One thought is: Does it matter?
Ultimately, this is a high school competition. What is the desired outcome of a high school competition? Community spirits, sportsmanship, celebration of effort, and winning are some of these. For the first three, whether a person is male or female doesn't really affect the good outcomes.
Winning of course, is the big one. People with more testosterone in their bodies will have more muscle mass and other performance enhancing abilities relative to someone with less testosterone. So this would affect who wins or not. So what does winning matter for?
Winning may mean entry into higher levels of competition. In this case, it depends if those higher levels of competition have hormone testing or categorize based on chromosomes rather than legal gender. My understanding is that world class competitions tend toward hormone testing.
Winning may mean, someone who otherwise would have won would now have 2nd place. Again, I ask what does this mean? If it blocks entrance into higher competition, is there a policy for the 2nd place finisher to enter higher competition in lieu of a local competitor who may not qualify (due to hormonal testing etc.) Does the transgender competitor intend to move forward to higher competition?
Winning may mean lower self esteem for the person who may otherwise have gotten 1st place. In this case, it seems fairly transparent that the first place winner was a trans-woman. Nobody seems to be hiding the fact, so while the winner of the girls event is clear, the 2nd placer and everyone knows they're the top placing non-trans person to win the event. Ditt for the 3rd and 4th placers. The difference is a medal. Maybe someone will be bummed out they didn't get written up in the yearbook. (Does it matter?)
Your comments about higher level competition bring a good argument to the table. As far as I know, awards and scholarships, etc are given based on placement at meets like this. I have not heard of scholarships and such being offered to 2nd place though I am sure it happens.
Transgender competitors are still quite a new phenomena in sports. I will see if I can find out more about the scholarships and higher level competition for transgender high school competitors. That is a great angle for another article.
Would be glad to continue the discussion on your next post. Drop me a reply when you post it!
I would suspect that many scholarships would eventually take that into account and that the issue is probably well known in that community. Once money gets involved, everyone has questions to ask!
Curious to see if you find more facts.
Considering this article brought out some good discussion, rather than going "dark" like it would have on Facebook, I am even more interested in finding out how scholarships work when transgender sports participants are involved.
Facebook and most blogging platforms are terrible ways to have a good discussion, since they don't even have threaded conversations. I still cannot believe that the large majority of websites still tap out at one reply level for comments. It squanders such a huge opportunity for building non-superficial communities.
Just wanted to let you know that so far, the only thing I can find on the transgender situation and scholarships is that there are LGBT specific scholarships and then there are the more traditional scholarships. There is no hard facts about how scholarships handle transgender students versus those competing under their birth gender.
The only information I have found directly pointed at transgender students is college to college specific. Some, such as Bates College, allows transgender students to compete as the other gender as long as they have been taking some form of sexual reassignment medicine (inhibitors for instance for males transitioning to female). Men going female that have not been taking inhibitors for at least one year cannot compete with women though women that identify as a man can compete on either side (even though they are not taking medicine for their reassignment). It has become a college to college policy thing. I may end up focusing on one college, or a region so that the article is not 50,000+ words long.
The NCAA is the only governing body I could find information on that would address transgender athletes. They require one year of hormone treatment or inhibitors, as the case may be, before the person is eligible for playing on their desired genders team.
Most high schools allow transgender students to compete under their desired gender without any medical proof of any kind of effort for reassignment being taken.
Still, no information on how scholarships specifically pick athletes to receive, or be offered, college financial assistance at the high school level. This being, do they take into account someone like Yearwood (featured in the article) and then offer female athletic scholarships to the "second place" person on a team or do they completely ignore the whole student body at a particular school and focus on ones with stringent gender athlete rules? Still working on that one but so far, nothing.
If anyone has any information on this, I am all ears.
Definitely interesting. One option for narrowing the field on investigating scholarships could be to focus on the ones local to this particular news article. It's an arbitrary way to filter, but might be appropriate in the context of telling an interesting story.
Another option could be focusing on some of the scholarships offering the most money, again an interesting way to structure a story.
Thanks for the ideas. I will definitely dive back in with those in mind and see what I come up with. There is a story here, and one worth telling. Maybe some stigmas can be removed with facts on how scholarships are handled.