What’s not being said matters for transgender athletes

Listen to what’s not being said in debates about transgender student athletes. It matters.

Legislation in at least 25 states introduced by conservatives so far have banned transgender athletes from competition in eight states. This month, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona suggested he’d move to counter the state bills because transgender girls have a “right to compete” under Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education. This week, his Office for Civil Rights released guidance saying Title IX prohibits discrimination against transgender students.

Conservatives, for their part, argue that they’re defending “fairness and equality for women” in athletics. Multiple other times in Title IX history they’ve claimed the same in previous attempts to alter how Title IX gets applied to sports. Those efforts failed.

Previously, conservatives didn’t address the main impediments to athletics equity in their arguments, preferring to focus on a narrow issue. They’re doing it again in today’s fights over transgender athletes. What’s not being talked about is what matters most. 

A small but surprising number of feminist women ally themselves uneasily with conservatives on this issue. They’ve seen most athletics opportunities and resources go to boys and men throughout the 49-year history of Title IX. They’re tired of it. They want their fair share. 

High school students are nearly evenly boys and girls (51% vs. 49%) but girls still get 1.3 million fewer chancesthan boys to play sports. At colleges with National Collegiate Athletic Association sports, women average 54% of students but get less than 43% of playing opportunities. Conservatives propose excluding transgender girls from sports but ignore the elephant in the room: what needs to change to give all girls a fair playing field?

In the 1970s, football coaches and other men’s sports leaders argued against any Title IX regulations that would change the status quo giving men nearly all the resources. Football and men’s basketball generate revenue from ticket sales and TV contracts, one argument went, which schools could use to fund women’s athletics. Never mind that almost all football programs run a deficit, or that schools were barely funding women’s sports with the revenues they had. Shift any resources from men’s athletics and revenues might drop. The whole thing would implode. Take away from football and you’ll destroy women’s sports, they warned.

It didn’t happen. Federal regulators listened to women’s advocacy groups. The sky didn’t fall. 

The Office for Civil Rights in 1979 adopted a compromise drafted by men’s athletics leaders. It didn’t mandate splitting budgets equally between men’s and women’s athletics but did require more support for women’s sports. Some schools found ways to increase women’s sports without touching men’s budgets. Others shifted some funds from men to women. 

Nationally, girls in high school varsity sports zoomed from 7% of athletes to 35% in Title IX’s first decade. Women’s share of intercollegiate sports budgets grew from 2% in the early 1970s to 16% in 1978. 

Then came the Title IX backlash of the 1980s. Some of the same opponents of Title IX in athletics argued that the law only should apply to schools or departments that receive direct federal funding. Athletics doesn’t. With some help from the Reagan Administration, they won a Supreme Court ruling saying just that. The Grove City College v. Belldecision in 1984 eviscerated all the civil rights laws in education – Title IX and laws against discrimination based on race, ethnicity, age, or disability. 

Civil rights groups convinced Congress to restore Title IX and the other civil rights laws to their original intent. The Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 made clear that Title IX applies to an entire school if it receives any federal funding. 

With Title IX restored, women fought hard in the 1990s to get their fair share of athletics. For Title IX’s 30^thanniversary in 2002, the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Athletics issued a “report card” that gave a C+ grade to progress in athletics equity. 

President George W. Bush’s administration that year created a Commission on Opportunities in Athletics to review Title IX and find “opportunities to ensure fairness for all athletes.” That was code for appeasing dissatisfied men in an attempt to restrict Title IX. The law was popular, though. A solid 82% of 1,000 adults surveyed in 2007 said they supported Title IX.

In multiple public hearings, Title IX critics claimed to care about women’s sports but said Title IX had gone too far. Some cash-strapped schools chose to cut “minor” men’s sports like wrestling or swimming in order to preserve football’s inordinate share of resources and to fund women’s sports. That discriminated against men, they claimed, and they blamed it on women, not football. 

Title IX defenders pointed out that between 1992 and 2000, schools added more men’s teams overall than they eliminated. Nearly three quarters of colleges and universities that added women’s sports teams in that period did so without cutting men’s teams. Over time, football gobbled more resources. Reduce the $1 million-plus salaries of football and men’s basketball coaches and each college could add three to six sports, economist Andrew Zimbalist testified.

The commission’s non-binding report suggested changing Title IX guidance to stop colleges from cutting men’s teams. It said little about the discrimination women athletes still faced. 

The Office for Civil Rights recognized the imbalance. It kept the Title IX regulations intact.

In the last decade culture wars over transgender rights in education focused first on bathrooms and locker rooms. Fearmongering conservatives claimed that letting cisgender students share these spaces with transgender students wouldn’t be safe. They implied that transgender students would attack or emotionally traumatize cisgender students, with no data to back them up. They didn’t show the same concern for high rates of harassment, abuse, and stress suffered by transgender students in general. 

Complaints about bathrooms and locker rooms failed eventually in the courts, with the Office for Civil Rights, and with public opinion. The conservative focus shifted to athletics teams. 

Exclusion seems to be their main agenda. Fighting about transgender girls in athletics diverts attention from the much bigger and very real problem. Nearly every politician pushing the anti-transgender legislation couldn’t cite a single case in their state in which participation by transgender athletes posed a problem. Perhaps they’d be more effective targeting the intentional neglect of athletics resources for all girls and women. 

Throughout Title IX’s history, looking at what the law’s opponents aren’t saying gives context to their claims of defending women. If they aren’t proposing ways to expand athletic opportunities and resources for all girls and women, it’s fair to question what motivates them. It probably isn’t the fairness required under Title IX.