Just Let Trans Girls Play Sports

More than half of states in the United States have banned transgender women and girls from female sports, including at the middle and high school age. Katelyn Burns, columnist for MSNBC and Xtra Magazine and co-host of the podcast Cancel Me Daddy, sits down with us to talk about a new Title IX rule proposed by the Biden administration and what it covers—and doesn’t cover—when it comes to the protection of trans students. 

Around the US, states have been increasingly introducing and passing legislation that singles out transgender women and girls and prevents them from playing on sports teams. In Kentucky, for example, the only 11-year-old trans girl playing a school sport in the entire state helped to start a girl’s field hockey team at her school; the state’s ban on trans athletes now singularly impacts her, preventing her completely from playing on the team that she created.

During the Obama administration, Title IX for the very first time included guidance on transgender students, which stated that educational and recreational opportunities (including sports) cannot be denied to transgender students that would be given to cisgender students. Guidance under the Trump administration was revised to be more unhelpful and discriminatory. Now, the Biden administration has revised the guidelines; unlike the Obama-era guidelines, these guidelines do include exclusions for trans girls playing sports against cisgender girls. This guidance does make it more difficult for states to institute blanket sports bans, but still does not explicitly disavow discrimination against transgender students.

Links from this episode

Katelyn Burns on Twitter
Cancel Me Daddy on Twitter
Katelyn Burns on MSNBC
Katelyn Burns on Xtra Magazine
Katelyn Burns: The massive Republican push to ban trans athletes, explained
Katelyn Burns: The unfalsifiability of the anti-trans sports movement
Biden’s Hollow Trans Sports Policy Appeases The Right

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast where we explore all things reproductive health, rights and justice. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and I'll be helping you stay informed around issues like birth control, abortion, sex education and LGBTQ issues and much, much more-- giving you the tools you need to take action and fight back. Okay, let's dive in.

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Jennie: Welcome to this week's episode of rePROs Fight Back. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her

Jennie: Hi, rePROs. How's everybody doing? I'm your host Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So y'all, there was good news last week. What? I know, I'm like, good news. I mean, lots of bad things also happened, but like, we're just gonna focus on the good news because it's good. Uh, last week an FDA advisory committee voted unanimously to support a progestin-only birth control pill to be available over the counter. Y'all. This is huge. Its taken us years of advocacy to get to this point. Uh, it doesn't mean you can go to your local pharmacy right now and get the pill over the counter yet. Um, the FDA still has to decide to follow the committee's recommendation and approve it for over-the-counter use. So, like, not yet, we'll know, I think it sounds like maybe in July. So like exciting, good news. Hopefully soon you'll be able to walk into a local pharmacy and get this particular pill available over the counter. It would remove a real barrier to birth control access. And, you know, we should always have bodily autonomy and the ability to make decisions for our body. And this decision to make it available over the counter would really help in making bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom a reality for many. There's still, it's not final, but like, it is a huge step and it could mean a lot. So I'm really excited. And you know, it, it's not everything, it's not abortion access, but like it is a big step and it is a reason to be excited. So hopefully soon the FDA will decide that this birth control pill should be available over the counter and that is something to celebrate. Uh, last week the Senate also did something to celebrate, uh, Dr. Geeta Rao Gupta. She, uh, finally got her nomination approved to be the Ambassador at Large for Global Women's Issues at the State Department. It has been a long road and a long fight to get Geeta approved. So it is so exciting to see her finally get her ambassadorship, uh, for the Office of Global Women's Issues. And that is just very exciting and, um, looking forward to seeing what she does in this new position. Let's see, in personal news, I guess let's still keep it like fun and light. So I recently went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival and y'all, it brought me back to the days when I used to go to the Rock County 4H Fair and like, you know, would go and see all the animals and walk through the animal barns and go and get the fair food and ride the rides. I mean, this festival did not have rides. Not that I would've ridden them at this stage. I definitely… not my jam anymore, but it was so fun to go and see all of the sheep.

