What's Behind Anti-Trans School Sports Laws?
UT GOP Gov. Cox vetoes an anti-trans school sports bill. His reasoning reveals why there's an anti-trans school sports bill in the first place.
Fascinating news out of Utah as Republican Governor Spencer Cox vetoed a bill that would have created numerous barriers to trans participation in middle and high school sports. Huge thanks to the Salt Lake Tribune’s Robert Gehrke for posting the letter into my Twitter feed; there is an archive on Google Drive at this link (h/t Newsweek), and I’ve made a local copy on my own domain as well, if you find while reading this from The Future that the Google share is gone.
This bill and the Governor’s response present an excellent opportunity for us to examine subtexts and carefully consider things. Are we really in a place where entire states are so hateful and ignorant towards the non-binary? Well, yes and no. The fuel for the fire is certainly there, but it’s not really the purpose of all of these legislation attempts, in much the same way that protests against “teaching critical race theory” aren’t about that, and protests against “mask mandates in schools” aren’t about masks or freedom or health, and the resurgence of book banning isn’t about books…or not as directly as one would think, at least. Let’s dig into this giant ball of malice and ignorance, and see what we find when we get to the center….
The Surface Layer
I’m not ideologically inclined to find a great deal of common ground with any GOP member. Cox’s decision here shows some genuine leadership; a willingness to do the right thing when it’s not popular. This isn’t the first time, and as much energy as I spend criticizing the right wing, I feel like I have a bit of a duty to also offer my approval in the rare instance someone “on the right” does something of which I approve.
On the down side, he relies on careful phrasing to avoid giving the appearance of actually supporting the concept of being transgendered.
Still, he makes the core points against the surface argument well, as summarized here:
“Here are the numbers that have most impacted my decision:
75,000, 4, 1, 86 and 56.
● 75,000 high school kids participating in high school sports in Utah.
● 4 transgender kids playing high school sports in Utah.
● 1 student playing girls sports.
● 86% of trans youth reporting suicidality.
● 56% of trans youth having attempted suicide”
- Utah Gov. Spencer Cox
The alleged moral-ethical arguments are readily dismissed by that information alone. There simply is no ethical argument that supports perpetuating that situation.
There can be no question that great agitation of transphobic attitudes and values is taking place, that trans people are being explicitly targeted for discrimination, that that some of that discrimination comes in the form of bigoted and unjust legislation. It is critical that as we examine this issue entire, we not lose sight of that fundamental truth: that these laws are hateful, without meaningful positive purpose, and solve no problems whatsoever, and any person of honor and integrity will automatically stand up against laws that try to relegate some of us to second-rate status or less simply because of who we are.
With that said, the problem goes deeper.
The Crust
As Gov. Cox also points out, there’s a deeper issue here in that the bill that was negotiated and supposedly settled was almost entirely different from the one that passed the Legislature. While still in many ways odious the bill that was expected did attempt to find a compromise position that would allow most students to play on the teams consistent with their identity, while also empowering a review board to keep an eye out for any of the allegedly sure-to-develop toppling of girls’ school sports statistics in favor of “boys pretending to be girls.”
There are already existing rules in place to prevent this. For instance, to even qualify for consideration as a transgendered school athlete you must have been through a year of hormone replacement therapy and consulted closely with medical, psychological, and psychiatric personnel.
The reality is that the exploitation of male physiology to “cheat” one’s way to women’s sports records, trophies, and general success just isn’t the problem it’s being made out to be by the folks agitating for this kind of legislation. But, as a concession to the noise-makers, Utah’s proposed legislation would have created these review boards to examine, on an individual basis when a plausible reason was presented (e.g. the sudden overtaking of records/performance statistics by a MtF trans student), whether an unfair advantage was being enjoyed by the trans student due to some “masculine” advantage in physiology.
Then, as state legislatures across the country are becoming more and more prone in recent years, the bill was changed at the last minute, negotiated conditions were removed or violated by newly placed content, there was no opportunity for public comment, and it was passed quickly without meaningful examination of the changes, to Gov. Cox’s desk.
