This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Red alert, folks! Sound the alarm! Crank the sirens! Flim the flams! We’ve got sports drama.
Okay, so, here’s the rundown: Elizabeth Eddy published a nasty screed in the New York Post that, some have said, is both racist and transphobic. If you don’t know who she is, Eddy is a professional American soccer player, and she’s a midfielder for Angel City Football Club, who are a part of the National Women’s Soccer League.
Let me be frank with you, here: I don’t care about soccer, or football, or even fútbol. I respect everybody’s right to enjoy watching or participating in sports, but I find most of them painfully boring, and soccer in particular pisses me off chiefly because of professional players’ tendency to fish for penalties by flopping around like morons.
Perhaps that’s unfair of me… but I’m afraid we’ll all just have to learn to live with it.
Here’s the short and sweet version of what Eddy wrote in the Post: She believes sports should be made “fair” again by removing transgender people from competition, she believes that “progressive” politicians like Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris being transmisogynists justifies her stance, and she shared some outdated studies to prove that trans women are humongous freakbeasts who will tear petite fragile babygirl cis women to shreds on the field of battle sports.
The “solutions” Eddy recommends are a general standing rule that athletes must be “born with ovaries,” or undergo chromosome testing. The former is garish, and the latter is such a fraught topic that I couldn’t possibly do it justice here, so you should read more about that from somebody with more authority on the subject. Frankly, there’s some language and attitude in there that I don’t appreciate, but it’s a solid overview of that particular problem.
You should know, too, that the study Eddy cites to prove that trans women, even after 12 months of cross-sex hormones, are terrifying swollen brutality machines bent on disemboweling every cis woman they see… isn’t providing the full story. For a start, another publication by the same author points out that transgender men, after HRT, are roughly in line with their cis counterparts; while trans women only retain a “9% faster mean run speed.” I’ve never claimed to be a scientist or a mathematician, but to me, 9% sounds near enough to a rounding error to be highly suspicious. The results only take into account one year of HRT, as well. Do we typically consider cisgender puberty to reach its apex after a single year? Is it not likely that a trans woman who has undergone two or three consistent years of T suppression and E could perform identically to a cis woman at competitive sports?
An even more recent study, funded by the International Olympic Committee and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine last year, found that only handgrip strength remained heightened in trans women athletes on HRT, while “jumping ability, lung function and relative cardiovascular fitness” were below cis women athletes’ averages. This suggests that trans women may even be at an athletic disadvantage when competing against their cis peers.
There is much evidence, too, that the supposed frailty of “the fairer sex” (a very recently invented concept rooted less in fact and more in the promulgation of bourgeois culture) is a load of crap. In truth, much of the separation between men and women in sports is a result of less money and effort being expended to ensure that female athletes are given the chance to compete both as children and adults. If more people took women’s sports seriously, and not just as a vehicle for harming trans women, would female competitors broadly perform as well as their male counterparts?
Conservative media is reacting to Eddy’s opinions (and the backlash against them) predictably: Founder of transphobic fashion brand Jennifer Sey and transphobic sports blog OutKick founder Clay Travis spoke to Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire to share with everybody how much they hate trans and intersex women, while Republican blob Glenn Bleck’s rag Blaze Media devoted an entire article to how much they believe trans women are men.
Conversely, Eddy’s own teammates have spoken out against her. The team itself released a sort of conglomerate statement to Instagram assuring the world that Eddy does not speak for them, saying, “Since our founding, Angel City has remained committed to equity, inclusion, and belonging. These principles will always guide how we show up for our team, fans, and community.”
Defender Sarah Gorden said, at a pre-game media event, “In this locker room, I’ve had a lot of convos with my teammates in the past few days, and they are hurt and they are harmed by the article. And also they are disgusted by some of the things that were said in the article.” Gorden also pointed out that the segment of Eddy’s article calling for genetic testing was centered on a picture of a Black player, Orlando Pride’s Barbra Banda, which is quite a bad look.
At the same event, goalkeeper Angelina Anderson said, “Angel City is a place for everyone. It always will be. That’s how it was from the beginning. That’s how it always will be, period.”
Gordon and Anderson are the captain and vice captain of Angel City FC respectively.
It’s heartening to see those women stand up for the rights of the people Elizabeth Eddy wants to kick out of the sport she plays. While Eddy insists that “reasonable people can disagree,” our community knows that there can be no disagreement on our ability to participate in sport, which is an undeniable human right.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
All competitive sport is unfair, for a variety of reasons. Every human being is unique, inheriting a body that has physical and mental attributes that make it better or worse for particular sports. To single out trans girls and trans women as problematic in cis women’s categories is to ignore all those other aspects that render one competitor superior or inferior in a multitude of parameters such as muscle strength, leg length or lung capacity. See this, too:
"Individuals should not have to make a choice between being their authentic selves or being athletes. While trans athletes competing in various sports and athletic events raises interesting considerations of how certain morphologic and physiologic factors affect performance, these questions are not exclusive to trans individuals. There are wide variations within cisgender populations, even when excluding individuals with differences in sexual development. It is expected that about 2.3% of a normally distributed population is likely to fall above two standard deviations from a population mean. These exceptional individuals may be those who are gifted and excel at some sport or athletic performance. In contrast only 0.5%–0.6% of the population identify as trans.
There is no concern for restricting individuals who are exceptionally large or small, those who are genetically gifted, or those with differing hormone concentrations or muscle mass, so long as their gender and biologic sex align. The disproportionate focus on the relatively small portion of the population who are trans seems based on the belief that cis men who cannot succeed in sports among other cis men would choose to misidentify as trans women to gain an advantage in sports against cis women. However, there are no legitimate cases of this occurring.
An individual’s sex does not determine their success or failure at any athletic event despite the high level of competition. This can be demonstrated when looking at not average outcomes, but the level of overlap among outcomes. The exclusion of trans individuals also insults the skill and athleticism of both cis and trans athletes. While sex differences do develop following puberty, many of the sex differences are reduced, if not erased, over time by gender affirming hormone therapy. Finally, if it is found that trans individuals have advantages in certain athletic events or sports; in those cases, there will still be a question of whether this should be considered unfair, or accepted as another instance of naturally occurring variability seen in athletes already participating in these events."
(‘Sex differences and athletic performance. Where do trans individuals fit into sports and athletics based on current research?’, Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 27 October 2023)