progressive ideology currently intersects with sports is the debate over transgender participation in sports,
in which extremists on both sides have commanded public attention. Progressive advocacy to force females to compete against trans-athletes with male sex-linked physical advantages has been met with conservatives’ absolutist prohibitions on any trans girls and women participating in girls’ and women’s sport. Lost in this conversation is that sports are not monolithic, and that their values and goals can depend on the age of the participants and what’s at stake in the competitions. The desire for sports inclusivity and broad participation can co-exist with fair competition, through measured responses that distinguish between sports at the pre-puberty and recreational levels, and sports at higher levels where more is at stake.
The debate needs to acknowledge that sports have been continuously sex-segregated for centuries in disciplines where male sex-linked advantages affect competitive opportunities for women. The U.S. law known as Title IX explicitly permits girls and women’s sport to exist separate from boys and men’s sport. Policy makers have long understood that from the onset of male puberty, male bodies develop in a way that gives them undeniable and irreversible advantages over female bodies in terms of speed, strength, and power. It is science, not ideology, that dictates the need for appropriate sex segregation in sports. It is not transphobic to recognize the significance of biological sex in sport. But it is also not necessary to exclude all transgirls from all girls’ sports regardless of whether they have experienced male puberty or are undergoing gender-affirming therapies. Inclusion works when it does not harm the female sports competition or the individuals that sex-segregated sport is designed to protect.
At the moment, on the global stage, this issue is being decided by sports governing bodies, often on a sport-by-sport basis, as in the International Olympic Committee’s policy that empowers each international sports federation to set its own rules for transgender participation. The NCAA has adopted a similar approach, deferring to national governing bodies in each sport, which typically allow trans women and nonbinary people to compete only after a period of time on testosterone-suppressing treatment. As for U.S. public school athletics, a state-by-state approach has emerged, leading to a patchwork quilt of conflicting laws and rules that have raised the heat on the issue.
On both sides of the Atlantic, there are renewed efforts to rediscover the traditional and unique American and European ways of life including its virtues that once elevated the Western civilization. What role , in your view does sport play in this?