International Women’s Day 2021

This morning I woke with intentions of writing today in a reflection of how the women in my life have inspired, shaped, and built me into the person I am today. Since I live in America and specifically South Dakota that plan has changed.

Let me begin by addressing the style in which this will be written. In the past I have received considerable pushback when I write about (our) children when it is true that I don’t, personally, have any children. I look to the youth of our society as all of our children. I will never say (my) children because I do not have any. And, I will not address them as (your) children because I will never tell someone how to personally raise their child. When I speak about our daughters I am thinking about my nieces, friends’ daughters, neighbor girls, and the rest of the young women who I am surrounded by.

I can’t help but to think about how hollow it rings for us to continue telling our daughters they can do anything and then point out one example of where this isn’t true. We never wholly believe as a society that they can beat a man. The news in South Dakota today is the perfect example of this and is being echoed throughout red-states and conservative conversations around our country.

Today, after being revived through a smoke-out process, the S.D. Senate passed HB1217. It is a bill that is sold as a protection of women’s sports by banning transgender girls from competing in women’s sports. It is a bill that was tabled by the Senate committee that oversaw it after passing through the House. This committee pointed to the fact that for nearly a decade the South Dakota High School Athletic Association has had a policy in place for handling cases of trans-individuals who wish to compete in high school sports. Yet, the bill’s sponsors revived it and made sure it was brought to a floor vote, where it passed with a tally of 20-15.

These bills that are labeled as a protection of women’s sports are far from protection and are more accurately an attack on trans-girls.

On International Women’s Day 2021, the state that I reside in has chosen to show our daughters, again, that it is not possible to win against a man. By telling them that we don’t feel you can compete against what some perceive as a boy, even though trans-girls are in fact girls. I have yet to see the flip side of this argument as it pertains to trans-boys. With this dismissal we are doubling down on this belief that girls cannot beat boys and women cannot beat men. We don’t feel the need to protect boys’ sports from what some perceive as a girl, even though trans-boys are boys. Letting every little girl in this state (and across this country) know we don’t feel she can ever win against the males in her life.

In my youth this topic would have been one where I felt completely different than I do today. In my younger years, my narrowmindedness would have probably landed me in support of these attacks. At that time, with my circle of friends and lack of exposure to the world, I most likely would have been one who thought it was up to me to decide who is or isn’t a girl (or boy). I wouldn’t have thought twice about disclosing to my school my birth gender and submitting a certification document to them. Now, I see this as a birth-genitalia register that will only be challengeable through a court process (allowing another individual or school to decide if I am the gender I say and it must now match my birth certificate.)

This has never been about protecting our daughters’ sports. If we want to protect our daughters’ sports we would demand equal time in training rooms, and equal pay for their coaches (to that of our sons’ sports), and equal funding for equipment and facilities. Those are the ways we protect women’s sports. Making all of our children disclose their birth gender and compete in that gender’s sports only protects one thing. It is there to protect some of us from having uncomfortable conversations. Conversations that are none of our business in the first place. It is not my business whether someone was identified as a girl at birth and now is the same. It is okay to ask what pronouns someone would prefer to be addressed by. It is not okay to force someone to live as someone they are not.

Our daughters will already have to compete harder against the males in their lives. They will have to work harder for the same money, conquer more for the same acknowledgment, and be more perfect for the same respect. We must stop inadvertently telling them that we believe they will fail. Instead, we can work toward eliminating that disparity for them and with them. When our society wholly believes that women are equal to men, there will no longer be a need to protect one from the other. Competition will still be possible, it will just start from the same line after that and ensure the prize at the finish will not change based on who would win. There can still be women’s sports, men’s sports, and mixed sports. We just can’t continue to assign at birth which way someone must compete.

On this International Women’s Day, I challenge each person in my life to accept a simple truth: trans-girls are girls and trans-boys are boys. With this acceptance we can move to protecting all of our children and allowing them to succeed at accomplishing all of their dreams.