You know who I was thinking about the other day? Jackie Mitchell. If you’ve never heard of her,
she was a baseball player in the 1930s. Jackie was a pitcher. As a child,
one of her neighbors was the great pitcher Dazzy Vance, who taught Jackie how to throw a sinker.
She was good. For a short time, she actually played professional organized ball, only the
second woman to do that up to that time. And, she didn’t play for all-women’s teams either,
like in the All-American Girls league that started up during World War II — she played
for the Chattanooga Lookouts, a class-A minor league team.
On April 2, 1931, she was brought in as a relief pitcher during an exhibition
game against the New York Yankees. The first batter she faced was Babe Ruth.
Jackie struck out Babe Ruth on four pitches. The Babe was not happy — he argued so heatedly with
the umpire that a few of his teammates had to pull him away and walk him back to the dugout.
The next batter Jackie faced was Lou Gehrig. She struck him out swinging on three pitches.
Ruth was in the waning years of his career — he would only play five more seasons in the majors,
including that year — while Gehrig was still very much in his prime. But, as it turned out,
they both had outstanding seasons in 1931 — they each hit forty-six home runs,
tied for the most in the major leagues; Gehrig finished with a batting average of
.343, Ruth with .373; Ruth led the majors in walks, on-base percentage, and slugging,
while Gehrig led the majors in plate appearances, runs, RBI, and total bases, led the American
League in hits, and finished second in the vote for the league’s most valuable player.
Two of the greatest baseball players who ever lived, each on the cusp of an outstanding season,
struck out by a 17 year-old girl.
Unfortunately, Jackie didn’t go on to have a great career
in professional baseball — she played for some barnstorming teams for a few years,
retired when she realized she was being treated more like a carnival attraction than an athlete,
never made it to the major leagues. And yet, there is that brief, tantalizing moment in history where
it seems like Jackie Mitchell might turn out to be a transformative, revolutionary figure.
I’m not really a sports fan — other than baseball and a handful of others that I
follow very sporadically. But, I know that throughout the history of athletics,
there have been such transformative figures that have raised the bar
and redefined what it means to be great in their particular field of competition.
In baseball, you think of people like Babe Ruth, or Willie Mays. In boxing, Jack Johnson,
who was such a dominant World Heavyweight Champion that for a time promoters ran out of
competitive opponents to match him against; a generation later, there was Joe Louis,
who held the World Heavyweight Title for twelve years. In basketball, Wilt Chamberlain,
and Michael Jordan. In golf — which many people consider a sport — Tiger Woods. In Tennis,
Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Roger Federrer, and perhaps the greatest of them all, Serena Williams.
I bet some of you can think of the names of other athletes in those sports who I’ve left out, or
their counterparts in sports I haven’t mentioned. Every sport has athletes like that, people whose
abilities enable them to so outpace their competition that it feels like they’re playing
an entirely different game than everyone else. They’re so good and make it look so easy that,
for a time at least, no one else can touch them. It almost seems unfair.
It’s not just major league professional sports, either. Olympic sports have such
once-in-a-generation standard-bearers, too. Take, for instance, swimming. Michael
Phelps. The most decorated Olympic athlete ever. Twenty-eight Olympic medals — a record. Of those,
twenty-three are gold medals — also a record. He won the most medals of any athlete at four
consecutive Olympic games. He set thirty-nine world records over the course of his career.
Phelps is perhaps the most dominant athlete in the history of organized
sports. His performances were so good, and in his prime he seemed so unbeatable,
that there were some who thought him too good to be true, insisting he must have
been using performance enhancing drugs. He wasn’t. He was actually that good.
Which is not to say that Michael Phelps didn’t benefit from certain advantages.
He’s six-foot-four-inches tall, with a long torso and short legs for a man of his height,
which gives him more power and creates less drag as he powers through the water. He has
big hands and his elbows are double-jointed, meaning his arms are essentially flippers. And,
tests indicate his body produces a much lower amount of lactic acid than the average person,
which enables his muscles to recover faster with less rest.
