The Latest Evidence That ‘Concern’ Over ‘Trans Sports’ Really Isn’t About Sports

A very nasty headline on the 🇺🇸 White House website

I threw these balls into a basket not because I’m sporty but because they’re trash. Steve A Johnson on Unsplash

Three days ago, immediately upon the U.S. Supreme Court decision to allow states to ban trans girls/women from girls’/women’s sport, the Trump regime made a celebratory post on the White House website.

Trump says lots of things; why is a MAGA opinion relevant here? Because Supreme Court rulings in general have Trump’s fingerprints on them, as three of the nine Justices — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett — are his nominees. Those three Justices voted to allow bans on trans women athletes. When Trump’s inner circle tells us what they think the issue before the court was really about, they’re divulging their real political agenda.

Here’s the regime’s celebratory post:

WhiteHouse.gov

There you have it in a nutshell.

Donald Trump, wielding the power of the executive branch, is helming a political “push,” one in which he suggests that the judicial branch has been enlisted. The goal is to “eliminate transgender insanity.” Eliminate and insanity are bad words for sandwiching a targeted identity group.

This news release tells us that Trump aims “to restore biological reality throughout the federal government” and to that end “has taken a series of decisive actions.” (An observation: If so-called “biological reality” were really biological reality, it couldn’t be politically diminished and wouldn’t have to be politically restored.)

Among those “decisive actions” Trump takes credit for:

Barring men from competing in women’s sports, resulting in athletic organizations such as the NCAA, International Olympic Committee, and World Athletics Council realigning their policies with biological reality.

This admission is important. The Supreme Court cited the policies of those athletic bodies as evidence of some kind of evolving anti-trans consensus in science or sports. But then Trump, on the very same day the court ruling came down, undermined the court’s message by admitting he had strongarmed those organizations to change their policies. In broad daylight, he manufactured the evidence, the court cited it as instructed, and voila. Now he brags about what he did.

Related to which, Trump will be “cracking down on athletic organizations.” You know, to support women’s sports. By threatening their sports organizations. As one does.

His broader principle is:

Restoring biological reality as the official policy of the federal government by recognizing that there are only two immutable sexes: male and female.

This means he is messing with trans people’s identity documents. We need them, possibly to vote, likely to fly within the country, and definitely to flee the country:

Restoring biological sex as the sole markers for official federal documents, including passports.

He takes credit for “40 hospitals and health systems” having ceased to provide trans healthcare to minors, a third of which also ceased to provide this healthcare to 18-year-olds (they are adults), and a handful of which ceased it for people of all ages. He calls this healthcare “child gender mutilation,” which makes little sense, as people under 18 rarely have surgery for gender transition.

The nonsense goes on:

Ordering the Department of Health and Human Services to perform a comprehensive review of best practices for children and adolescents, ultimately confirming the complete absence of scientific evidence…

Even the Supreme Court — in its decision issued that day, the one to which Trump is ostensibly responding — tried to point to an ongoing medical debate over what effects hormones have on the body. Trump goes further by saying there’s no debate.

If there is no evidence supporting a certain kind of healthcare, how can there have been best practices about it? Unfortunately, I think he’s implying, rather, that the “best practices” are conversion therapy.

He admits to “cutting billions of dollars in federal funding” and specifically threatening schools with loss of said funding “to halt the indoctrination of children” over the fact that trans people exist. Similarly, he says he ensures that “service academies and training programs” do not acknowledge the existence of trans people.

He crows over his new military policy that has been “requiring troops to serve according to their biological sex, and barring so-called transgender individuals from military service.”

Lastly, he has regulated women’s “bathrooms, locker rooms, and shelters.”

Having allegedly completed all these things, yet because fascism definitionally is always reviving the halcyon past, he “will continue safeguarding…shielding…and restoring…”

Indeed, at the bottom of the news release, please see the first “related” item, a release from three months earlier: “President Trump Ended Democrats’ “Transgender for Everybody” Insanity.” Oh, so he ended it three months ago, but now he has another “push” to eliminate it, and (he swears) he’ll continue to do all the things he’s already done.

Folks. This is not about fairness in sports.

The word “eliminate” is eliminationist language.

When you hear trans people complain of eliminationist or exterminationist language, this is a prime example of it. It means someone is recommending eliminating us.

Along with the MAGA movement generally, POTUS himself was behind the June 30 SCOTUS decision. If he wanted us to believe that the court decision was really about sports, he wouldn’t headline his news release “eliminate transgender insanity.” He wouldn’t fill the news release with talk of passports, bathrooms, healthcare, and federal funding for schools. He wouldn’t claim he’s defending biology itself.

Someone just informed me a couple weeks ago — verbally, by voicemail — that no one wants to exterminate me, and that if I believe this, then I am operating solely on feelings and disinformation.

Really? No one wants to exterminate trans people? Then why is POTUS talking about eliminating my insanity?

Anti-trans “trans sports” rhetoric, including that Supreme Court decision, is not primarily about sports. It’s about a much bigger agenda, as the Office of the POTUS has helpfully enumerated for us in this news release. It is intended to eliminate transness in multiple ways. This is relevant to trans people’s lives. Some people are more at risk for this discrimination and violence than others, and we should each do our part to protect ourselves and those who need our help.