Washington drafted the nation's first male inclusion policy back in 2007. Why?

Aidan Key: "I'm not sure of the impetus. There were very few out trans kids at the time."

“In partnership with Aidan Key, Director of Gender Diversity, the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA) was the first state activities association to enact successful policy and practices regarding the equitable inclusion of K-12 transgender students in sports and other activities. WIAA’s groundbreaking policy and its subsequent inclusion in the official WIAA handbook in 2007, has served as a successful model for the rest of the nation. Building on over a decade of implementation and ongoing learning, the WIAA assessed and improved its Gender Identity Participation philosophy and eligibility rules in 2019. The refinement of policy, with the acknowledgment of the needed ongoing learning, is a process to which Gender Diversity and WIAA are strongly committed in order to meet the needs of all student athletes. WIAA continues to stand as one of 16 state activities associations with gender-inclusive policies that facilitate the full participation of trans, nonbinary and other gender diverse students in school athletics and activities.”

This glowing admission of the WIAA’s pioneering efforts at violating girls’ rights to fair, safe sport, opportunities, privacy, and dignity kick off the Gender Diverse Youth Sport Inclusivity Toolkit, also put together by Aidan Key’s organization, Gender Diversity.

2007. Think about that. Eighteen years ago. In those innocent days, girls’ sports were for females, boys’ sports for males. There were no kids asking to play on the opposite sex team. The NCAA’s trans eligibility policy was still three years in the offing. Only the International Olympic Committee had, at that time, seen fit to create a pathway for men to compete in women’s sports, and this was enacted in the shadows, in direct conflict with every shred of scientific and human rights evidence. The Guardian obtained a letter written in 2003 by Dr. Richard Budgett, then with the British Olympic Association, saying: “The effect of allowing male transsexuals to compete as women would be to make competition unfair and potentially dangerous in some sports and would undermine women’s sports.” Shamefully, the IOC chose to do just that, setting a precedent for giving away women’s right to their own sports. This was not driven by a groundswell of support from the public for allowing men in women’s sports. Transsexual men by the hundreds were not clamoring to compete as women. No, the impetus for the IOC’s policy came top down, from deep-pocketed, anonymous sources willing to enrich key IOC members’ Swiss bank accounts to push an agenda that is anti-woman, anti-reality, anti-sport, anti-science, and for these reasons profoundly unpopular with the public. If they were aware of it. Which the IOC made sure did not happen.

Similarly in 2007, the WIAA went looking for a solution to a problem that didn’t exist, using the IOC’s model—strange top-down impetus, not at all a response to a grassroots publicly supported movement, rushed through in one day with as little public input as possible. They enlisted the help of Aidan Key, who in her late teens came out as a butch lesbian and later as trans, but doesn’t call herself a trans man—”It’s not about becoming a man. I still struggle to relate to men.” Key may or may not have had a Bachelor’s degree in 2007, had no expertise in policymaking, sport administration, or sport science. Her only expertise at that time came from navigating her own gender journey and organizing some public discussions in Seattle around transgender topics.

Why did WIAA seek to establish a trans inclusion policy way back in 2007? Who was asking for it? Who was involved in the policymaking process? What was the discussion? Clearly Key was the key to these questions. I contacted Key through her website, Gender Diversity, and was honestly quite surprised to get a positive response, even though I indicated I was writing for The Female Category, which is a nonstarter for many trans-inclusive advocates. Key is a lovely person to talk with, very chatty, such that many of my questions went unanswered even after an hour-and-a-half Zoom call. It was a feat of extraordinary restraint that I did not challenge almost everything Key said in the interest of letting her talk. And talk she did. It was disconcerting how she could speak in mellifluous, vague ways with a soft smile in her voice that I can imagine would win over any WIAA board member who was not that knowledgeable about science and didn’t want to appear hateful or bigoted. But behind the soft words, Key redefined girl to include boy—the most disrespectful, misogynistic, rights-stripping twist of language imaginable. The dissonance was deeply disconcerting.

