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Here is some Nice Time for your weekend, for a change. There has been so little of it in our fallen dystopian world recently, what with all the … (waving hand around in the air) well, you know.
A couple of weeks ago, a transgender student in Maine won the 800- and 1,600-meter cross country races at a high school track meet. This provoked Laurel Libby, a Republican TERF in the state Legislature, to throw a goddamn hissy on X and then in an interview on Fox News. Libby had the usual litany of TERF grievances: biological males, domination in sports (including Nordic skiing, lest you forget we’re talking about Maine), blah blah blah, forever and ever, world without end, amen.
Libby’s spasm prompted the girl who finished second in the 1,600-meter run to write a very lovely letter in support of the girl who beat her, and to tell Libby in a much more polite way than we would have said it to piss off. We’re going to bold the part that just killed us (softly):
Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first.
One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish.
Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points.
We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are.
Anelise Feldman
Freshman, Yarmouth High School
Yarmouth
Damn. Ethered by a high school student. We would retreat to our shame closet and think about what we’ve done. But we’re not Libby, who went running to the place where all wingnuts go for validation: to Bill Hemmer on Fox, where she crawled up on her cross and nailed herself to it over her treatment by her fellow legislators, while whining that “biological males are dominating” in high school sports.
This is total horseshit. As far as anyone can tell, there are exactly two transgender girls competing in high school sports in the state of Maine. The number of transgender girls competing nationwide, as John Oliver noted recently, is vanishingly small:
Libby has a very recent history of making transgender women in sports her personal hobbyhorse. A couple of months ago, she posted a screed on Facebook in which she whined about a transgender student winning the pole vault at a state track meet. Because she named the student, the Maine Legislature voted by a narrow margin to censure her:
The censure resolution stated that Libby refused to remove her post after she was warned it may endanger the athlete and said “it is a basic tenet of politics and good moral character that children should not be targeted by adult politicians, especially when that targeting could result in serious harm.”
This seems like basic common sense, to not turn loose the anger of the Right on a high school kid just trying to live her life. But it’s 2025, and human decency on the Right is in short nonexistent supply.
The censure resolution required Libby to apologize from the well of the state House, which she has so far refused to do. So she’s prohibited from voting on anything until she does. Naturally, this gives her the opportunity to whine that her constituents are being oppressed by not having representation in the legislature.
Yr Wonkette’s motto about this for Libby and all her supporters remains similar to our motto on other hot-button social issues (abortion, gay marriage, and so on): Don’t like transgender people? Then don’t transition and shut the fuck up.
But to turn the focus back to where it belongs, on Anelise Feldman and her fellow students. For every Riley Gaines or San Jose State volleyball player who gets national attention for complaining about transgender girls, there are a gazillion reported stories about high school students shrugging at the same issue. There are a gazillion stories about students who have accepted their transgender peers by whatever sex they choose to identify themselves.
People often take high school sports so damn seriously, which we get. There is a lot of collegiate athletic scholarship money available, for one. And if middle-aged parents have to transfer their dashed dreams of athletic glory to someone, it might as well be their own offspring.
But the Right has an incredibly skewed idea of how much this issue actually affects sports. Partly that’s thanks to anti-trans groups that track and routinely inflate the number of trans athletes across the country. One way they do this is as follows: If a transgender woman wins a first-place medal, they count that as three medals lost by biological females, because the second-place winner would have gotten first place, and then the third-place finisher would have gotten second, and the fourth-place finisher, who didn’t get a medal at all, would have taken third.
Another way they inflate the numbers is this:
Both HeCheated and SheWon also include “sports” that do not appear to have a sex-based “biological advantage” at all—like poker, darts or billiards. Even competitive oyster shucking made the list.
Competitive oyster shucking? That thing that mostly happens on “Top Chef”? Really?
But at the end of the day, the focus should be on what high school sports are for Anelise Feldman and millions like her. The sense of pride in personal growth and achievement, the camaraderie of competing against and with your schoolmates, the fresh air and exercise that adults of every generation are always convinced the kids aren’t getting enough of.
Feldman put it like this:
Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are.
In other words, they’re kids. Let them live their damn lives. They’ll have plenty of time to turn into assholes later.
[Portland Press Herald / Erin in the Morning]
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