Targeting transgender athletes ignores the real problem

Republicans in the New Hampshire House of Representatives last week narrowly passed a bill targeting transgender student athletes on a party-line vote. Sponsors claim that we need House Bill 1205 in order to protect girls and women who want to play sports in school and to protect Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The bill now goes to the Senate.

I spent six years researching Title IX for a book on its 50-year history. Here’s the problem with HB 1205 and the arguments behind it: Their goal of excluding transgender students is the opposite of Title IX’s goal of including all students in the benefits of education, which includes sports. And if anyone should be targeted for stealing thousands of athletic playing opportunities from girls and women, it should be boys’ and men’s athletics programs, not a very tiny number of transgender students.

Dividing school sports by sex wasn’t a given when Congress passed Title IX. This was just one organizing structure considered. Some civil rights advocates opposed the idea, knowing from experience that “separate” is never “equal.” (It turns out they were right.) The Department of Education considered competing ideas like organizing teams by height, weight, and other factors instead of by sex. Or using an Olympic model in which boys’ and girls’ teams compete at the same time and the joint score determines which school wins a match (which would ensure investment in girls’ sports). Those ideas were ahead of their time, and Title IX advocates settled on dividing sports by sex just to get enforcement rolling.

If HB 1205 sponsors really want to protect girls’ access to sports, they would draft legislation addressing the longstanding and well-known discrimination in our schools and colleges that unfairly give lots more money and playing opportunities to boys and men. It’s easy to see the extent of the athletic imbalances in colleges by going to the federal Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act database (EADA). For high schools, look at the website of Champion Women, a legal nonprofit that did a major public service by crunching raw data supplied by U.S. high schools for their athletic programs.

How big is the real problem? Let’s look at just three examples related to the three Republican senators who sponsored HB 1205 along with nine Republican state representatives.

Sen. William Gannon is a graduate of Saint Anselm College in Manchester, where women are 61 percent of students but get only 40 percent of the playing positions in sports. Men are only 39 percent of students but get 50 percent of athletic scholarship aid and a whopping 80 percent of the athletics recruiting budget. Saint Anselm is depriving 107 women athletes of a chance to play. The college redirects $430,439 in student aid from women to men (most likely illegally) and shortchanges the recruiting budget for women’s athletics by $33,337, according to the most recent data on the EADA.

Sen. Ruth Ward’s district includes the town of Stoddard, where teenagers attend Keene High School and the closest college is Keene State College. The high school needs to add 17 playing positions for girls to match their share of enrollment. The college owes the women’s athletics program $2,892 for recruiting that it uses to recruit men instead.

Sen. Howard Pearl lives in Loudon, whose high schoolers go to Merrimack Valley High School. The school is depriving 33 girls of the chances to play sports that would be available to them if administrators divvied up athletics opportunities fairly by share of enrollment, Champion Women calculated.

Our flagship public institution of higher education, the University of New Hampshire, shunts 23 playing positions that should be for women over to the men’s athletics program. UNH shortchanges women $635,355 in athletic scholarship aid and $61,863 in recruitment funding.

Look at virtually any high school, college, or university in the country and you’ll find similar discrimination that has been going on for more than 50 years. Champion Women estimates that U.S. high schools as a whole need to add 539,958 playing positions for girls in order to comply with Title IX. U.S. colleges and universities are robbing women athletes of more than a billion dollars in athletic aid – $1,092,028,197.

That’s not chump change. But we may be chumps if we accept the inaccurate interpretations of Title IX and its history used to justify HB 1205, producing fearmongering more than fairness.