Jennie: And then there was like amazing yarn and other like, uh, knitting products and things. I didn't get any yarn, but I did get, um, a, a knitting bowl. So I'm really looking forward to using that and hopefully end, uh, cats deciding to chase balls of yarn. That will be a huge win for me. Uh, but the fun thing to talk about was we went to a, uh, a herding demonstration with border collies and y'all, it was fun to learn how they do it and how they train the dogs. But it quickly descended into absolute chaos when two of the sheep got out and just like took off. And then one of the border collies like took off to go do its job, right? To get the sheep and try and bring them back. And they were like not about to go back through the fence the same way they got out. So they've set the, um, the people decided they needed to open the gate so the border collie could bring them back in the gate. Well, because they opened the gate, the other two sheep took off and like took off down the midway. So then they had to send two more border collies after those sheep. And it was just utter chaos of like dogs and sheep and just like so many people on the midway. And then just to like cap it all off with like comedy of errors, there were, uh, two people in those like inflatable t-rex costumes, you know what I mean? Uh, walking down the midway and the sheep started following them and then you had, uh, the, uh, border collies chasing the sheep. It, it was just utter chaos. But it was really amazing cuz it was like a real demonstration of like how smart and good these, uh, border collies are at herding the sheep. They got all four back, even with just like the mass of humanity that they had to herd the sheep around. It was, it was really kind of amazing to see. Um, anyways, so that was long weekend. It was a lot of fun. I guess with that, let's turn to this week's episode. I'm really excited. I am having one of my favorite people on. I really love Katelyn Burns. She is a wonderful journalist. She's a contributor to MSNBC, but she also co-hosts an amazing podcast called Cancel Me Daddy, which I cannot recommend strongly enough. She does a lot of reporting particularly on trans issues and I just love getting a chance to talk to her. Uh, so I had her on this week to talk about the new Title IX proposed rule from the Biden administration and why there's some problems. Um, so let's get right to it. Let's get to my interview.

Jennie: Hi Katelyn. Thank you so much for being here.

Katelyn: Thanks for having me.

Jennie: I am so excited to have you here one, cause I always love having you on and someday, someday it will be because things are amazing and like everything's great.

Katelyn: Yeah, right. OK.

Jennie: That's my goal. It'll happen. I keep resisting and I'm like, something good will happen and I can have her on…

Katelyn: My running joke is nobody ever calls me about good news.

Jennie: I keep being like it's gonna happen. I'm gonna have good things to talk to you about. But again, like I talk about reproductive health and like trans rights and like, like there's just not a lot of good.

Katelyn: Yeah. It's tough going in those areas.

Jennie: Okay. Before I get like too carried away, cuz this has been my new thing is I get excited and forget. Would you like to take a second and introduce yourself?

Katelyn: Yeah, uh, my name's Katelyn Burns. I'm a columnist for MSNBC and Xtra Magazine and I'm also cohost of the podcast Cancel Me Daddy.

Jennie: Y'all, if you're not listening, you really should be because I love it and listen to it like the second it comes out, it makes me so happy.

Katelyn: It's been sort of an interesting journey that we've been on with that show. Cause it kinda started out as like my, and I just, you know, Oliver, we, we would make fun of the cancel culture discourse and I think that discourse itself has changed and it's, we've more evolved into a show about how people use the internet and I think that's really beautiful.

Jennie: Yeah, it's, y'all, it's really wonderful. I really enjoy it. They have fabulous guests and Katelyn and Oliver are both wonderful so definitely check it out. Okay. I guess I can't just sit here and talk about your amazing podcast. You've done a lot of great reporting on trans athletes and sports and, and maybe we should start there cause I think this is one of those issues where if you're not really involved in the discourse or know a lot about the issue, like just hearing the top line, you might be convinced that like there's a problem with, with trans, with uh, trans women playing women's sports, but like that's not the case. So let's just like unpack that a little bit.

