Transgender youth in sports have recently come under extreme scrutiny from politicians in every state, including Mississippi. In March 2021, Gov. Tate Reeves signed the Mississippi Fairness Act, which stated that athletes attending primary or secondary schools in Mississippi may only participate on sports teams in accordance with their biological sex. The reason for this bill, he said, was “to ensure that young girls in Mississippi have a fair playing field in public sports.”
Despite not being able to name a single case in which a transgender athlete has had an unfair advantage in a sports game, policymakers across the nation have continuously introduced and passed anti-trans bills. The Williams Institute reports that Mississippi is home to roughly 2,400 transgender youth between the ages of 13 and17, who comprise about 1.2% of the state’s youth population.
Of this 1.2%, an even smaller percentage participate in sports. Bills such as the Mississippi Fairness Act demonize transgender people and perpetuate their societal stigma. Defenders of such bills often say that transgender people will overtake women’s sports and steal their opportunities. However, to completely disregard someone’s identity for a hypothetical problem proves that these defenders do not care about the well-being of trans people and only seek to further isolate them.
So, the question is, where do we go from here? How do we allow transgender athletes to continue to play sports in accordance with their identities but still “level the playing field?”
One method involves creating a third category for trans athletes. This avenue would rid all “cheating” accusations, but this solution disregards individuals’ chosen identities and fails to consider trans people who are at various stages of their transitions. Putting someone who has been on hormones for many years against someone who has been on them for a week would be technically unfair, lawmakers suggest, and is exactly the situation that they are trying to avoid.
If such a solution were implemented, trans athletes also may be limited in their opportunities to play sports, especially at local levels, as the population of trans high school athletes is sparse.
This path discriminates