If you are a transsexual, someone that has decided to change genders for whatever reason, then that is your business. I personally don’t care. What I would like to know is what does the community think about actions such as this one.
Andraya Yearwood, who is 15 years old, was born a male. He apparently identifies as a female but has not taken any action to act on it. Other than entering female only sports events at his school in Connecticut. Now, you can probably guess the outcome already.
.png)
Yearwood is on the right in the above photo
Cromwell High School gave Yearwood permission to compete on the girls track team as he entered High School (the previous year he competed as a male on the male team) according to The Day. Yearwood is apparently ‘successful’ against the girls he raced against so far.
“Andraya’s times in the 100 and the 200 are fast. A year ago, her 11.99 in the 100 would have won the Class M title and put her second at the State Open, .01 seconds behind the winning time. And Andraya ran Wednesday in cold conditions, and without starting blocks. She is expected to get faster,” says The Hartford Courant. Continuing Yearwood said, “It feels really good. I’m really happy to win both titles,” he said. “I kind of expected it. I’ve always gotten first, so I expected it to some extent. … I’m really proud of it.”
Kate Hall, a junior at Stonington High School which competed against Yearwood and Cromwell High, spent several years being the first across the finish line in female track meets. Kate was born a female and lives and competes as such. At this years Class M meet, Hall came in second against Yearwood. Hall posted a 12.83 while Yearwood posted a 12.66.
Hall said to the Courant, “There’s not much I can do,” said Hall after coming second. “Second doesn’t work for me. Yeah, it does, in a way, for the team. But you come into a state championship meet looking to win a state title. I had an awesome chance. I could have done a lot of things (differently). If I’d run my best, I could have won it.”
Hall’s track coach, Ben Browne, stated that Hall was “emotional” about the situation.
Yearwood’s mother, Ngozi Nnaji, discussed with the Courant, “I know they’ll say it is unfair and not right,” she said. “But my counter to that is: ‘Why not?’ She is competing and practicing and giving her all and performing and excelling based on her skills. Let that be enough. Let her do that and be proud of that.”
Yearwood had this to say to the Courant, “I do hope I inspire people, but not only with track. I hope it inspires people to not hold yourself back just because you’re scared of it or it is your first time doing it, or because of other people’s negativity.”
According to The Day the The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference “defers to the determination of the student and his or her local school regarding gender identification."
Let me remind you, Yearwood has apparently not taken any steps to becoming a female other than registering with the female track team Cromwell High School. Yearwood apparently said to many sources that there were no rude comments, no verbal attacks, over the situation.
This post received a 30% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @triverse! For more information, click here!
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.
There was an interesting situation earlier this year that shows the opposite angle of this. A transgender boy (born female) won a female wrestling tournament in Texas.
In that case he had been transitioning and taking testosterone, and actually wanted to compete in boys wrestling but the state ruled he must compete as the sex on his birth certificate, forcing him to wrestle girls or not compete at all.
The big difference is of course the hormonal steps toward physically transitioning, but your story and this raise interesting questions for certain!
According to the information available, the teen in my article has not begun taking any steps towards becoming a female so it is literally a teenage male running against teenage females.
I knew about that wrestling situation. Rather sad because those steps taken gave that person a perceived edge over on the competition. That is how I view it, clearly the state of Texas feels otherwise.
I don't feel like the state of Texas feels otherwise, I see it as more the laws and regulations not keeping pace and there being a general lack of transgender understanding. Everyone probably saw the inherent unfairness but went by the rule book to the letter.
I feel like it's on par with the ridiculous "bathroom bills" that require trans people to use the facility of their birth sex. Too often I think people equate transgender to being a transvestite/cross dresser.
Blanket politics and hard rules will probably never work to address situations like these. Hopefully a bit of common sense and individual review will prevail in the end.
Good points.
Hi! Have you heard about @krwhale? It is similiar with @randowhale. For your information please click on.