Katelyn: Yeah. I wanna start by saying like I completely understand where the average person comes into with this. I want people to sort the assumptions that we have around athletics and gender and you know, if you just watch like, let's say a men's basketball game, a professional, a men's basketball game versus a professional women's basketball game, you will notice an athleticism difference. And cause most people don’t know a trans person, that's the beginning and end of their like knowledge of the situation. So what people imagine is like, um, “well what if LeBron James all of a sudden, you know, decided to be a woman and play in the WNBA and like, how unfair would that be?” And I'm over here like yes. Like that would be very unfair, ok. But what people don't understand is the effects that hormone replacement therapy have on a person's body. If you put LeBron James on like the same medication that I've been taking for the last seven years and made him do it for multiple years, he's not gonna be flying around the basketball court like he'll still be able to dunk cause he's 6’7. But you know what, there are 6’7 women in the WNBA who can also dunk. Like he wouldn't be like the, like the same exact athlete that he's today. And I think that is the sort of sticking point in all of this. You have people like me who say, look, like the research into this is still very early-- even I admit that it's very early, but from what we've seen, there's no like trans domination of women's sports. You know, you have good athletes who are trans women who have had varying levels of success in women's sports, but it's not like any person, you know, any uh, male athlete can transition and walk into a women's sport. And just so I approach it from an, uh, a viewpoint of I think we should opt towards inclusivity before knee jerking into restriction before we don't fully understand all this stuff. And I make that case by pointing out like, look, there hasn't been a truly dominant trans woman athlete today in any sport. You might sit there and say, well, you know, uh, what about, uh, Leah Thomas, the swimmer? And there was so much bad reporting about that that just completely like misread the situation. I remember the first time I heard about Thomas was in The Guardian and they have this one sportswriter who has it out about this issue who I believe is dishonest. Like you don't even have to cut that part cause I believe it. Um, and the very first time I read about Leah Thomas was this guy saying, here's a trans woman athlete who is very likely to smash all of the swimming records in these events. And Katie Ledecky's events, Katie is the greatest female swimmer of all time, arguably the greatest swimmer regardless of gender. Like if you compare her times and like Michael Phelps's times against the rest of the field that they're swimming against, like Katie Ledecky is that much better than the average women's swimmer than Michael Phelps. So in my opinion, she's the greatest female swimmer of all time. Thomas never came close to Katie's time. So it started for me with this Guardian reporter saying, “this person's gonna be better than Katie”. It's a, that hasn't been the case. It will never be the case, like Leah Thomas is not anywhere near that level, but that's the level of panic we started with. Um, and it went, you know, from the Guardian, it was all over right-wing news. It hit the New York Times. And New York Times is kinda like, well, you know, “this side says it's fine. And the other side says it's like, unhuman or whatever.” Um, they have to get you everybody's opinion and they don't actually verify anything for themselves. But look at, she’s an Ivy League swimmer. The Ivy League is not the premier college swimming league in the country. In fact, the Ivy League does not issue athletic scholarships to begin with. So notoriously the Ivy League is like weaker than other leagues. So the fact that she was dominating the Ivy League does not mean she was dominating women's swimming. Um, if you look at the national championship meet where Leah Thomas did win one event and lost like three others, she did well, did not dominate. She was, you know, there was a swimmer there that won like six gold medals like in national championships. Uh, and I don't understand why the headlines weren't about that swimmer rather than Leah Thomas. So even like that example, which is always held up as like, this is the reason why we have to kick women's, you know, trans women outta women's sports, it doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. Um, and I just wish that more people would have an open mind and maybe take an examination of their own assumptions around gender and sports before they jump, jump in with, you know, common sense opinions, so to speak.

Jennie: I guess before we go any further, I mean I have lots of thoughts, but like, let's just talk a little bit about like what's happening in the states. Like there's a lot happening around sports, trans, uh, women playing sports in states. So what are we seeing at the state level?

