For the second straight year, a small group of transgender athletes dominated their respective events at the girls track and field state championships in Connecticut. Apparently, the second time through the ringer for some fellow competitors was too much, with parents of those athletes now stepping forward to try to ban those transgender athletes from competing as females.
As reported by the Hartford Courant, the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference allows athletes to compete as members of the gender with which they identify. That means that transgender teenagers can compete alongside cisgender opponents, creating what some feel is an uneven playing field.
Supporters of two petitions to eliminate the transgender regulations claim that their efforts arent aimed at the individual athletes who will be most directly impacted by the regulations. Still, its impossible to overlook the success of Andraya Yearwood, who first spoke about her transition to being a transgender female with the Courant a year ago. In the time since then, Yearwood has captured back-to-back 100-meter State Open titles as a freshman and sophomore. After Yearwood broke out as a freshman she inspired multiple other transgender entrants, according to the Courant.
While parents of opposing runners may deny their petitions have anything to do with the chosen gender identity of the teens in question, its hard to debate the impact such rules and regulations could have on transgender athletes themselves.
A transgender girl is a girl and ought to be treated like a girl, Erin Buzuvis, the law professor who is the director of the Center of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Western New England College, told the Courant. If you start to put limitations or exclusions on their participation, not only do you run the risk of violating state anti-discrimination law but also you are disregarding and disrespecting a population of students based on a core aspect of their identity, which is something that schools should not be in the practice of doing. I understand that it appears to many people as an inequitable playing field, but they dont have any context or knowledge about how that athletes life would be if she werent transgender. And it would be possible shed be beating their daughters if she was cisgender (someone who identifies with their birth sex).
This law professor is an idiot, and I hope Connecticut can finally get the ball rolling to end this lunacy of boys playing in girls sports in our country. ---
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