This past weekend I was talking with someone, a midwestern guy in his late 60s who’d coached girls soccer for his three kids. The world cup was on, and he asked if I followed sports. I like being honest if at all possible. I told him I didn’t grow up playing sports. I went into my usual defensive “we went to the library instead,” which is true. And I gave him my usual “in high school gym class I sat with the other girls in the corner and we painted our nails and didn’t participate,” which is also true. Those both sounded like cute, wholesome stories to me. Easy ways to explain who I am today. “That’s a shame,” he said. I’d never realized that. “Oh?” I asked. “It’s a shame you didn’t get that experience of togetherness, of teamwork and accomplishment.” I could have kept expanding on that list of things I was missing out on, I realized. I didn’t get the experience of getting to know my body, of getting to know my limitations and strengths. Because the truth is, I loved playing sports as a kid, when I could handle it socially. The only reason I hadn’t played is that I was routinely mocked and assaulted. The polite word is “bullied.” I hadn’t chosen to sit outside society, I’d been cast out.... The reason that the sports ban breaks my heart is because when I see trans youth I see everything that I was denied. Society denied me a girlhood, and for a brief moment in the 2010s I saw trans girls who got to just be girls, who got to grow up right. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express in words how much I just wanted to be one of the girls as a kid, or just how grateful I am to the girls who tried to let me. I’m eternally grateful for the girls who let me paint my nails with them in the corner, who helped me put on makeup after I made it to school. I’m eternally grateful for goth, which told me it was okay to genderbend. But it would have been cool to be on the field hockey team too. It’s fun to get good at things. It’s fun to get to use our bodies. It’s fun to do all of those things together with other people.... There are going to be endless knock-on effects of the sports ban, of course. We’re already seeing racist policing of cis women’s bodies in the name of transphobia. Society is going to start staring at kid’s genitals in order to sort them into boxes at school, which isn’t good. And of course, fascists love to be able to categorize people in order to oppress or destroy them, and anti-trans liberals are helping them determine “womanhood” as an immutable category. Fascists will build a prison for cis women built out of trans people’s bones. But even if this ruling only affected the trans girl athletes, formally casting them out of society by casting them off the sports team that would be bad enough. Even if it only affected the third best discus thrower in West Virginia, it would be bad enough.
Margaret Killjoy, excerpts from It's Just Sports, I Tell Myself, With Nervous Laughter or: it's just acceptance in society
















