Lately, there has been a lot of brouhaha about trans female athletes competing on women’s sports teams. The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation in April that would prohibit trans women from competing on women’s teams nationwide.
I do not understand why this has become such a big deal, unless it is just another effort to fan the flames of nonsensical culture wars as a substitute for doing anything meaningful to help ordinary Americans. According to a recent article in Newsweek Magazine, there are approximately 100 trans athletes competing throughout these United States. One hundred. Out of 340 million people.
This is a crisis?
By way of contrast, there are approximately 600,000 homeless people in this country; upwards of 50,000 die from gun violence every year; thousands of children go to school hungry every day, and thousands of women are likely to be raped in 2023. We can also talk about the thousands of women who may die this year from lack of access to abortion care. It seems that there are more urgent issues requiring the attention of our legislators.
Why on Earth are we so worried about 100 trans athletes? I would venture to say that most of us are not worried about them at all, but they are the new obsession of a Republican party that does not intend to do anything to address the actual problems we face.
I do understand the argument about physical strength differentials between women who are anatomically female versus women who were assigned male at birth. As a woman, I can safely assert that the only anatomical males over whom I have a physical strength advantage are probably no older than age three, and all bets are off if they’re in the middle of a tantrum—which always seems to confer super-human strength on otherwise manageable children.
So, while it is possible that some trans women might be better equipped for wrestling, or football, or weightlifting than those of us who were assigned female at birth, it hardly seems like a crisis requiring a legislative remedy. There simply are not a sufficient number of trans athletes to pose a major challenge for women’s sports.
Instead of solutions to the more pressing problems listed above, we have an entire political party picking fights with trans people; drag queens; and, in the case of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, with Mickey Mouse.
There seems to be nothing the GOP loves more than a red herring—something unusual and essentially meaningless that they can point to excitedly in order to gin up mass hysteria over nothing. They are the Henny Pennys of American politics, running back and forth like deranged chickens, shrieking that the sky is falling every time they see a piece of dandelion fluff drifting by. In my view, the party of pearl clutchers and conspiracy theorists has so little will to address the actual problems of Americans that they have devolved into a pathetic crateful of cackling poultry.
Once they have solved the “crises” of drag shows and wokeness and trans athletes, once they’ve gotten to the bottom of how Donald Trump could have possibly lost an election (helpful hint: it’s because a majority of Americans voted for someone else), and once they’ve made sure that really rich people become even richer, I hope they might be able to find time in their schedules to do something about the very long list of actual problems facing the citizens of this country.
In the interim, all of us have some time to consider whether the behavior of our elected officials suggests any degree of integrity whatsoever, or whether they are fit to hold office, or whether they are so bereft of compass and character that they need to be replaced. We have over a year to make sure that we are registered to vote, have all the “proofs” of identity and citizenship now required of us, and arrange reliable transportation to our assigned polling places.
It may be that we decide a change in representation is in our best interest. At least for the time being, voting still matters. We do not have to continue maintaining a henhouse full of cacophonous chickens and roosters who produce little more than small, stinking piles of cockle-doodle doo-doo.
