CHelsea Mitchell had a queasy feeling at the indoor high school track and field championships in February 2020 in her small state not far from New York. A year earlier, she had placed third over the same distance of 55 yards, beaten by two trans girls. She and two other sprinters then filed a complaint with the Washington Department of Education, which has a department that oversees civil rights compliance in America’s schools.
But now one of the two opponents against whom she had lost a year earlier was crouched next to her in the hall in Newhaven in the starting blocks. “I ought to be confident,” she later wrote in an opinion piece in the national newspaper USA Today, because she had a good chance of “winning the race.” But last year’s “devastating experience” conveyed to her: “I’m not good enough, my body isn’t good enough. And no matter how hard I work, I’m unlikely to succeed.” Why? “Because I’m a woman.”
accusation denied
Her text was intended as an emotional plea against the rules of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which organizes athletic competitions by students in the state and allows trans athletes. Her civil action against those statutes had recently been dismissed in federal court. The judge rejected the accusation that “boys regularly displace girls” in the races and that the right to start for trans girls resulted in illegal discrimination against young women, on formal legal grounds.
But he might as well have commented on the results of the 2020 championships. Because Mitchell had not only beaten the unpopular competitor next to her once, but twice. In the lead-up with six hundredths of a second ahead and in the final even with 22 hundredths of a second.
Despite flimsy arguments that tend to omit such details, the Alliance Defending Freedom, whose attorneys had pushed Mitchell’s lawsuit, got it right. The institution, founded by numerous representatives of conservative Christian faith communities in the 1990s, works under the banner of religious freedom, among other things, to push back the equal treatment of homosexuals and trans people, which has been enshrined in law in recent years.
In this specific case, the opportunity was seen to instrumentalize the sports science debates about the performance of athletes after a gender reassignment from man to woman. In fact, the organization’s campaign aims to undermine societal equality for trans people.
Exchange of keywords
Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, a man with presidential aspirations, used the controversy surrounding collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas in March to issue an official proclamation on the results of the American collegiate swimming championships in the 500-yard freestyle 450 meters) to publish.
After that, it was not Thomas who won the race, but Emma Weyant from Florida, who finished second, 1.75 seconds behind. Thomas had started for the University of Pennsylvania. Weyant for the University of Virginia. The race in question was not held in Florida but in Atlanta. Nevertheless, DeSantis felt responsible and declared that American universities would “destroy women’s sports”. “Ideology is placed above biology”.
Relevant information is lost in the exchange of keywords. This is what conservative governor Spencer Cox found out when he was about to sign a law banning trans athletes from schools in Utah: Around 75,000 young people take part in school sports. Of those, four had undergone sex reassignment, with only one from male to female. Cox vetoed the plan, risking re-election in 2024. Only a few days later, the two legislative chambers in Salt Lake City overruled his objection with the necessary majority.
