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Round about nine years ago, something odd was happening. No, not “billionaire coups in broad daylight while media pretends not to notice” odd, just … odd. After 40-ish years of overt political attacks on gay men and then lesbians, gay marriage was legalized and, after the sky did not fall, quite a few people in the vastly overpowered zone of the American center-right shrugged and continued on as if the new status quo was no biggie. The far-right anti-queer activists hadn’t given up, but Obergefell made near-term wins against gays and lesbians unlikely, so the right flank of the GOP had to turn somewhere, and they turned their sharpened quills towards trans people. This was not the odd bit.
No, the odd bit was that the first state to institutionalize discrimination against trans people, North Carolina, caught unholy hell for their HB2, which prohibited non-discrimination ordinances at the city level and mandated a statewide anti-trans bathroom regime. Passed on March 23, 2016, the most offensive parts of the law were repealed 53 weeks later on March 30, 2017. (Full repeal would take some years.) During those 53 weeks, studies were commissioned showing that boycotts would cost the state over 3 billion dollars. Three. Billion. Large hunks of that came from the NCAA promising to move all its events out of the state. That’s how much the US public — and colleges and universities in particular, who had a lot of loud, activist queers and transes on their campuses — wanted this whole fight about the LGBs and the QTs and the aces and the lambdas and maybe some Cyrillic letters to just be over already, dammit.
During those same 53 weeks Charlie Baker, then governor of Massachusetts, was booed off a stage for refusing to say whether he would sign a non-discrimination law inclusive of gender, gender identity, and gender expression. He’d come to bask in the love of his constituents as the most pro-gay Republican governor of any state in the country’s history, and he got booed off the stage because it wasn’t enough without protections for trans people. It was an encouraging time.
Overt political and legislative attacks on trans people have ramped up dramatically since then, to the point where Yr Wonkette had to praise that same Charlie Baker, now NCAA President, for pointing out to Congress that out of the five hundred thousand NCAA athletes, fewer than 10 are trans.
But this is not the end of the story.
Yesterday Donald Trump issued an executive order targeting trans people in sports, threatening the ability of schools and possibly the NCAA itself to receive federal funds if they allowed trans people to participate openly. Pam Bondi, our new US Attorney General, followed that up with an internal DoJ memo asking for the Justice Department’s lawyers to plan lawsuits and criminal prosecutions against schools and companies who practice or even just endorse diversity, equity and/or inclusion. So immediately upon release of Trump’s statement, Baker released this statement:
The statement read in part:
[The NCAA strongly believes] that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes […]. To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.
The NCAA Board of Governors is reviewing the executive order and will take necessary steps to align NCAA policy in the coming days […]. The Association will continue to help foster welcoming environments on campuses for all student-athletes.
Hahaha, “welcoming.” Far from pushing for inclusion as the NCAA did in 2016, it is now complying in advance with a more direct attack on its students than North Carolina’s HB2, and Baker has moved from courting the queers to embracing executive hostility. The (yes, imperfect) allies of LGBTQ+ communities nine years ago are Trump’s allies today. For many, the turnabout has been demoralizing.
It has been asserted around the internet that attacks on trans people are a distraction from other Trump actions. Yr Wonkette does not believe that these attacks are distractions from the assault on USAID any more than the assault on USAID is a distraction from attacks on trans people. Every single one of these attacks is an evil of its own, and none of them can be disregarded.
Others, more neutrally, opine that Trump is “flooding the zone,” by taking so many actions it’s impossible to oppose them all. Yr Wonkette does not believe this either. Not only is Trump’s attention span too short to act strategically, we do not buy the premise that the finite opposition can’t oppose all of the many hideous actions taken by the Trump administration. It’s easy to forget, but Trump also has a finite number of people working for him, and they have finite time to inflict damage.
Still others argue that anti-trans efforts and anti-reproductive rights efforts and other anti-human efforts are all of one piece, attempting to consolidate power in the hands of a few rich, white men. While there is something to this, just wanting power doesn’t explain why male models women’s sports.
