More Democrats Need To Say It: 'Sports Leagues Should Be Organized By Sex'

The overwhelming majority of the public believes this, and it doesn't make them bigots. The view needs to be robustly represented inside our tent.

Dear readers,

Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans and found 66% of respondents, including 45% of Democrats and Democratic leaners, favor “laws or policies that require trans athletes to compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth.” Only 15% of respondents were opposed. Public support for these restrictions has only grown as public awareness around the issue has grown; three years earlier, Pew found 58% support and 17% opposition.

Democrats who agree with the large majority of the public (and about half of their own party) on this issue are by and large afraid to say so. Their reticence to speak up only reinforces public perceptions of the Democratic Party as too liberal and out of touch with the concerns and opinions of the broad public.

The argument against categorizing sports by sex — really more an assertion than an argument — holds that gender identity is the only proper criterion for organizing societal institutions around sex or gender. “Trans women are women,” and therefore, if you have a women’s swim team, you have to allow trans women on it. But social constructs have to be constructed socially. Most institutions in our society aren’t segregated by sex or gender, and when they are, we need to ask why. And the reasons for sex segregation in sports are closely related to biology.

Males and females are different, physically, and males are systematically stronger. Segregation by sex makes it possible to have athletic divisions where females can compete and win. If you stop segregating by sex and instead segregate by gender identity, you undermine a core social purpose for which single-sex sports were created. So of course male participation in women’s sports is widely seen as unfair, in spite of the arguments from left-wing writers that sports have never been fair and nobody should care about this. And of course opposition to trans participation hardened when transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, with obvious athletic advantage from male puberty, brought national attention to the issue by setting multiple Ivy League women’s swimming records after transitioning.

Lia Thomas of the University of Pennsylvania wins the 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA Division I Women's Swimming & Diving Championship on March 17, 2022 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Justin Casterline/Getty Images)

This is true even though most of the public accepts the gender identity framework. A majority of respondents in the same poll tell Pew they favor non-discrimination protections for trans people in contexts like employment and housing; so, contrary to the histrionic arguments you hear on the internet, favoring sex-segregation in sports implies neither a denial that trans people exist nor a desire to “throw them under the bus.” The political problem arises when Democrats, under pressure from left-wing activists who have read too much Judith Butler, adopt policy positions that jump from the widely-held and politically defensible idea that gender identity is real and relevant — and that trans people therefore have relevant interests to defend in the law — to the unpopular and unworkable idea that sex is therefore irrelevant and must be disregarded even in contexts where most people see good reason to care about it.

So why don’t more Democratic politicians draw the line where so many Democratic voters do: wanting to ensure that transgender Americans are treated equally in contexts where the law already says men and women should be treated the same, but nonetheless believing that women’s sports should stay female? In some cases, it’s probably because they sincerely believe it’s important to reconceptualize gender in a way that treats sex as irrelevant. But in other cases, it’s because they’re afraid of getting yelled at. Over the last few years, the activist strategy for advancing transgender rights has leaned lightly on persuasion and heavily on browbeating, and within institutions dominated by liberals — including the media and the Democratic Party — this has been highly (though not universally) effective as a way to enforce preference falsification and to suppress ideas (and even information) disfavored by activists. This campaign has led to Democratic politicians taking positions they cannot properly defend or even explain, and contributed to a broad social perception that Democrats are out of touch and obsessed with niche identity issues to the exclusion of the broad public’s concerns.

In addition to involving a lot of histrionic unpleasantness and unfair attacks on people’s character, this strategy has ultimately failed at its underlying objective. Can you look at today’s political environment and say that getting Democrats to pretend they believe sex is irrelevant has worked as a strategy for advancing the interests of transgender Americans?

Now, following an election in which Democrats’ misadventures on this issue proved a significant political liability, they seem lost. Soon after taking office, President Trump issued an executive order seeking to impose sex-segregation on educational sports leagues. The NCAA followed suit, restricting participation in women’s sports to natal females, and drawing fairly muted blowback from Democrats, who mostly seem interested neither in defending nor in repudiating prior Democratic efforts to require many women’s teams to permit trans participation. As The New York Times described Democrats’ predicament in July, “Stuck in a widening gulf between the views of the party’s liberal voters and advocacy organizations on one side, and those of the broader American electorate on the other, many Democratic politicians had resolved to say as little as possible about the subject.”

When a few Democratic politicians have admitted they share the view that women’s sports should be reserved for females, there has been backlash from the left. After Rep. Seth Moulton declared "I have two little girls; I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” local Democrats (including public officials) protested him at a “Neighbors Against Hate” rally. They threatened a primary challenge. Speaking of histrionic and unfair attacks on people’s character, the chairwoman of the Democratic town committee in Salem, Massachusetts called Moulton a Nazi “cooperator.”

But even Moulton joined all but two House Democrats to vote against federal legislation to impose sex-segregation in sports. I understand Moulton’s explanation for his opposition, and I would ideally prefer to avoid making federal law here: not every issue requires a federal solution, and devolving decisions about how sports leagues should be organized should help ensure that local institutions serve the purposes that are desired by local communities. I also share Moulton’s concern that certain approaches to enforcing sex-segregation could lead to invasions of athletes’ privacy. But there are a couple of problems of Democrats’ own making that make it hard for them to argue (as many have recently) that the federal government should sit this one out and leave it to the leagues.

One is that Democrats already tried to impose their own federal solutions through multiple avenues. Nearly all Democrats in Congress (including Moulton) have voted for a bill, the Equality Act, that would have generally required sports leagues at public K-12 schools and universities to classify by gender identity instead of sex. After Democrats lost their House majority, the Biden administration then proposed a regulation under Title IX that would have offered more flexibility but still would have disallowed sex as the driving classifier for school sports leagues in many situations. (Biden ultimately withdrew the proposed regulation before he left office.) The other is that everyone has seen how the preference falsification campaign made it difficult for supporters of sex-segregated sports to make their voices heard as leagues, school boards and other institutions made decisions at the local level in recent years. Look, for example, at Megan McArdle’s account of the fear that people around Ivy League swimming felt about expressing their in-fact-overwhelmingly-popular view that Lia Thomas shouldn’t be swimming on the women’s team. This history undermines Democrats’ ability to convincingly position themselves as supporters of free and open local choice about how sports institutions will approach sex and gender.

And most importantly of all, Democrats need to win elections. I keep hearing about how Donald Trump and his Republican Party present a unique threat to our democratic institutions; I’m a little surprised the people who tell me this don’t always see an urgent need for the party to win more votes by running away from very unpopular stances on relatively minor policy issues. And on issues where the right policy answer flows from what the public wants — the question of how to organize a sports league depends on what the league is for, which depends on what people think sports are for, so it’s public opinion all the way down — the party should be especially responsive to polling. So if two thirds of the public says sports should be organized by sex — that this is one of the places where sex matters — the implication isn’t just that Democrats should say you’re allowed inside the tent if that’s your opinion and we won’t call you a bigot. It’s that there should be affirmative legislative support from many Democrats for sex classification in sports because that’s what so much of the public wants.

Very seriously,

Josh