More Worry Over the Locker Room Than the Game

Every person deserves respect, dignity, and equal opportunity.The Supreme Court ruled this week that states can ban transgender athletes from competing in girls' and women's sports. Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud: the number of kids actually affected by this is tiny, and the outrage machine is enormous.

The NCAA's own president told Congress under oath there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes out of 510,000 total NCAA athletes. Two thousandths of one percent. Conservatives have built an entire political industry around a problem that barely exists, because it's an easier fight than the ones that actually matter.

Representative Niska posted this week that "girls' sports should be for girls," and that Minnesota should be next to pass a ban. He's framing it as common sense he's been saying "from the beginning." I want to look at what he's actually asking the legislature to spend its time on.

I understand wanting real conversations about fairness in women's sports. Those conversations deserve to happen. What they don't deserve is a legislator racing to introduce a bill about ten kids while ignoring everything else girls in sports actually face.

Because if this were really about protecting girls, the priorities would look nothing like this. A UNESCO study found 21% of female athletes experience child sexual abuse at some point in their sport careers. Nearly a third report being punished through excessive training. An Indianapolis Star investigation found at least 368 gymnasts alleged sexual abuse by coaches and gym staff over twenty years, and USA Gymnastics let known predators quietly move from gym to gym instead of stopping them. Meanwhile, women have been pulled out of Olympic competition and subjected to invasive testing, not because they're transgender, but because their natural bodies didn't fit someone's idea of what a woman should look like. That's the same impulse behind this ruling: policing women's bodies and calling it protection.

Representative Niska hasn't introduced a bill on any of that. We haven't talked about how underfunded girls' sports are compared to boys'. But banning a handful of kids from playing on a team, that got a press release the same day the ruling came down.

Call it what it actually is. Not protection. Discrimination against people you don't understand, dressed up as concern for people you've never bothered to fight for. Representative Niska is more worried about who’s in the locker room than giving every girl the chance to play the game in the first place. 

This isn't happening in a vacuum, either. It's coming from a national party whose leader has been publicly accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, and who was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women without their consent. When the top of your party treats women's bodies as something to grab first and explain later, don't lecture the rest of us about protecting them. Representative Niska is welcome to tell voters in 31A whether he agrees with that behavior or not. So far he hasn't. So much for state leadership.

I'll say plainly what a lot of politicians won't: we absolutely can protect transgender kids' dignity and take fairness in girls' sports seriously at the same time. That takes real guidelines, built with coaches, athletes, and parents in the room, not a press release timed to a Supreme Court ruling. That's the kind of leadership I'll bring to St. Paul. Solve the actual problem in front of you. Don't go looking for an easy fight because the hard ones are, well, hard.

Brian Walker