20 Reader Views on Transgender People in Competitive Sports
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Every Friday, he publishes some thoughtful replies.
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After Lia Thomas became the first transgender athlete to win an NCAA swimming title, intensifying the ongoing debate about transgender athletes at all levels of sports, I asked readers, “What do you think about this, and why? What are you unsure about? If you could ask one question of someone who doesn’t share your position to better understand theirs, what would it be?” Thomas herself has spoken about these matters in interviews, including a recent one with Sports Illustrated, where she says, “I just want to show trans kids and younger trans athletes that they’re not alone. They don’t have to choose between who they are and the sport they love.”
In excerpting your emails, I inevitably ran into language choices that could be the subjects of their own debates. For example, some correspondents use the term biological male, though many transgender people prefer assigned male at birth. Other observers even object to calling Lia Thomas a woman and using she/her pronouns, which is how I and others believe we should refer to her. So that readers get an accurate understanding of one another’s perspectives, I’ve preserved your word choices rather than imposing any consistent style, so be aware that there are contested terms throughout. (Note: No one who explicitly identified themselves as transgender replied to my question.) As ever, I have made cuts for length, clarity, and constructiveness.
We begin with Jonathan S., who urges us to enter into this controversial subject with a background question in mind: Why is it that we segregate sports by sex and/or gender in the first place?
He writes:
We cannot cogently answer the question of how trans persons fit into our
