A fundamental tenet of the transgender rights movement is that a person’s sex (i.e., their secondary sexual characteristics) is distinguishable from their gender (i.e., their sense of themselves as male or female). This is why—despite the fact that gender dysphoria remains listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—we do not consider transgender people to be raving lunatics. A person who feels trapped in the wrong body is not crazy; their sex and gender are merely misaligned.
While supporters of transgender rights could certainly quibble with this distinction at the margins—How can a person develop a meaningful “gender identity” without resorting to arcane gender stereotypes?—most are willing to accept the basic logic of it. And if nothing else, how a person chooses to identify their gender and whether that identity aligns with their sex has few practical impacts on anybody else.
Few impacts, but not no impacts. Enter Lia Thomas. Thomas is a transgender woman and a member of Penn’s varsity women’s swimming team. For the first three years of her college career, she competed on the men’s varsity team, where she was a middling talent—at least, to the extent any Division I athlete can be said to be less than exceptional. Eventually, she came out as a trans woman, and, following the requisite year of hormone replacement therapy, began competing with the women. She has been highly successful on the women’s team, setting records and winning championships, though her times are slower than they were when she competed as a man.
Unsurprisingly, Thomas has become a lightning rod. Her teammates have signed competing open letters, debating whether she should be allowed to participate on the women’s team. Penn officials reportedly told Thomas’s teammates that they could be removed from the team for criticizing her, and that such criticisms could harm their future job prospects. Thomas’s coach says he has received invective-filled emails. Parents worry (though almost always anonymously) that their children are losing valuable opportunities to compete or even participate because of Thomas. Thomas and the team have been subject to exacting media scrutiny, far beyond the scant attention that is normally paid to women’s collegiate swimming. And then there are the online comments, many of which are quite cruel.
Some of Thomas’s detractors, of course, believe that she is not a woman, and that to call her one is to acquiesce in her delusion. (Though these individuals don’t say “she” or “her.”) Others offer a more subtle critique. They are willing to accept Thomas’s identity as a female, while arguing that her sex gives her an undeniable advantage over biologically female athletes. Among other things, men have more muscles, larger hands, and greater lung capacity than women—all major advantages in the pool. That Thomas is allowed to compete, these critics say, is a harbinger of the end of women’s sports. Hard-fought victories for women’s equality could be erased overnight.
Thomas’s supporters, on the other hand, argue that criticisms of her are inherently transphobic. Thomas herself concisely explained her and her supporters’ position in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated: “I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team.” To Thomas and her allies, her identity is the beginning and the end of the argument.
There is a compelling simplicity to this position. To supporters of transgender rights, Thomas is a woman. There’s no way of getting in a person’s head and determining what their gender identity really is. That Thomas says she is a woman—and that she is willing to go through the tribulations of a very public transition—has to be enough.
Nevertheless, the position that Thomas is a woman and should therefore compete on the women’s team is specious. The reason that Thomas is a woman is that she identifies as female. Her biological sex, however, is male. As a matter of respect and dignity, we use female pronouns when talking about Thomas and allow her to alter her secondary sexual characteristics so that she may become more female. Fundamentally, Thomas is a woman because sex and gender are different. By arguing that because she is a woman she should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, she once again renders sex and gender indistinguishable.
Thomas and her allies need not concern themselves with those of her critics who will never accept any dimension of her femininity. People who reject Thomas’s gender identity, who recognize no difference between sex and gender, who will continue to refer to Thomas as “he” will be neither convinced nor cowed into silence by accusations of transphobia.
The people that supporters of transgender rights should be concerned with are those who are willing to accept that Thomas is a woman, but who nonetheless do not want her to compete in women’s sports. These critics of Thomas recognize and respect the distinction between sex and gender. They accept that Thomas is a woman because she says she identifies as one. They will not fail to notice that they are being called transphobic for questioning whether someone of the male sex (regardless of their gender) should play sports against people of the female sex—the very distinction that makes the person of the male sex a woman.
Many of these people are social elites, who live and work in liberal environments in which accusations of transphobia are damning. These individuals can probably be cowed into silence, having calculated that speaking an obvious truth is not worth the cost of damaged job prospects or social ostracization. Enforced silence, though, is not the same thing as agreement. Exacting punishment on those who ought to be your natural allies is not the way to build a movement. And demanding fealty works only to the extent people believe that you hold real power over them—something they will discover you lack the moment someone they agree with speaks out against you and the world keeps spinning on its axis.
The risk for advocates of transgender rights is that by driving disagreements with people who broadly agree with them underground, they risk driving those people away from the cause. Worse yet, socially enforced silence will mean that advocates for transgender rights will never know how many prospective allies they have driven away until it is too late. It is obvious why Thomas wants to have it both ways: She gets to live as her true self and to keep competing in a sport that she loves. For supporters of transgender rights, however, this particular definitional game may not be worth the candle.
Chauvinisms 