Here’s a taste of Key’s speaking style, an excerpt from a very long interview with Key on the queer history site Outwords:

Essentially, that began my very, very significant learning journey about how do we create an environment in schools that has not been created before. With respect to gender? Well, on one hand, we have a lot of the tools because we've worked at efforts at inclusivity in other areas. When I was a kid, there were efforts meant to more racially integrate schools. Some of those efforts worked very well, some did not work so well. What can we learn from that? And how many of the tools that we have would be applicable in this way? And then begging the question over and over and over, why do we separate by gender? And not as a rhetorical question, but as an exploratory question. We divide by gender for very good reasons. Okay, what are those reasons? Let's name them. What are our objectives and do we accomplish those when we divide by gender? Well, we accomplish them to a degree. Okay, are there other ways we can accomplish those same objectives? Well, yeah, we could do this or Yeah, we could do that. But if the solution isn't obvious, then gender is a handy divider that does provide some benefit, but also excludes some people. Also, there are boys who might thrive better in an environment that is optimized for girls. There are girls who would love to step into some of those boy environments…

…to bar them from sports participation and other activities. It's just painful out there. The reason I mentioned all of that is because what we need extends so far beyond facts. We need somebody to walk us through, to actually help hold our hand while we move through our fear and distress and confusion, our anger. Why should we make all this change for just a small percentage of people? I don't understand that. That doesn't make sense. Well, actually it does, and can. You make changes to be more inclusive. It benefits everyone.

Lots of words to tell tired lies and half-truths—conflating sex differences with racism, using gender instead of the factually correct term sex, dismissing the “good reasons for dividing by gender,” claiming kids with trans identities are “barred” from sports, the startling assertion that policy should not be based on facts, and finally, that male inclusion in female sports (which, in all those words, Key never articulates) “makes sense” and “benefits everyone” without explaining how. In the same way a boy is a girl if he says so, allowing boys in girls’ sports makes sense because Key said so.

We agreed to continue our conversation in which I hoped to ask more pointed questions rather than just listen to Key’s view of things, but when I contacted her again, I got no response. So this then is the flip side of my previous post in which a Washington female athlete and her mother talk about the fruits of Aidan Key’s “very successful policy.” This is how the WIAA’s trans inclusion policy, the very first in the U.S., came to be. It’s edited for length.

The Female Category: How did your collaboration with the WIAA in 2007 come about? Were there instances of trans kids to which they were responding? Who was asking for this policy?

Aidan Key: The WIAA awas asking for it. I’m not sure of the impetus. From where I was sitting, there were very few out trans kids at the time. They [the WIAA] were trying to be proactive. They brought together a lot of people: attorneys from the ACLU and the NCLR [National Center for Lesbian Rights which has now been renamed the National Center for LGBTQ Rights]. I was the community member, people from the Seattle public schools, the athletic director from Denver—the issue was coming up in Denver. They hired a moderator. They wanted to come up with something by the end of day. The only policy in existence, the IOC policy, was not applicable to kids [males were required to have an orchiectomy]. In the discussion we felt imposing the policies for college athletes [the NCAA had no policy in 2007] or for adult trans athletes wouldn’t work for kids. Just getting a diagnosis of gender dysphoria—the number of mental health professionals working with children was miniscule. Asking parents to track down one of three people in the entire state and pay out of pocket, that didn’t seem workable.

The Female Category: I guess I still don’t know why an inclusion policy that allowed boys to identify into girls’ sports was needed, just on the off chance that a boy would some day identify as a girl and want to compete in girls’ sports?

Aidan Key: This policy was not drafted with trans girls in mind; it was the experience of trans athletes, period. But there is harder pushback for trans girls to participate. When a trans girl is forced to be with the boys, they will reject her. Tomboys who play with boys, when they get to puberty, the boys ice them out. It’s a society problem. Trans athletes are not the threat they’re being held up as. They’re a representation of a threat to ensure trans people stay in their place. It’s an attempt to establish sex as only the only determinant of advantage.