Katelyn: Yeah. Uh, at the state level, or, gosh more, I think more than half the country now has banned trans girls from any sort of, uh, women's or girls sports. And that includes like high school, middle school age. That's really problematic because I think it's especially heinous at the middle school level because if you have an out trans girl in middle school, she's likely not have gone through, you know, a lot of her own male puberty. She's likely on puberty blockers at, at the very least. And you know, before that age, boys and girls athletes are typically put together because their bodies are developing the same. And it's not until the sex hormones kick in that you start to see a differentiation in cis athletes. So the fact that they're going all the way back in, like some of these states are banning elementary schools from having trans girls in girls sports. And I'm like, why are there gender segregated sports in elementary school to begin with? When I was growing up, the boys and girls all played, you know, soccer, basketball, uh, everything together… And um, there's one example in Kentucky in particular I wanted to highlight where there was only one trans girl playing a school sport that they could find in the entire state. Um, and she was like 11 years old and she helped, she was like the driving force in her school starting a girl’s field hockey team. Um, so because of her efforts, the school had a team, if she hadn't bothered to do anything there would be no team at all. And she was the only person that that states ban on trans athletes affects and she's now no longer allowed to play on the team that she created.

Jennie: I mean this where… like how, how can somebody justify this to me?

Katelyn: You're telling me that this 11 year old little girl is a threat to the safety of women athletes? No. So to me, this is where it starts jumping from “We have legitimate concerns” into no, you're really just outright discriminating, um, based on your own bigotry. Um, and I get that this is a complicated issue for people, but like, look at how these like policies are actually being applied and it doesn't make any sense.

Jennie: They're just kids trying to live their life.

Katelyn: There's maybe two dozen of them in the entire country. There's probably more laws banning trans girls from uh, school sports than there are trans girls trying to play school sports in the entire country. Um, I looked into, there was this uproar in this tiny part of Vermont, which is super progressive. We'll never see a ban there. There was a trans basketball player and apparently she was just good at blocking shots, didn't really have much else to her game, was not the best player on her own team. And there was a Christian school that just flat out refused to play this team. And I took a closer look into the, you know, the situation and you know, the, the team, which was not dominant. They, they lost like seven or eight times over the course of the season. Um, it was the state tournament, uh, it was a state tournament game that the Christian school forfeited and then the team of the trans girl got blown out in the next round. It's like, I'm looking for cases of like these trans girls or women dominating these sports and just not finding them. You know, there's been one openly trans woman Olympian in Olympic history. It was at the last Olympics. She was a weightlifter. All of the conservative papers are like, this is unfair. She's gonna win the gold medal automatically. Like why even have the competition? She finished dead last in the entire field and she was a, it was literally all bigotry assumptions. And I would just like policy side, the policy discussions to be based in fact and not in like the assumptions and preconceived thoughts of mostly male politicians and sports administrators.

Jennie: I just, this whole conversation just makes me so mad. Like I, I just think about like the trans girl who just like wants to play sports with her friends, man. Like yeah. Just like let her live her life. I… it boggles my mind. That we're trying to make her life harder.

Katelyn: And like, before we get too deep into, lemme like clarify my own qualifications on this. I was a three-sport athlete in high school, a three-sport athlete in college, uh, in male sports. Um, I got, and I also got a degree in sport management from the University of Massachusetts, which is one of the only schools for that program in country. So sport management and policy. So I'm not just coming at this from the perspective of like a trans journalist, like this is like what I sort of have devoted my life to even before my transition. Like, I hope your listeners understand that I, that I'm not just coming at this with like an emotional argument. It's, there's some educational background to it.

Jennie: Okay. So I guess that brings us to like today's like, main topic is the Biden administration proposed a new Title IX rule that like, in the flurry of reporting around it, like I'm sure nobody knows what is in it because it was like, “this is amazing. This is terrible.” Like it was all over the place from paper to paper. Katelyn, what is it?

