Welcome to the Sisterhood!

A guest essay on trans women's inclusion in sports

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A reader named Penelope Kae sent me this essay. It’s about sports, sure, but it’s also about the hard-won lessons from the post-feminist 1980s, when gendered expectations of women changed without much societal or structural support changing with them. Women were thus expected to work full time despite the fact that Nixon nuked the 1971 childcare act and paid family leave has gone nowhere. We ended up performing what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called “the second shift:” work all day, then come home and do the bulk of the childcare and housework. This, of course, is what poor women had been doing for years, but with the rise of the career woman, this became common for middle class women, too.

Eventually, many of us with such lives realized they were unsustainable. We had to make choices, if we had the luxury of doing so. Some women chose career over kids. Others the opposite. But we were faced with the reality of hard choices; that was part of what defined womanhood.

Kae argues that once a male transitions to live as a woman, she is then faced with the same choices. Perhaps, having been reared as a man, she’s unfamiliar with this imposition. More from Kae below:

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I've read a lot of takes on both sides of the trans athletes debate and they all pretty much boil down to a fight over whether or not gender identity trumps biological sex or not. I don't actually think these two things are incompatible. To me it seems clear we can respect trans women's identities, and demand fairness in sports at the same time.

Being a woman means not being able to have it all. All of us make choices and sacrifices. We come to a fork in the road and we choose the path we think is best for us, even if sometimes the other path looks just as inviting. Should we go to college or get a job after high school? Should we travel the world or start a business? Should we get married or stay single? Take our partner’s name or keep our own? Study for a high-paying career or follow our heart in the arts? Have children or climb the corporate ladder?

Transition or compete?

Sometimes making a decision means closing the door on the other option forever, other times it means only delaying our ability to do both. For example, I always wanted to get a Master's degree but I had my babies right after undergrad and I didn’t have the time, money, or capacity to do both. Now my kids are a little older and at 40 I'm finally in grad school.

Trans women have asked to be respected and accepted as women. I’m happy to oblige. My message is this: Welcome to the sisterhood ladies! As a woman, there are a couple of things you need to understand, and the first is that you too will be expected to make choices and sacrifices. Experiencing the benefits of male puberty makes your inclusion in women's sports unfair. Sports have nothing to do with how you feel about yourself, it’s about how you perform. Many women are deeply distraught over the size of their bodies. They spend inordinate amounts of time and money and effort on diets, workouts, surgeries, waist trainers, and constricting underwear trying to make themselves smaller. But if a female MMA fighter wants to compete, she can’t simply say she was meant to be born in a smaller body. No, she must compete in her appropriate weight category in order to ensure the fairness of the fight. To all my trans sisters out there, no one wants to exclude you from participating in sports. We only ask that you compete against others whose body type is most similar to your own. That means competing against men.

You are at a fork in your path and, like all other women, you must choose what direction to take. Do you want to compete? If so, delay your transition so that suppressing your natural testosterone will not put you at a disadvantage against your male competitors. If your desires or mental health dictate that you cannot wait to transition, then make that choice instead. Transition your body and find other prosocial ways to participate in non-competitive sports or other physical activities.

This is what Caitlin Jenner did. She made the choice to compete and delay transition, just as I delayed grad school. She ran her whole career in her male body and won fair and square.* Later, she was able to make her transition and live in a way she feels is a more authentic presentation of her true self without ever compromising the fairness or integrity of her sport.

Finally, there is one other aspect of womanhood I would like to invite our new trans sisters to understand. There is nothing wrong with your body. It’s another lesson all of us women have to learn the hard way. No matter what you look like there will always be some relative, bully, advertisement, influencer, or troll ready to tell you that your body is wrong. In someone’s eyes you will always be too tall or too short, too fat or too thin, too old or too young, too modest or too revealing. Or even too masculine. You can ask Venus and Serena Williams, Pink, or Michelle Obama what it’s like to take shots for appearing too strong. It’s up to all of us to figure out how to shut out the haters and learn to love ourselves just as we are. You can change your body and make it appear more feminine if you like, but if you don’t love yourself it will never be enough. You will never make yourself happy by trying to fit yourself into the very narrow mold of what society says a woman should look like. Believe me, most of us have tried.

So my advice is: Don’t. Be yourself. Be a woman who is proud of her masculine physique, and get in the game and show those boys what it feels like to get beat by a girl. Your cis sisters will be here cheering you on.

* LD adding: She may also not have felt safe to transition until recently, when trans people had more acceptance.