Powell: Polite society mustn't discuss transgender players in sports

By CHRIS POWELL

Polite society isn't supposed to talk about whether the women's national professional basketball league, the WNBA, should admit transgender players -- that is, men who "identify" as women.

A few weeks ago a WNBA player, Sophie Cunningham, calmly expressed opposition to letting males participate in women's sports. While there was nothing hateful about what she said, she was denounced around the country and within the league itself.

Many people who seemed to know that transgenderism in sports is crazy, or who seemed to know at least that most people consider it crazy, argued that it isn't worth discussing because the WNBA's labor contract restricts participation to women. But the contract doesn't define "woman." Can biological men become women just through thoughts and feelings?

That's the heart of the issue -- an issue U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson purported to be stumped by during her Senate confirmation hearing in 2022. Jackson testified that she couldn't say what a woman is because she's "not a biologist," even as tens of millions of Americans who are neither biologists nor judicial nominees can give an adequate answer.

Prominent among those who want to avoid discussing the substance here is the University of Connecticut's women's basketball coach, Geno Auriemma. In a recent interview he lamented that the issue distracts from the achievements of WNBA players, and he dismissed it as a mere "hypothetical."

But it is far more than hypothetical.

For starters, two former players in the National Basketball Association -- the men's league -- are pranking the WNBA by declaring themselves transgender and candidates for the women's league's draft. They may figure that with their stronger frames they could demolish female competitors.

The prank may prompt the WNBA to take courses in biology and political correctness. Even if the league peremptorily dismisses the pranksters, it will be making a decision, if an incomplete one.

And surely Auriemma is aware of Connecticut's own recent controversy over transgenderism in high school girls track -- the victories in 2018 of two transgender runners. A federal lawsuit brought by the girls who otherwise might have won is challenging the policy of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference to allow biological males to compete as girls.

Always politically correct, state Attorney General William Tong has put state government on the side of the transgender athletes. After all, it is said, there are only a few problems like this in Connecticut high schools, only a few girls were deprived of championships by biological males, and those girls are somebody else's daughters whose rights to equal protection of the law may be sacrificed to the fashionable belief that biology and gender are mere fictions.

The audiences of high school track events may be too small to worry about politically. But the more that transgenderism in sports is indulged, the more there will be, and there are already many transgender issues in bathrooms and prisons around the country.

No one involved in this issue, especially not in Connecticut, a socially libertarian state, is attacking transgender people. They have the same rights as everyone else. But biological and gender differences are real, males have physical advantages over females, and girls and women will not have equal opportunity in sports if they don't have their own leagues or divisions. That's why federal law was enacted to require as much.

The transgender issue is narrow: gender separation in sports and gender privacy and safety in bathrooms and prisons. Transgender athletes can compete in sports with their biological gender.

Most people know as much even as they don't want to risk being called names. But politically the issue may not be settled sensibly in Connecticut until a transgender player applies for the UConn women's basketball team or joins one of UConn's rivals. Then the issue will make national television and games will hinge on it. Women's basketball is big in Connecticut and gaining adherents nationally, and transgender players will make it ridiculous.

If that is what is required to restore sense and fairness, may it happen soon.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. His other columns are here.(CPowell@cox.net)