This is a blatant end-run around the intent and purpose of our whole system of “checks and balances,” and Gov. Cox was right to call it out in his response:
It is important to note that a complete ban was never discussed, never contemplated, never debated and never received any public input prior to the Legislature passing the bill on the 45th and final night of the session…
…How we make policy matters almost as much as the policy itself. An opportunity to participate is a critical component of public trust…This was a complete reversal of every discussion, public or private. - Utah Gov. Spencer Cox
Legislators who passed the bill in the form it reached the Governor’s desk engaged in an act of deliberate bad faith. Allowing that to happen without serious challenge would have been a major display of executive weakness on Cox’s part.
The attempt, in and of itself, to put the bill through in this manner is frankly an unconscionable and deliberate hostility toward the basic concepts of democracy on the part of the Utah legislature. Regrettably, this is not particularly new or surprising behavior on the part of that body.
It’s also still not the core of this mess, but we’re getting there.
The Mantle
Cox goes on with a valid and well-considered laundry list of reasons this legislation is a bad idea relative to the usual right-wing perspectives of return on investment, dollars and cents, pointing out that the costs of litigation certain to arise from the passage of this law would likely bankrupt the entire state high school athletics association.
He brushes up against the real root of this mess in noting “a hastily adopted amendment to explicitly exclude Utah’s local schools from indemnification.” There’s a line item in this bill that explicitly allows public school systems to be sued over it, where they may otherwise be shielded by various laws protecting the people who enforce them from being held criminally or civilly liable for the good-faith enforcement of laws (but they’re actually not shielded, see below).
Absolutely mind-boggling. An open invitation for every lawyer who wants to get on the news to start filing paperwork. But that’s not the most amazing thing about this clause; what’s amazing is that it’s totally unnecessary. Again, to Gov. Cox:
“…it was incorrectly argued that government immunity would protect schools from a lawsuit based on the ban. Because these lawsuits would involve potential civil rights violations, they would not qualify for governmental immunity [and] would inevitably face costly litigation and the potential for significant damages.” - Ut. Gov. Spencer Cox
In light of all of this, we have to ask ourselves: is it possible, is it really possible, that the people of Utah and their legislators are so petty and venal and cruel and ignorant and full of hate for the non-binary that they’re willing to bankrupt their public schools to keep four trans kids off sports teams?
No, it isn’t. And that brings us to the meat of the matter.
The Rotten Core
I want to emphasize again that in no way do I wish to minimize or disrespect or ignore or relegate to a side-issue the fundamental harm, cruelty, and brutality being perpetrated against trans people in bills like this. As Gov. Cox’s missive points out, it literally hurts badly enough to kill.
The targeting of trans kids here, though, isn’t the point. That’s part of what makes all this so venal and malicious, is the vast majority of these legislators do not care about the gender identity of these students, at all. It’s just a convenient prop they can use to stir up the hateful and easily manipulated among their base, a hate and credulity the leveraging of which right-wing politics throughout history has always been craven enough to exploit.
The point, Constant Reader, is to dismantle public education and funnel its funding into private hands. The lawsuits aren’t an unintended by-product of this or some kind of collateral damage, they are the entire purpose of these efforts.
The same is true for the anti-mask protesting, the hostility and aggression at local governmental and school board meetings, the book bands, all of it. It’s all designed - not to say most of the people participating at ground level have the wit to grasp the larger purpose of their own induced behavior - to tear down public education from root to limb and then dynamite the stump.
Why? Three reasons, one obvious and hideous, the other two not so obvious, but terrifying:
Profit.
Already “the economy” benefits greatly from expenditures on public schooling. However, there’s a lot of annoying rules and regulations in the way that prevent the maximization of profit, because that’s not the reason schools are supposed to exist. Private companies can come in under the pretense of offloading municipal costs by outsourcing everything to charter school operators, then that formerly public money that was being spent on salaries for teachers and staff, capital equipment, etc. is first filtered through the hands of profit-seekers.
Ending Public Education.
