Opinion

OPINION: Transgender Athletes

Bellwood-Antis Senior Evan Frye

Evan Frye, Student Contributor
November 25, 2019

Imagine being a girl and dedicating your entire life to a sport such as track. You work hard and get trained by your coaches for years, trying to beat the school record for the event you run. Your senior year is coming up and you know that this is your year. Everyone in the past that has beaten your times are gone now. Everyone is getting excited for you, but then a dilemma pops up. One of the male track athletes from last year has transitioned to a woman, and is now going to be joining the women’s track team.

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The transgender athletes will always have unfair advantages over the rest of the female athletes.

It may seem okay at first, but once the seasons rolls by, its not okay. The new transgender athlete absolutely destroys the school record within the first couple of meets and continues to break the record again and again as the season goes on. They get times that you could never physically get. All your hard work and dreams of beating the school record is crushed because of a trans-women athlete that is competing with unfair advantages.

This is my main reason on why I am against transgender athletes competing in sports according to which gender they identify as.

Transgender athletes should participate in sports according to the gender that they were born as. This is only fair because transgender female athletes have unfair advantages over cisgender female athletes. Although transgender female athletes must go through a whole year of transitioning before being permitted to compete in the NCAA, they still have high levels of testosterone in their bodies, which allows the human body to be stronger. Cisgender female athletes don’t have testosterone at the same levels. Also, transgender female athletes have bigger bone structure, greater lung capacity, and larger heart size even after they transition. Again, the trans-athletes have even more advantages over the cisgendered. It is simply unfair. And because of these advantages, there have been many trans-athletes that have broken records lately. For example, a transgender female weightlifter from New Zealand named Laurel Hubbard was a two-time champion at the Pacific Games. Another example would be June Eastwood, a transgender female that ran cross country in college. She was originally on the men’s team at the University of Montana, but then transitioned and joined women’s team. Throughout Eastwood’s college career on the team, she had broken several records. As a highly competitive man, her personal best time in the 1,500-meter run was just 0.12 seconds off from breaking the female world record. This just seems outrageous that people are letting this happen.

I do not agree that transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in certain sports according to which gender they identify as. It is simply not fair for the cisgender athletes who have worked hard to achieve their goals. The transgender athletes will always have unfair advantages over the rest of the female athletes. Having transgender athletes compete with the gender in which they identify is just absurd.