Katelyn: So to understand where we are, we have to understand where we've been. Your listeners who have been really in tune to trans rights for the last like seven or so years will probably remember the Obama administration's Title IX guidance on trans students. It was literally just a guidance like “here are suggested guidelines for including transgender students in your general education policy.” Um, and it was really revolutionary at the time. Cause it was the first time the federal government came out and said, “Hey, you, like, you are denying an equal educational opportunity if you're keeping like trans girls out of the girls room or trans boys outta the boys' room.” At the time, there was a big push to try to make trans kids use third spaces facilities. But those facilities weren't designed for students. Right? So what ended up happening has the in numerous cases, a trans student would ask to go to the bathroom and they'd have to go 10 minutes further away to get to the bathroom than their cisgender counterparts. And in court, that extra 20 minutes outside of the class is a denial of educational opportunity. So like, that's sort of like where it all started. And then, uh, that became, that was like one of the first times that the political right sort of blew up over trans rights. They're like, “ gonna put boys in your little girl’s bathrooms,” all that stuff.

Jennie: Oh yes. The, the glory days.

Katelyn: Yeah. So then, you know, flash forward and Trump is elected, and actually I had some insider info on what, what they were talking about, uh, in the educational, like the education department. Um, because I had, uh, my ex actually was sitting in on meetings and then giving me secret information that was off the record, uh, which is on the record now. But basically like, uh, you know, organizations came in like, um, Caitlyn Jenner was consulted on this. This was in like 2017-ish right around there. Um, there were, uh, you know, what is it, the log cabin Republicans before they turned into like this whatever they are now where they're like, “we love gay people, but trans people…”And they were talking about Trump, what the Trump administration would, might try to change it. Uh, and my impression from my…but the document ended up producing was not somebody's meat for our base. Trans students no longer have rights and they really throw out the guidance. So flash forward to now with the Biden administration, uh, they now have to put out something to replace the Trump guidance and… rewind… because I realize I forgot to mention the sports side. The Obama era policy said you cannot deny any trans person any, uh, educational opportunities that would be provided to cisgender peers, which included sports. So this is where the Biden administration departed from the Obama era. I had heard this was coming down the pipeline for a while. And of course I get bits of information that are [maybe] actually verifiable. So it's not like I can run out and report it. But you hear rumors that things are happening behind the scenes. And I had heard that they were struggling with the sports issue. It doesn't poll particularly well for Democrats. And as we know, Democrats are particularly afraid of polls, uh, instead of just making an argument. But that's the story for another day. Um, and so what we got a few weeks ago was this Title IX guidance… “You cannot deny a transgender student the same opportunities as their cisgender peers, except there are certain cases on an individual basis where trans athletes may be denied the, uh, the, you know, the same right to compete with, you know, trans girls with, with, with cis girls.” Basically, I got really frustrated because the entirety of the like advocacy industrial complex on the liberal side came out in lockstep and said, “this is so great. You have secured rights for transgender students for the rest of time, you know, whatever until the next Republican president gets elected.” And you know, we had, uh, talked to a couple of trans like legal experts, like people who've operated in the LGBTQ legal space and they're looking at it and they're like, “ok, well this actually makes it really difficult for these states to institute their blanket bans. Um, it means that whenever, like a state athletic association denies a trans girl the right to play in girl’s sports, they have to individually justify their decision. Like it has to be based on something that's individual about the person besides just their trans status.” Which I think is the most positive thing about this guidance. First of all, it protects trans students outside of sports and that's great and we should applaud the Biden administration for that. We should also applaud them for making it more difficult to institute blanket bans on trans girls and girl’s sports. But the, there's a little part in the back of my brain that looks at this and says, like, we started from position of “there are no exceptions to discrimination against trans students.” And what we have today is a democratic president coming out and saying there are some cases in which discrimination against trans students is necessary. And that I think has been the goal of conservatives all along with all of this. Like, they don't really care about women's sports. What they really care about is classifying trans women as men under the law and trans men as women under the law. Like that's what they have been going for all along. Cause it legally erases us from existence. Right? And here's a case of basically Biden coming out and saying, “yeah, there are some cases where it's OK to classify trans girls as boys,” and I worry that if we give an inch on this, then the next time they'll say, “well, we had a good reason then, here's another good reason and here's another good reason and here's another good reason.” And all of a sudden you go from, “oh, well that was supposed to be just for sports, but now maybe it's about bathrooms, now maybe it's about, you know, adult locker rooms. Now maybe it's about, you know, like, like rape trauma centers.” You know, I look at that and I see the “parade of terribles” to borrow a term from our conservative people who always argue on the other side of things. And I see a “parade of terribles” that comes outta all this, but when I say that, I'm like, shouted down. Right? Because it's like, you can't say any, you can't say that. Like, I don't think that's the case. Uh, you know, they'll say you can't criticize Biden cause it gives ammunition, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's really frustrating for me, um, because I see a lot of potential bad outcomes to this, uh, and only a handful of good outcomes to all of this. Jennie: Yeah. I just remember the day it was released and like seeing so many people celebrating seeing some confused headlines. And then I got, I'm on Erin Reed’s like her uh, substack email and she was like, “no y'all, this, this is not it. This is not good.” And I was like, oh, I need to take a closer look at this.

