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.