Jack Verzuh, a national-level ultimate frisbee player from Seattle, was drawn to sports from a young age — in athletics, they were judged on their skills rather than their gender identity. But in more recent years, as Verzuh came out as transgender, they found the sporting community they always loved to be pretty restrictive and exclusive.
“I identify as non-binary and there’s not a non-binary division in ultimate,” Verzuh said. “When I play, I’m often misgendered by other teams, by announcers, by referees in a way that is a constant struggle when I want to compete.”
This lack of space for athletes who don’t identify with their assigned gender at birth extends beyond Verzuh’s experience.
“We’re seeing a coordinated attack against trans youth across the country and that’s obviously very concerning, and it’s concerning that it’s now being introduced here, in our state,” said Marcela Taracena, Communications Director, ACLU of Arizona.
House Bill 2201 in Washington State would have prohibited students assigned male at birth from competing in the female division of individual competition sports such as swimming and cross-country.
This bill discourages those who identify outside their birth gender from participating in sports, according to Cynthia DeVille, the first transgender athlete in the Northwest Athletic Conference, competing in women’s golf.
“It’s disguised as something else and it appears to be harmless, but it’s not harmless, it is absolutely discriminatory,” DeVille said. “And in this day and age, I don’t believe we have a place for it, not in our society, not in this state.”
The bill did not proceed in Washington’s current legislative session, but its primary sponsor, Representative Brad Klippert, said he would likely introduce it again.
“According to this bill that was dropped this year, if their sex at birth was male, this would pertain to them,” Klippert said. “And it’s kind of like a period — it doesn’t say anything about hormone therapy or does not include any of those considerations.”
The ability to participate fully in school life is critical for transgender students’ wellbeing during adolescence and 56% of LGBTQ team members report feeling a positive sense of belonging in school, according to GLSEN, an organization that researches policies designed to protect LGBTQ students.
It’s an injustice to restrict transgender children from playing sports based on their gender and their birth certificate, DeVille said.
Preventing transgender students from fully participating in sports violates their rights under Title IX, a law that protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs, according to GLSEN. There is no research to support the claim that allowing athletes to play on the team that fits their gender identity creates a competitive imbalance, according to GLSEN.
“They’re not looking for an advantage, they’re not saying, ‘Well, I got testosterone in me, I can hit the ball a mile,’ they’re not thinking that,” Deville said. “They’re thinking, ‘I want to be like every other girl or every other boy, and I want to have that opportunity.’”
A proposed bill in Arizona waiting for a hearing on the Senate Floor called “Save Women’s Sports Act”, would require transgender youth assigned male at birth to present a signed physician’s statement that indicates the student’s “sex” based on an analysis of their genetic makeup, if they want to play on an athletic team consistent with their gender.
“We’ve been trying to meet with lawmakers and sort of run them through how harmful this bill is,” Taracena said. “We have told lawmakers and our governor that if this legislation is ultimately signed by him that we will definitely see him in court.”
Although these bills aim to ensure equitable competition in sports for female athletes, Verzuh explained that they are part of a long history of using sexism as a method of perpetuating transphobia.
“Saying that women need to be protected or cis[gender] women need to be protected and the way to do that is to exclude trans women, right, it’s just such a pervasive myth in the sporting world,” Verzuh said.
It’s a very thin veil of using language that sees women as a protected category to perpetuate transphobia and fear, Verzuh explained.
Although there have been no reported incidents of students pretending to be transgender to join a school sports team, according to research by GLSEN, it still drives fear and worry about unfair advantage in competition, according to Sara Lopez, Program Director for the Intercollegiate Athletic Leadership at the University of Washington.
“When we have a lot of fear, then I think we start to put in place policies that don’t really consider how to provide equal opportunity,” Lopez said.
“I think for us it’s just important to stress that trans girls are girls,” Taracena said. “This sort of exclusion, you know, it doesn’t do anything to protect women’s sports it just contributes to higher rates of anxiety and stress.”
According to the 2019 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health by The Trevor Project, 78% of transgender and non-binary youth report being the subject of discrimination due to their gender identity and 22% of youth who attempted suicide experienced discrimination.
Maximizing the experiences of young athletes will require thoughtful policies that value diversity and reflect that for everybody involved, Lopez explained.
“There are avenues now for parents to go down with their children to allow for them to discover who they are,” DeVille said. “And if who they are doesn’t match the gender that is arbitrarily just assigned at birth based on genitalia, then so be it — they aren’t hurting anybody.”
According to Verzuh, the first step is allowing people to choose the gender division that is right for them.
“That means not having testosterone limits and not having tests, not having invasive paperwork and it means allowing queer and trans folks to just decide what makes sense and what is right,” Verzuh said.
Athletics and sports provide an opportunity to belong to a strong community and to become comfortable with what changes are happening physically and socio-emotionally, Lopez said.
“We need to recognize that sports are a fantastic place for young people to go through these times of sort of finding their identity and understanding who they are and we need to make that available to transgender athletes as well as all other athletes,” Lopez said. “We need to be thinking about how to include more young people and not, you know … create policies that exclude any young person from participating.”
Verzhuh explained that the next step would be rethinking what it means to play in the women’s division, what it means to play in the men’s division, how there are identities that don’t fit in these neat boxes and how we can use language as more inclusive.
“Trans children, you know, have that same variation in size and strength and athletic abilities as other young people and so again, to really consider our policies and support their identity as they’re developing … and not sort of force them to somehow adopt a gender, just because it was assigned at birth and that’s not who they are,” Lopez said.
These bills attempt to exclude people, DeVille said.
“The bill basically says, ‘There’s no place for you. You’re not good enough. You don’t fit in the box, so you can’t play,’” DeVille said. “We have kept the social construct of the gender binary, and if you don’t fit in the gender binary, then you become a second-class citizen.”
Originally published in The Seattle Lesbian