Katelyn: Yeah. So Erin got a lot of pushback from different people about that article and actually DMed me about it, right. And I'm like, yeah, like I think both, you know, all sides of this have their points, but I think that your read on it is like pretty close, at the very least. And you know, Erin and I, we're cool. We don't talk a lot. So when she messages me, it's kind of a, a big deal, right? Cause that means we're trying to figure out.

Jennie: Yes. And it's two people I'd love to have like, figuring it out, right. Two very smart people who know these issues.

Katelyn: Um, but yeah, it's just, it's a tough situation all around, uh, the, the sense that I get is a, the administration is afraid of the athlete question. Um, and I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of democrats who are afraid of the athlete question, including some trans people who hold state office are afraid of that issue as well. And I wish they wouldn't be, but you know, I'm just a lowly journalist, so, well…

Jennie: It just like takes me back to like, again, abortion and trans rights and all of this is interrelated and like yeah, same groups doing these same things of like, okay, well abortion is bad at 20 weeks. Okay, well what about 15? Like I just see it like this. Like let's just get a crack of daylight and then we can expand it until all of a sudden there's no protections.

Katelyn: Exactly. Um, and actually, I don’t know, if you saw Nebraska earlier this week, did you see this?

Jennie: I feel like yes, but there's been so many terribles I think you're gonna need to remind me.

Katelyn: So they, they, the conservatives there unsurprisingly, had, uh, were trying to work through a transgender youth, uh, healthcare ban, which is a different issue, which was one I think we've talked about before in a previous episode. And I don't wanna dive into that, but it'll be unsurprising to you and many of your listeners that, uh, one of the conservative lawmakers decided to introduce an amendment to that bill, which, which introduces a 12 week abortion ban as part of their trans youth healthcare like ban.

Jennie: That sounds right. It's the same people.

Katelyn: Turns out we were right all along.

Jennie: Yeah. And it's like the same conversation and keeping in, bringing into every time we're having like the mife conversation is like, this isn't staying here. You know, like… This is going into trans healthcare too. Like we need to make sure we're keeping the eye on all of the balls, not just like mife.

Katelyn: Yeah. And you're starting to see like, um, it's, it's moving past sports in the youth question. Like Texas, uh, one of their state agencies I think proposed like, uh, they kind of played it as an anti-trans measure, but really it was like gendered, um, like required dress codes.

Jennie: Oh.

Katelyn: Yeah. That basically cis women can't wear pants at work and it's like, yeah, that's what happens. When you start policing gender, it's like, this is where it goes.

Jennie: I just like, and we're starting to see the inklings of this heading into like the global space of like, yeah. Not wanting like, gender-based violence is starting to get pushback and like certain circles like talking about it and you're just like starting to see the, like cracks showing up in, in any of the like gender work of like, I can feel it. And I'm worried.

Katelyn: Yeah. I mean the Equal Rights Amendment has popped back in the news recently and the main conservative argument against it these days is that, “oh no, it's gonna give those transgenders some rights.”

Jennie: That's great. Let's give them rights!

Katelyn: Sounds amazing. That's what they want.

Jennie: Okay. So that's all terrible. Y

Katelyn: Yes. Ugh. Again, we're gonna have a good reason, uh, you're gonna come on for a good reason, but what can our audience do? Like there is so much happening. Like is there anything we should be doing right now?