Phelps enjoys these advantages as a result of his genetics. They definitely gave him
a significant competitive edge over his fellow swimmers, but we didn’t consider Michael Phelps
to be a cheater because he was taller, or had a longer torso, or was double-jointed,
or produced less lactic acid. He was simply an athlete doing what athletes always do,
using the physical gifts he’d been given, and working hard to reach his potential.
Besides Jackie Mitchell, there’s another athlete I was thinking about recently.
This athlete is also a woman, though her sport isn’t baseball — like Michael Phelps,
it’s swimming. And, like Michael Phelps, she has certain physical characteristics that give her an
edge over her competition. She’s tall — taller than all but four members of the 2020 U.S.
Olympic women’s swim team. Her body uses oxygen with remarkable efficiency,
giving her stamina and the ability to unleash explosive bursts of speed. Like Phelps she is
strong and seemingly tireless. Like Phelps, she regularly not only wins
but dominates to such a degree that some observers have remarked that it just doesn’t seem fair.
The athlete I’m talking about is Katie Ledecky. She’s won gold at three consecutive Olympic games,
a total of seven Olympic gold medals. She’s set fourteen world records during her career,
three of which she still holds alongside three more U.S. national records.
As a student at Stanford University, she also competed in the NCAA for two seasons,
setting records, winning individual titles, and leading Stanford’s women’s swim team
to the team title both years, the second time with the largest margin of victory in 25 years.
One of the individual championships Katie Ledecky won during her NCAA career
was the 500-meter freestyle. This year — just about a week and a half ago,
in fact — that event was won by a swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania named Lia Thomas,
who became the first trans woman to win an NCAA Division 1 national championship,
and who, according to some people, is the harbinger of the death of women’s sports.
The argument goes something like this: Lia Thomas was assigned male at birth, and spent the
vast majority of her life living as a man, and therefore has certain physical advantages over
her competitors as a result of her “male body.” It’s unfair, they say, for a “biological man”
to compete against “biological women,” and if trans women gain a foothold in women’s sports,
eventually they’ll take over and cis women — or
“real women,” as many of the people making this argument would put it — will be pushed out.
There are several reasons why I do not buy this argument. Firstly, it’s unconcealed fucking
bigotry, and I tend not to find that sort of thing persuasive. When people describe Lia Thomas,
or any trans woman, as a “biological man” or otherwise question or deny the legitimacy of
their womanhood, those people are ignorant at best, and more often than not are making
a deliberate attempt to vilify, dehumanize, and erase trans women and trans people in general.
Second, the physical advantages Lia Thomas is accused of benefiting from don’t really exist.
Thomas is medically transitioning, which includes undergoing hormone replacement therapy, or HRT.
One of the effects of the type of HRT Thomas is taking is loss of strength and muscle mass.
She was a member of the men’s swim team at Penn prior to transitioning,
and all but one of her personal bests come from that time, before she began HRT.
True, since transitioning and joining the women’s team, Thomas has set a few records — which doesn’t
really prove anything as far as this argument goes — she’s a great swimmer — but she’s hardly been
unbeatable. She won the NCAA championship in the women’s 500 freestyle, but she also competed
in the 200 and 100 freestyle, and she didn’t win either of those — she
finished fifth in the 200 and dead last in the 100. Also, while she won the 500,
her winning time was over nine seconds slower than the record set by Katie Ledecky.
So, what’s the thing that’s supposed to kill women’s sports? The fact that one trans woman
won a national championship in one of the three events in which she competed? I don’t mean to
disparage Lia Thomas’s achievement, because she is truly an amazing athlete who should be proud
of her accomplishments, but let’s try to maintain some perspective here,
okay? Lia Thomas is a great athlete, but she’s not a game-changer. She’s not Katie Ledecky.
Third, even if she were — so what? Suppose that Lia Thomas hadn’t just won
that one NCAA title — suppose she dominated the entire competition,
just ran away with it, took home the gold in every event in which she competed, won by just
embarrassing margins. Would that mean the death of women’s sports? Why? Because one athlete
showed up who was head-and-shoulders above the pack? I don’t see why that should be the case,
considering the fact that, as I was saying earlier, that’s how sports work.