All of this strife and conflict is intended to drive parents - across ideological lines - to pull their kids from traditional public schools and move them to privately owned charters and similar arrangements - charters that are no longer government employers and are consequently exempt from some union requirements, as a fun side-effect among many others, including loss of transparency about curriculum decisions.
Liberal and progressive parents pull their kids out because of the hostile environment and low quality of service due to funding being drained away and the best teachers also being drained away for the “more competitive” higher salaries that the public schools can’t afford because they’re getting sued to death.
Right-wing parents pull their kids out for the same reasons they always have; to keep them in a “separate but equal” style pretense of fairness and equality of opportunity while reserving the best resources for those who are born into existing material privilege. Add also ensuring the continued compliance of each new class with the necessary social values to ensure their obedience and cooperation with the prerogatives of profit-making their entire lives. Get them invested early, teach them from a young age how to think like businesses instead of human beings, teach them that’s the only way they’ll ever meet their basic needs or be “successful,” by exploiting those who aren’t born into the same privileges.
In both cases those parents take with them the portion of public funding for education allocated to their student/s, and move it into the for-profit system, adding further crippling and deterioration to the public system, lather-rinse-repeat, pretty soon you’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy/social norm that no diligent parent wants their kid in one of those horrible underfunded public schools, and it’s not too long from there when you simply no longer have public schools at all.
The Endgame
This is where things get truly scary. Now these private companies literally have control over how your kids are taught to think. What are those private companies going to do? Teach those kids to think in ways that are most profitable to those private companies. (NB: Churches are private companies.) Deliberately fail to teach the core critical thinking skills necessary for your kids to be well-armed for self-defense against disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, advertising, and other forms of potentially malicious persuasive communication. A population with those skills is not in the best interests of people who live and die by profit - capitalists.
This is not a new problem. George Carlin described it as well as anyone could:
“They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.” (Embedded video is George Carlin. I should hope you needn’t be told it has NSFW audio.)
This is the alarm bell that we are still failing to ring; this is the thing that Governor Cox failed to say out loud and may be failing to grasp at all. It’s not just about trans kids or masks or sex education or critical race theory.
It’s about ending public education completely because education empowers people and that creates competition for existing power. We can’t consider whether we’re truly free if we can’t get health care, when we can’t consider what being truly free even means. We won’t get angry about abuses of power wielded against us, if we are denied the tools to recognize it when it’s happening.
This is not a new problem, as evidenced by that nearly two-decade-old clip I’ve embedded, and of course if you’re familiar with Carlin’s work he’d been talking about all of that stuff for decades prior.
Too many of us didn’t listen, and now we’re really in the soup. All of this mess with rising neofascism and the horrendously ignorant (and again, deliberately induced) public response to Covid in so many sectors, even the ongoing mess in Ukraine and the ridiculously blatant propaganda flowing from Russia that some Americans - again, left and right - are inexplicably buying in to because it plays to their own biases (usually their bias in favor of believing they’re better informed than average).
We’re watching the negative impact of this root policy of disempowering “the people” by ensuring you don’t empower them to begin with having been implemented for over four decades, and it’s not going to stop unless we stop it. How we stop it has many answers, but in the end they all come back to eliminating profit motive from critical public infrastructure. That includes health care, criminal justice, and education, among other things. Pursuit of profit not only impedes progress by imposing artificial limitations on spending for things that are, ultimately, priceless.
That is the core point that Governor Cox avoided in his remarks, and that most of the conversations about these issues consistently miss because they’re focused on the acute target - in this case the rights of trans kids - and losing sight of the big picture that develops when you take the transphobic bigotry and add the mask protests and book bans and critical race theory and all the rest:
Ending, permanently, the very ability of human beings to even know what freedom is, so they don’t notice when they no longer have it.
John Henry is a long-time activist and political communication expert who majored in communication and minored in political science at Western Michigan University. He makes his home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and is the founder of “Musk For A Minute,” a fundraising initiative for innovative, evolutionary creators, and also of CUSTODE, dedicated to solving the crisis of information illiteracy. Funding for the creation of this article article comes from supporters of those organizations and JohnHenry.US.