughly 150,000 teenagers. There are about 20 million college students in the U.S., a figure that's been steady for about a decade. If we ballpark transgender individuals at .7%, we are once again at about 150,000 transgender individuals who are college students.
Interestingly, the number of college students on athletic scholarship is in the same vicinity. Between 180,000 and 200,000 students are on athletic scholarship in the United States. Assuming almost half of these are women, we have somewhere around 90,000 genetic females on athletic scholarship who would be at risk of competing against genetic males.
Conclusion
Since laws regarding trans athletes are changing as I write this, I will attempt to survey the most recent legal arguments and latest policy changes as I revisit this topic in the days ahead.
The times, and the genders, they are a'changin'. The challenge will be to keep a rational, even-handed perspective on all this without getting jammed up in any La Brea pit of moral certitude. At this point, on this topic, I think what passes for American progressivism is largely in the muck.
Bob Dietz
June 2, 2021