When Babe Ruth moved from the pitcher’s mound to the outfield, started playing
every day and smacking thirty, forty or fifty home runs a season, that radically changed
the game of baseball. In very short order it went from being a game where the offensive strategy
focused on getting runners on base and pushing one run over the plate at a time, to a game where
the offense was dominated by power hitters. If you were a singles-hitter or a pretty good baserunner,
but you weren’t capable of belting ‘em outta the ballpark like Babe Ruth, or Rogers Hornsby,
or Lou Gehrig, or Jimmie Foxx, or any of the other sluggers who eventually followed in Ruth’s wake,
maybe you thought that the way the game changed wasn’t fair, because the standard for what made a
great player, or at least a great hitter, had been redefined in a way less suited to your skills.
It happened in baseball, it happened in basketball, it happened in tennis, it’s happened
in every sport, including swimming. Athletes get better, records get broken, the bar gets raised,
some people who used to be able to hang with the best find that they can’t any longer — things
change. The only difference between a cis athlete who revolutionizes their sport and a trans athlete
who revolutionizes their sport is that the trans athlete was assigned the wrong gender at birth.
Lia Thomas is not a threat to women’s sports. How could she be? She’s a woman,
competing against other women. If you think she isn’t a woman,
you’re wrong, and you’re a bigot — maybe work on that.
Trans women in general are not a threat to women’s sports, nor are they a threat to
cis women competing in women’s sports. What is a threat to women’s sports is the fact that here in
the United States they get so little respect that they often make more headlines for being dragged
into trumped-up moral panics like this than they do for the accomplishments of their athletes.
Most of the people raising the alarm about Lia Thomas don’t actually care
about the state of women’s sports, just like they didn’t actually care
when they tried this same kind of disingenuous concern trolling about this exact same issue a
few years ago — I had a front row seat for some of that, because it was being pushed
by a few fairly prominent members of the atheist/skeptic community here on YouTube — I
thought they were uninformed, intolerant dicks then, and I still think it now.
If the state of women’s sports does matter to you, instead of spewing phony outrage,
why not try actually supporting women’s sports and women athletes? Watch women’s sports on TV
once in a while. If you’re a sports fan already, there’s no reason not to — I love the Olympics,
and some of the most thrilling events I watched at this year’s winter games were in women’s
hockey. I definitely did not get the impression I was watching an inferior product to the men’s.
Better yet, if there’s a women’s sporting event near you,
go watch it in person. Bring a friend. Buy tickets, buy merch. If you have a good time,
talk about it with other sports fans in your life, see if they’d like it,
too. Support girls’ athletics at your local schools just the same as you would the boys’.
When you talk about sports, don’t forget to include women’s sports in the conversation. Treat
women’s sports with the same degree of respect and importance with which you treat men’s sports.
Or don’t! Look, I’m not saying you have to like or support women’s sports. Like I said earlier,
I’m not really that big of a sports fan, period. You don’t have to care
about women’s sports at all. Just stop pretending to care about women’s sports
when what you really care about is using them to hurt trans people.
I am the most vanilla, typical, cis-hetero white dude you will ever meet, and fellow cis-folk,
I am telling you: we have nothing to worry about. Trans people are not a threat to us,
in any way. They may sometimes challenge us, but that’s only because we need to grow.
Maybe you’re confused, maybe you don’t “get” the whole trans thing. That’s okay. There are lots of
ways to educate yourself, so you don’t have to be confused any more — most of it really isn’t that
complicated. But, you don’t even need to know that much to know that you shouldn’t mistreat people,
or seek to deny people opportunities, or deprive
people of their rights and their ability to lead a free and happy life, because of who they are.
And, you know what? If educating yourself about trans people before
you share an opinion about their effect on the state of women’s sports or anything else
sounds like too much work, sitting down and keeping your fucking mouth shut
is always an option, and maybe it’s the option you should take.