The Female Category: Well I don’t think tomboys are iced out. After puberty I think teenage boys understand the sex difference in ability, and girls do too. Girls playing in boys’ high school hockey just get walloped is all. These sex differences are real, and they matter in sports.

The Female Category: Male and female categories are sex-based categories. They’re 100% inclusive of every child, regardless of identity. Every kid has a sex and they know what it is, particularly if they identify as the opposite sex. Was it ever posited that kids should just continue to participate in their sex category?

Aidan Key: I couldn’t believe the thinking, how new this conversation was. The two pairs of attorneys brought up all kinds of things. The ACLU even put forward using Body Mass Index, but determined that only testing trans kids would be discriminatory. We were attempting to address what already existed in upper level sports, but none of us knew what questions or situations would come up at the K-12 level. I listened to everyone and then said I didn’t think these things were going to work. I thought trans kids should have a way to participate because participation at that level is so important. We didn’t know how it would go or what questions would come up but I thought we should step in and try to be inclusive. We could have a review team in place to monitor how it’s going. The WIAA stepped in and said let’s go that route, provide a way for kids to participate in alignment with their gender identity.

The Female Category: Six-year-olds playing t-ball, yes, that’s about participation. But all high school sports are competitive. Kids are getting scouted for college teams, possibly getting scholarships. If you’re in high school and you just want to run, you can do that on your own or enter a 5K or whatever, but if you’re on the track team, it’s competitive. Was there any discussion about physiological sex differences between boys and girls?

Aidan Key: The competition factor cannot be dismissed. But for trans girls it’s really harsh. They’re assaulted, bullied, there’s a higher likelihood of violence if they compete against boys. And there’s a lot of variables with children in sports, varying abilities.

The Female Category: There’s mountains of evidence, 70-some years of school fitness testing data to begin with, that shows consistently that boys are in general bigger, stronger and faster than girls. That’s before puberty, and only becomes more so after.

Aidan Key: Of course there are physiological differences, some advantage is a reality. I will never argue that gender differences don’t exist, but puberty is going to change some things. Take the example of a student who’s had early intervention [no minors had puberty blockers or cross sex hormones in 2007]. They did not have those unwanted physical changes. Identical humans do not have the same experience. Are we going to bar the ones who got intervention later?

The Female Category: In these discussions about inclusion of boys in girls’ sports, everyone focuses on the boys, as if they’re the stakeholders. No. It’s girls. Girls are the stakeholders. What was the discussion around girls’ rights in this one-day policymaking session?

Aidan Key: The WIAA policy set up a review committee if problems came up. I said back in 2007, one of these day a brave trans girl is gonna win something and you are gonna hear about it. You better be ready for that. One athlete won a race. In nearly 20 years. Okay. I think that’s pretty good, I think this is a completely successful implementation. Examination of this successful policy shows it continues to work very well. One student wins a race, a benchmark is set. If I’m a coach, I don’t say to my team you have no chance of beating that. I tell cis girls I think you can beat this. If I tell them they can prevail, they will. I remember when the 4-minute mile was broken; now lots of people do it [lots of boys/men do; no women have broken the 4-minute mile]. I think about watching the WNBA and the stunning display of athleticism compared to when I played basketball in high school. I celebrate that progression. I don’t know if you heard about a girl in Connecticut who sued the state because she’d lost to a trans girl. Soon after that, she upped her game and beat that athlete. There are fears of dominance—if that shows up, then let’s take a look at it. I heard about a trans girl who was afraid to use the girls’ locker room and the other girls invited her [to use the locker room]. She’d fought for her right to participate—who wouldn’t want someone like that on their team? Some girls could beat her and sometimes they lost but it speaks to a bigger issue than whether one in 200,000 athletes win a race. That is not an issue. That is not a threat. Does the number of trans women in sport indicate they’re overtaking women’s sports? If that situation were to arise, I think we should look at it. I think the WIAA policy is a successful effort that the state has done to try to set the stage for further discussion and meanwhile, kids get to participate.

