Ben Bailey: Find solutions other than exclusion for transgender athletes

Dear Rep. John Curtis,

I wanted to write you about an answer you gave in a recent debate about transgender people competing in sports. You said you were opposed and that it was “about fairness.” You further noted that you did not want your daughters “competing with a man in sports, period. Under any circumstances. Now if it’s more complicated than that, I am happy to sit down and talk about it.”

In short, Rep. Curtis, it is more complicated.

I value your respect for fairness and your concern for cisgender women. I also value your love for your daughters and your desire for them to have fairness. I do acknowledge the inclusion of transgender people in sports does present some complications and ensuring fairness in sports is something I value as well.

However, I also value the inclusion of transgender people and hope we can find more creative solutions than outright exclusion. I appreciated your invitation to talk about this issue. I am trusting your intentions were honest with that statement.

With that acknowledged, I hope you can hear the difficulty I had with your response. When you referred to trans women as men, I felt profoundly sad. I wanted more understanding and emotional safety for transgender people. Furthermore, like you, I also value fairness and I want to be sure we are also being fair to transgender people.

I would like you to understand that gender and biological sex is more complicated than the binary that you implied. Biological sex can be more complicated than outward genitalia, which is how medical professionals usually assign sex at birth. Rather, biological sex includes the concepts of sex chromosomes, inward/outward reproductive organs, secondary sex characteristics and hormones, and there can be complicated combinations/mixtures (or lack) of these features that don’t fit into the simple binary.

How one experiences their gender is more subjective to each individual, but there is neuroscience research that suggests that trans women are different biologically from the cisgender men that you conflated them with. I am afraid that, by conflating cisgender males and transgender females, the experience of transgender people was not appropriately understood.

I hope you can appreciate how if the majority of society continued to misgender you as a female despite you experiencing yourself as a male that this would be deeply discouraging. This consistent misgendering is the lived experience of transgender people. Understandably, it is deeply discouraging for them.

The brevity of your answer also left me wanting more empathy for transgender people. Not only do transgender people need to worry about people misgendering them, they also need to worry about literal physical violence.

A study from the UCLA School of Law found that transgender people are are four times more likely to be the victims of “violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault.” Furthermore, transgender teens are much more likely to die by suicide.

I believe that this is due to a consistent denial of their gender identity and the transphobia they experience from their family and peers. I would further note that there is also a systemic lack of resources for transgender people, and one such example is lacking community that they could potentially find on a sports team.

Given all of this, I would really appreciate it if you referred to people by the gender that they identify with. Transgender females may have been listening and I am afraid they also felt sad and hurt when you referred to them as men. I would also request that you sit down with an expert on sex and gender so you can better understand the related science. After meeting with an expert, I also might suggest that you sit down with transgender people to gain more empathy for their perspective and the unfairness that they experience. I know my heart and mind has been deeply changed as I have done this, and I hope the same for you.

As a citizen of Provo and Utah, I want to thank you for the good work you have done, not only as my congressman but also my former mayor. I do trust your intentions are good and your desire to represent all the people of our state.

Ben Bailey, Provo, is a licensed psychologist and therapist. In his job, he has the privilege of working with many LGBTQIA+ clients.