There has been a lot of discussion in the news lately about transgender girl athletes competing against girls in sports. One side thinks it’s unfair for the girls if trans girls compete because of the differences between male and female bodies especially after puberty. The other side thinks it’s unfair to not allow trans girls to be who they want to be and do what they want to do.
Megan Rapinoe is “an American professional soccer player who plays as a winger and captains OL Reign of the National Women’s Soccer League, as well as the United States national team,” according to Wikipedia. She has also been an activist for womens sports.
Rapinoe recently told TIME she is “100% supportive” of “trans inclusion” in girls’ sports. She went on to say that people “need to understand that sports is not the most important thing in life.” Rapinoe explains that there is regulation at the highest levels of sports, including at the college level, at the Olympics and in professional sports. “It’s not like it’s a free-for-all where everyone’s just doing whatever,” she said.
“[S]o much of this trans inclusion argument has been put through the extremely tiny lens of elite sports,” Rapinoe said. She continued, “[w]e’re talking about kids. We’re talking about people’s lives. We’re talking about the entire state government coming down on one child in some states, three children in some states. They are committing suicide, because they are being told that they’re gross and different and evil and sinful and they can’t play sports with their friends that they grew up with.”
She encouraged everyone “who is afraid someone’s going to have an unfair advantage over their kid to really take a step back and think what are we actually talking about here.” Then she said, “I’m sorry, your kid’s high school volleyball team just isn’t that important. It’s not more important than any one kid’s life.”
In her viewpoint, every child should get to play the sport they want to play, with the gender they identify with. She said if there comes a point where we realize that all the scholarships are going to trans girls, or they are winning all the medals, she “has confidence that we can figure it out.”
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Megan Rapinoe got to the elite level in her sport not having to compete with male bodies who identify as women. So all of this is easy for her to say. For someone who has been such an advocate for women’s sports, what she is saying makes no sense. If the floodgates are opened, there will come a time when girls don’t want to play sports anymore, because they are always losing to trans girls. Can you see any possibility that this won’t happen?
