Questioning whether ‘trans athletes should be allowed to participate in women’s sports’ overlooks civil rights — trans women are women regardless of whether they can access (and want) gender-affirming healthcare.

An athlete’s performance is determined by a variety of physiological characteristics, and the idea of monitoring testosterone can reflect institutional transmisogyny — the discrimination or prejudice against trans women.

“Claiming that being assigned male at birth makes one constrained to the category of man and the so-called biology of maleness for their entire lives is tantamount to erasing the embodied and lived experience of trans people,” ACLU Staff Attorney Chase Strangio writes.

This year, at least 11 states introduced bills that prevent trans youth from fully participating in sports, violating rights under Title IX, a law protecting people from "discrimination based on sex in education programs.”

The ability to participate fully in school is critical for student-wellbeing and 56% of LGBTQ team members report feeling a positive sense of belonging in school, according to GLSEN, which researches policies designed to protect LGBTQ+ students.

“If you tell a young person that they cannot be who they are and in order to enjoy the benefits of their education they must exist in accordance with their assigned sex at birth, then you are instructing the state to engage in a process of coerced conversion therapy,” Strangio writes.

The hashtag ‘BidenErasedWomen’ is hypocritical — it reflects TERF ideology that’s erasing women by gatekeeping their understanding of ‘woman’ to non-trans women, and by reinforcing a binary structure that doesn’t exist.

(TERF stands for trans exclusionary ‘radical feminist’)