The reason Trump and his followers are attacking trans people is more simple than all that: They really, really hate trans people. Chris Geidner, Law Dork, noted that other executive orders already being contested in court are being defended by lawyers who assert that it’s fine if the ExOs are motivated in part or in whole by hatred — “animus” in the language of the courts — despite past Supreme Court decisions finding that animus cannot be a constitutional basis for legislation. The important thing to note here is that because past precedent makes success in court incredibly difficult if a law or government action is based on hatred for a minority, no lawyer would skip to defending the notion that animus is fine, actually, if they could plausibly argue that no animus was present.
For court-watchers the meaning is clear: Trump’s lawyers are admitting in court that Trump hates trans people and is developing and implementing his policies in order to further that hatred. Trans felons, military members honorably serving, children praying for puberty blockers, and teenagers hoping to make the varsity football team, all of them have been attacked in the name of hatred, and the NCAA that existed before Charlie Baker’s has been swept away. Instead of standing up against petty animus Republicans frequently sought to disguise with coded language, the largest amateur sports organization in the country is siding with the naked hatred of a sitting president.
Wonkette has covered bits of the San Jose State volleyball saga. One of the very few trans athletes in an NCAA sport apparently plays for those Spartans. She will lose her spot on the team despite long term hormone therapy and little to none of the Right’s nightmare: “male puberty.” As many as eight other trans players will likewise lose their spots, and with those spots, scholarships. Some players may have to drop out of school, but at the very least they’ll take on more debt than they would have otherwise.
All of this is bad, but no one should lose sight of the larger picture. Sports are important. Sports are vital. Culture and community revolve around sports. Children who play sports reduce their risk of obesity, addiction, teen pregnancy and teen fatherhood, dropping out of school, and depression, among other harms. Meanwhile they increase happiness, build social support networks, learn emotional and social skills useful in their studies and their future jobs, and increase their likelihood of graduating college. In fact, you can learn all about the many benefits of youth sports at this handy health.gov page.
(Oops. Well, maybe you can learn something from the University of San Diego.)
Even this doesn’t cover all the harm of this new executive order and the bad example set by the NCAA. We know that when trans people are banned from sports, cis women suffer, too. These orders empower the people who hate trans folks and strong women alike. They set an example that hatred is more than acceptable, that acting out of hatred wins fame, money and power. The bullies are strengthened and encouraged not despite the lack of enforcement mechanisms to keep trans kids and athletes off the fields and courts, but because there is no mechanism.
A specific path to enforcement would imply that other forms of enforcement are at least undesired and at most disallowed. But without any specified way to exclude trans people, the gender police are free to do anything at all, from internet harassment to physical beat downs.
Things are too bad these days to merely report the news, so yr Wonkette’s Senior Trans Correspondent has implemented a mandatory recommended action section at the bottom of every post. And the recommended action today is easy: Love the kids.
With so much weaponized hatred, there is going to be quite a lot of pain out there. Because only 5 to 10 percent of trans teens access gender affirming medical care like hormones, the health care bans are harming relatively few people. Yes, the harms hit the most vulnerable among the most vulnerable, but it’s relatively few. Meanwhile, cissexist attacks that are designed to target large groups in public may hit less hard but will hurt many more people, cis, non-binary, and trans. Trump is attempting to transform kids’ games into Orwellian Two-Minute Hate events where differences are scrutinized and punished.
It’s hard to express the vulnerability of adolescents to this type of social punishment, but everyone who has experienced puberty knows it. The public hatred that Trump is deliberately inspiring needs a counter. Other people will argue court cases or file bills in state legislatures. But anywonk can go where the harm is happening, spend a Saturday down at the park where a child or grandchild or some neighbor’s kid is playing softball, and set a different example. Bring orange slices for both teams. Tell everyone you love them and hope they have fun. Sit next to the kid who looks lonely.
Trump wants to teach terror. You don’t have to read his executive orders or get a law degree to fight it. Just go love the kids, all the kids, and make sure that each and every one knows that they belong.
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