The Female Category: In 2007, how did you know this policy would be fair, safe and ensure privacy, dignity and opportunity for girls in sport?

Aidan Key: For everyone in the room, that piece itself would have been top priority. The types of questions we explored, how would they play out? We don’t know. How do you know until you step into it? We said, let’s put something in place and be very attentive. The WIAA has done very well in looking at the stats. Trans girls specifically are indistinguishable.

[After saying I had a lot more questions and that we should talk again]

Aidan Key: The needs of women is where we align. Our passion has the same foundation.

That was a sweet-sounding end to our conversation. But it occurred to me that when Key talked about the “needs of women” she included men. Which, like all things gender ideology, turns meaning inside out. The needs of women are to be recognized as a distinct sex—single-sex sports, locker rooms, opportunities. Key advocated in 2007 and continues to advocate for the needs of a tiny population of men to be prioritized over all women. We are not aligned.

Just a few statements that hit a nerve like a dentist’s drill:

That the WIAA drafted this policy in one day. The heck?! More than anything, this speaks to a group that wanted to rush through a spectacularly unpopular, quite possibly illegal policy as quickly and quietly as possible. That Key proudly recalled the timeline seems to point to utter misunderstanding of how policy, good policy, is made. Also, the lack of people with scientific expertise, lack of women’s rights advocates, and heavy preponderance of lawyers and trans advocates is the same recipe that resulted in the disastrous and very influential IOC and NCAA gutting of women’s sports.

That the reason all efforts were directed at forcing girls to accept boys in their sports was that they could be counted on not to assault or bully them. Bottom line: girls are more easily bullied into being “kind.” Obviously, they all understood male violence and intolerance is a problem, one they chose not to tackle. Easier to take girls’ rights away and shame them into compliance. So they did.

Admitting that sex differences exist! The unsaid addendum to that admission is that girls should simply accept unfairness. Key used the same absurd waffling that there’s variation among girls’ performance, some kids have private coaches, etc etc. Everyone in that room implicitly understood male advantage exists, and chose to ignore it.

And the most eye-wateringly misogynistic statement from this loving, kind person—having boys in girls sports will urge them to up their game. Girls just need to try harder. Key conveniently forgot the reason for girls’ sports—to celebrate female excellence, not male mediocrity.

Some questions I would have asked had we had a follow up:

• What made you think that trans kids were not included in sports? You were included on girls’ teams in high school as most women with trans identities still are.

• In 2007, the term “sex” in Title IX was understood to mean biological sex. Explain how including boys in girls’ sports was not a violation of their right to single-sex sports

• In 2007, the only science available, and this was from the IOC, was that inclusion of “transsexuals” in women’s sports would be unfair, unsafe, and undermine women’s sports. What scientific evidence did you use to inform a policy that allows unfairness, lack of safety and integrity in women’s sports?

• You admit sex differences between males and females—on what basis could you say this policy is fair and safe for girls?

• You have no idea how many boys there are in Washington in girls’ sports, and one boy has won lots of races and two state championships. If this is the hallmark of a successful program, what circumstances would make you think the program was not successful?

• Let’s imagine if, back in 2007, the WIAA had decided to put the same firehose of resources, time, and effort into educating kids and the public about the reality of sex differences in sport, specifically targeting boys’ sports—athletic directors, coaches, athletes—with education about gender differences and tolerance of gender nonconforming boys. What if that had been backed up with financial accountability—if male sports did not make room for gender nonconforming boys, if there was bullying or harassment, there would be financial consequences. Funding would be cut. Girls’ sports already makes room for girls, however they identify. As Key understood, as all high school sports administrators know, this is a male problem. Boys need to sort it out. Imagine, if this policy had been in place, and after 18 years, a boy with a trans identity won a state championship in boys’ track. Can you even imagine anything better for boys’ sports, better for that boy, better for girls’ sports that was indeed just for girls, better for the trans community? No controversy. No unfairness. No rights violations. Everyone participates. This would be the most massive win-win imaginable. This would be a successful policy.