Affirming a lie is not kind

Kids are the foot soldiers of gender ideology, while adults stay behind the lines

So, this happened last spring. A student at the school where I assistant coached middle school track signed up for the boys’ 400 meter race. I did not know this student well, had not in fact ever spoken with her. I’ll use she/her pronouns because her name was on the girls’ roster and she had never told me differently. It is this school’s policy to let students participate in sports in alignment with their gender identity, and in middle school track, athletes signed themselves up for whatever events they wanted to do, including boys’ or girls’ sections of those events. There were four or five heats of the boys’ 400 and she was in the last one, watching with increasing anxiety as the boys tore around the track. As she was about to step to the start line, she asked me almost desperately if she could switch to the girls’ 400 but those races had already been run. I told her to do her best, and she did, but was still last by a wide margin, not only in her heat but in all the boys’ heats combined. Her time would have placed her squarely in the middle of the girls’ cohort. I did not see her after the race nor, in fact, ever after that. She quit track.

Clearly a 12-year-old would not on her own formulate the radical idea that she could completely dissociate from her body and become the opposite sex. There was, no doubt, plenty of information on transgenderism gleaned from peers and the internet, but to act on that thought, to sign up for the boys’ race, took some serious “affirmation” by trusted adults. This child was lied to. Adults know, should know, that sex matters in sports, but this child was told she could run with her gender identity. That her sexed body did not matter. She could see the truth, that she was going to be grossly overmatched in the boys’ race, and she paid the price for an adult’s lie—it’s humiliating to lose by a long way. Instead of questioning what adults and peers said about gender identity, she internalized that she sucked at track. How did this student benefit from being affirmed in something that is not true?

Recently I saw this posted on ICONS. The story is strikingly similar. A mother tells the story to a meeting of the California Interscholastic Federation of her daughter who had been a top athlete in middle school but in 9th grade declared she was transgender, a boy, along with some of her friends. She quit girls’ sports and went out for boys’ wrestling. On the day of the first scrimmage, the girl became “terrified” when it was obvious she would be seriously overmatched by the boys in her weight class. On that day, she quit sports completely. Her mother said, “My daughter, a talented athlete, was lied to by her teachers, by her school counselors, her coaches, and her athletic director. She was told she could become a boy if she was unhappy with her girl body.”

Telling kids that sex does not matter and that they can do sports according to their gender identity doesn’t end well. For the child. While girls who identify as boys suffer a huge sports disadvantage on the boys’ team due to their sex, female-identifying boys enjoy a big bump in rankings, which is not fair to girls on the team, and for which the boy is blamed. The children are the ones on the ground, visible to all. The adults who told them they could get out there and do their thing as the opposite sex remain anonymous.

The most recent example is New Hampshire high school sophomore Maelle Jacques, a boy who competes in high jump on the Kearsarge High School girls’ team. Jacques has racked up a number of wins this indoor season and is expected to win the NHIAA indoor track championship. The high jumper is the only athlete in the girls’ competition to have cleared five feet, while more than a dozen in the boys’ competition have bettered that height.

Jacques is paying the price for adults’ lies. He’s been told he can compete with his gender identity, that his sex doesn’t matter, and if anyone doesn’t accept him as female or calls out the unfairness, that’s proof that people hate him because he’s trans. Instead of supporting this child with the truth, he’s been set up as cannon fodder by adults who are themselves out of sight, behind the scenes, unwilling to look beyond the dogma of the trans movement.

Educating oneself about sex differences in sports is not difficult; coaches and athletic directors should already know this. For example, this research from the doctoral dissertation of Gabe Higerd on high jump results by sex:

Note that the average height of 1.65 meters achieved by boys bettered about 90% of girls’ jumps. SEX MATTERS IN SPORTS. That’s regardless of whether you’re talking about state champions or the least talented athlete on the team. (I hear this all the time—well, this boy is so untalented, it’s fair for him to be on the girls’ team. Nope. If that boy had been born a girl she would have been 10%-12% weaker and slower even than her male counterpart. Apples to apples. Untalented girls deserve fair sport too. I oughta know : ) )

I digress. It’s on the adults in a child’s life to 1) know the truth about sex and gender as it relates to sports, and 2) that what they’re promising gender-questioning kids can be delivered. Re: truth. Firsthand is best. If you’re a parent or advisor who hasn’t done competitive sports, start. Do what you’re telling your child they can do. You could join a training group or look up an online training plan for a 5K. Then run a 5K. In the results, notice where you place in your sex category. And where your time places you in the opposite sex category. What does this tell you about sex-based differences in running performance? Did you place higher in the men’s or women’s category?

Look at men’s and women’s track and field current world records and world records over time. Men’s records are faster, farther, in every event over time. Then there is a study published in BMJ Open Sports and Exercise Medicine that looked at thousands of runners who identified as nonbinary. The study found that sex (all of those people had a sex!) differences in sports performance remained even though the runner identified as nonbinary. Thus gender identity does not affect sports performance; sex does. For example, a boy’s sports performance will not change if he begins to identify as a girl. Males as a class perform better than females as a class, and the difference in performance between the sexes is greater than within each sex. This is another false argument I hear frequently, that the variation in performance is so great within the female category, it’s arbitrary to exclude males. Not true. Sex is the definitive dividing line in sports performance (see the high jump chart above). That was the reason for the female category to begin with. Finally, just published, sport scientists Greg Brown’s study on pre-pubescent children shows that boys have performance advantages over girls well before puberty.

So, as to #1, sex and gender identity are two different things. Sexed bodies affect sports performance; gender identity does not. Given what we know about sex differences in sports, it’s untruthful at best, a betrayal at worst to tell a child they can be both equally competitive and fair in the opposite sex category.

After you’ve done due diligence on #1, then #2 will be easier. Parents, gender specialists, counselors, teachers, etc are quick to affirm a child’s gender identity but seem to forget that the child has to live in a society. The idea of “just living your life as your authentic self” fails to take into account that no person (see that gender neutral thing I did?) is an island. Did the parents of the New Hampshire high jumper know that boys jump at least 15% higher than girls? Did they consider how girls who had to face this unfairness might feel? And what position this would put their child in? What did they tell their child about those who don’t subscribe to gender ideology (the idea that some people have a gender identity that doesn’t match their sex)?

Ignoring sex-based differences in sport performance negatively impacts girls, regardless of how they identify or don’t identify. It’s a lie to allow female-identifying males into girls’ sports and tell athletes this is fair; it’s a lie to tell girls who identify as nonbinary or male they can compete at the same level with boys.

Telling kids the truth about sex and gender identity is always the best policy. But as always, telling the truth may take some courage. Another uncomfortable truth.