Katelyn: Oh gosh. I want listeners to have an open question. Um, and it's ok if you end up not agreeing completely with what I've said today, that's ok. That doesn't make you a bad person. But I don't, all of the athletes growing up and how all of the boys like dominated the women actually have a quick anecdote about that. Cause um, I was not a great athlete. I was tall and that helped a lot, especially in basketball. Um, and then my school had this amazing girls’ basketball player who got 2000 points in her career and went on to play division one college basketball. Um, and is just an absolute legend. And she was a great, way above me. And I remember her senior year, the two of us played one on one in like gym class and I ended up beating her by a point. Now I was not a point scorer. I think I was a two-point scorer, like, to be honest with you, I barely beat her. It was actually a really close, like back-and-forth game. And we ended up talking about it a couple of years ago after I transitioned because I had written an article for obvious reasons. And, but we got into like a conversation in the, in the comments and I was like, “yeah, like I, the only reason that I beat you was because I was stronger basically, and rebounds and difference. I was like, if I was on puberty blockers or estrogen at the time, I think you would've kicked the shit outta me.” She goes, “I know I would've.”

Jennie: Yes!

Katelyn: And you know, I was 6’2, she was 6’0, she was a little bit shorter than me. Like, I keep going back to that when I'm thinking about like these kids, I don’t know what I would've done, you know, when I was a kid, I chose to stay in the closet. It was a different time. It was the 90s, it was the early 2000’s. Like being gay in my high school was like, uh, not a great thing. And I was in a very progressive area, small rural high school,

Jennie: Same.

Katelyn: Like didn't exist in my high school. So coming out was not in the cards for me. Uh, but the way I dealt with a closet was through sports. Um, and I think if you, in today's environment, I would still have been an athlete in high school. I would've made it, if I had to choose between sports and my, my gender if I thought I had the chance to come out and transition. I did wanna address one thing too. Cause the argument that I get a lot is, well, why can't these trans girls play boy sports? And I would like your audience to think about when was the last time you heard about an openly trans woman playing on a men's sports team? I'm an expert in this. Like I have a degree in sport management, and I have never discovered one. At any level. High school, college, like I'm sure it's happened in high school. I don't think it's ever happened in college. It's certainly never happened professionally. And I wanted people to think about why that might be the case. Cause there have been trans women athletes over the years. This, this issue for actually first came to the floor-- 1972 when Renee Richard sued for the right to play on the women's professional tennis, uh, tour. Um, and people back then were saying “this is the end of women's sports” and here we're, you know, 50 years later that was the end. And women's sports has never been bigger, right? So I don't think playing on the boys team is a thing that is realistic. Um, especially for somebody who is young and is on puberty blockers or is on hormones, on estrogen specifically. Um, I don't think that's a safe situation for them. We know that trans women lose performance. There's a lot of people who argue they don't lose enough performance [for the] women's team, but we know they lose a significant performance, I struggle sometimes to open jars. Now that's kinda the running joke in the trans community is you start taking estrogen, you can't even open jars anymore. That's not a viable alternative. Um, and that's why when I say if you're banning trans girls from girls sports, it is a ban on trans girls from playing sports. Um, and I just wanted to leave people with that.

Jennie: Well, Katelyn, as always, even if it is about horrible things, is always a joy to talk to you.

Katelyn: Well, thank you. I got to recount my, you know, homophobic high school days. So.

Jennie: Yes. Okay, y'all, I hope you enjoyed my interview with Katelyn as always. I had so much fun talking to her. She's just wonderful. And someday, someday I will have Katelyn on to talk about something that is just happiness and joy because there is good news and not more bad news, but today was not that day.

Jennie: Thanks for listening everyone. And we'll see you on our next episode of RePROS Fight Back. For more information, including show notes from this episode and previous episodes, please visit our website at reprosfightback.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter at RePROS Fight Back, or on Instagram at reprosfb. If you like our show, please help others find it by sharing it with your friends and subscribing, rating and reviewing us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.