Sorting Out Trans Participation in Women's Sports Requires Empathy

Sorting out trans participation in women's sports should start with empathy. The latest executive order is presented with cruelty.

There is a reverse bigotry in the accusation that those who object to transgenders in girls' high school sports or misuse pronouns are handmaidens or fascists who don't toe the correct intellectual line. But there is a cavernous cruelty, and the distinct smell of autocratic sauerbraten, in the Trump administration's targeting -- no, terrorizing -- of athletes who represent just 0.6 percent of the American population.

Recently, NCAA President Charlie Baker testified that there are fewer than 10 transgender athletes out of 530,000 in college athletics. But with his latest executive order, the commander in chief makes it clear he wants all six or eight of them under his Brioni heel, and Baker appears ready to comply. Trump also wants to criminalize the visas of trans Olympians.

How you do something matters as much as what you do. Trump doesn't just want transgenders out of track meets and swimming pools; his latest executive order is calculated to inflict maximal fear and public humiliation on them. He directs federal officials to launch investigations into trans women who may apply for visas to "fraudulently" come to the United States to compete in women's sports, including the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and deny them entry. He frames his latest order as part of a "war" to "reclaim our culture and our laws."

Now, if a foreign trans woman's visa can be called "fraudulent," what does that make a trans American's passport?

Plenty of citizens reasonably object to transgenders in women's sports, or treatments for gender dysphoria in the young, or pronoun policing, but they manage to do so with civility and respect for fellow souls. No one more outspokenly defends women's sports than Martina Navratilova, but she also steadfastly defends human rights and expresses affection and understanding for the pioneering trans player Rene Richards, her friend and former coach.

Trump's order and his language in presenting it seem calculated to provoke hostility and misunderstanding, and they're liable to poke collateral holes in the civil rights of all of us. Which is quite possibly the point: to dragoon good people into a dark place they never intended to go.

"These people are sick. They are deranged," he told a North Carolina crowd. He has attacked "transgender insanity." In February 2024, he promised to "take back our education system from the communists and the freaks that are destroying it." At a rally just before Christmas, he vowed to stop "transgender lunacy."

Why is Trump so hell-bent on destroying the basic peace of trans people, not just stamping them out of competition? Why is he so focused on putting half a percent in distress? Maybe to soften us to his incursions. For your sake as well as mine, it's important to ask: Would we tolerate the state treating a straight white American man this way?

In 1935, the state of Oklahoma wanted to sterilize criminals who demonstrated "moral turpitude." An inmate named Jack Skinner, jailed for stealing chickens and armed robbery, sued. His case made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it violated the equal protection clause. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in the opinion, "There is no redemption for the individual whom the law touches ... He is forever deprived of a basic liberty."

Beware: What if the law touched you in these ways? Trump has ordered penalties against teachers who may help kids "socially transition." He has basically gutted trans patient privacy in Health and Human Services and made them targets by mandating "whistleblower" protections. Until a judge stopped him, he proposed sending trans women to men's prisons. In an order directed at the military, he didn't just bar service, he swerved out of his way to call transgenderism a "falsehood" that is fundamentally incompatible with "honor." And now he wants to declare visas fraudulent if he doesn't like their self-description.

It is unnerving to see the state put a hand on trans athletes this way. Again, it's not the "what" but the "how." White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the new executive order merely an effort "to restore common sense to our country." But these orders far exceed common sense. They're brutishly written, specifying targets for persecution, and framing people as dishonorable and thus undeserving of empathy.

Hannah Arendt observed, "The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism."

Whatever you think about trans athletes, surely the subject, in which so much science remains undetermined, calls for empathy. These executive orders, as they're written, are barbarism.