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When a parent thinks of their daughter having the opportunity to play sports, they might picture themselves waking up early to drive her to the skating rink, or imagine they’ll spend hours of their lives in the car driving to tournaments. They may consider the countless weeks and months of training she will put in. They likely never consider the possibility that their daughter may be forced to undergo an exam of her reproductive anatomy in order to be eligible to take the field.
That’s exactly what’s being proposed by some three dozen bills that have been introduced across the U.S. in the past year (many since the start of the current legislative session) which claim to “protect” girls’ sports by attacking trans girls’ right to compete. Their arguments hinge on the inaccurate belief that trans girls have a “biological advantage” against cis girls in athletic competition and are therefore a threat to girls’ sports.
Who gets to compete as a woman, from college sports to the Olympics, is often based on hormone levels. And while there are plenty of arguments about why the science and evidence to support this line of thinking is faulty, there is another concern that’s so rarely discussed—ideas around bodily autonomy and consent, not just for the trans athletes these policies are attacking, but for cis girls and intersex athletes caught up in the transphobic witch hunt.
In sports, especially at the elite level, there is perhaps more of a need to know things about people’s bodies than there would be in other jobs. The body is the tool, the instrument required to do the job—elite athletes are subject to rigorous doping standards; student athletes receive physicals before competing. But why should a trans athlete (or any athlete) have to disclose what gender-affirming surgeries they have or have not had or what their body parts look like? And what happens when we ask children to undergo genital exams in order to compete in sports?
Under the guise of saving girls’ sports and protecting girls and women, the current and proposed legislation in Idaho, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, New Hampshire, and other states would require minor athletes to provide “proof” of their sex—that means trans girls, cis girls, and anyone suspected of being trans could have to undergo a genital exam before they’d be allowed to hit the court or the track or the field with their teammates (the original version of a bill introduced in Mississippi included this provision, but that was eventually removed from the bill that Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law last week). Many of the bills mirror the language of HB 500 in Idaho, which passed in 2020 and was subsequently enjoined in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union; it requires that a person “prove” their sex by confirming their chromosomes, reproductive anatomy, or endogenous testosterone levels.
Some bills go even further. One version of West Virginia’s anti-trans sports bill requires that students turn over their genetic information in order to establish eligibility to participate. In Georgia one of the anti-trans sports bills introduced would require that a panel of three physicians convene to examine the medical records and body—including the genitals—of a student athlete to verify sex as part of establishing eligibility. And at the federal level, Congressman Greg Steube of Florida introduced a bill that would threaten federal funding for schools with trans-inclusive sports policies and could potentially lead to genital exams to determine the sex of students.
“The latest wave of anti-trans sports bills represent an escalation of the already dangerous and intrusive bills that we saw last year,” says Chase Strangio, deputy director for Transgender Justice for the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project. “The volume of bills and the pace at which they are advancing in state legislatures is particularly concerning, and if passed, I expect that these will open the door to greater surveillance of and intrusion into the bodies of young people who are gender expansive or perceived to be gender nonconforming in some way.”
Some athletes—such as former Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar and tennis legend Martina Navratilova, founding members of the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group—and anti-LGBTQ+ rights groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, argue that transgender girls are taking opportunities away from cisgender girls. But health experts, trans advocates, and people who understand sports policy, agree the arguments put forth by proponents of these bills are misguided—and potentially dangerous.
First, it should go without saying that subjecting girls and women to invasive exams and requirements to “prove” their gender is not protecting women at all. Beyond that, there is no medical basis for these exams and absolutely “no health reason to examine someone’s genitals before engaging in sports activities,” says Leah Torres, M.D., an ob-gyn at the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa.
But most concerning is the potential these bills create for abuse—it’s not hard to draw a line between the kind of sexual abuse that advocates have spent decades fighting and the genital exams they are now willing to allow in order to exclude trans girls. Athletes who were subjected to abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics doctor who sexually assaulted hundreds of gymnasts under the guise of treatment, often talk about not knowing what was normal and believing they just had to accept the intrusive exams or “treatments” in order to continue competing in the sport they loved. This legislation potentially asks young girls to accept the same violation in exchange for the ability to participate in sports.
“There are already serious problems with sexual harassment and assault—particularly youth in girls’ sports—and opening the door into this type of expansive bodily intrusion is extremely dangerous,” Strangio says. “It does nothing to protect women and girls, as proponents of these bills claim—on the contrary, these bills are a threat to all women and girls, particularly Black and brown women and girls who are already disproportionately subjected to scrutiny and testing for being considered insufficiently feminine in the context of standards derived from white supremacist and patriarchal norms of gendered appearance.”
Human Rights Watch and the United Nations have called the kind of sex testing included in some of the proposed legislation a human rights violation. “We should be extremely skeptical and concerned about the notion that any athletes have to testify with their bodies in those ways in order for sports to be kept as a competitively ‘fair’ space,” warns Elizabeth Sharrow, associate professor of public policy and history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, whose work focuses on equity, policy, and Title IX. Caster Semenya, a middle-distance runner from South Africa, has spent over a decade fighting for her right to compete in elite sports after being subjected to invasive tests, including genital examinations, and demands that she take medication to lower her natural testosterone levels. In February she announced that she is bringing her case to the European Court of Human Rights.
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“The only thing to be gained from this legislation is to traumatize young people who are already at increased risks of depression and suicide,” Torres says, referring to the high rates of suicidality among trans youth. “This is not what our legislators are for. We are supposed to protect our children from predators, not subject them to predation.”
This is not just about sports, experts warn. These policies raise issues about bodily autonomy and consent that anyone who cares about women and girls should be incredibly worried about. Many girls—trans and cis—already understand how their fights are incredibly linked. In Idaho, 17-year-old Jane Doe, a cisgender girl athlete, sued the state because she feared her own privacy would be at stake if one of her competitors were to dispute her sex, recognizing how a threat to trans girls’ bodies is also a threat to her own.
Ultimately, transphobia and transmisogyny do more than just harm the trans women and girls who are at the receiving end of it—though that should be enough to condemn it. Its harms trickle outward, jeopardizing the safety of all girls. “For legislators to put forward a legal requirement to violate these basic tenants of medical practice and interpersonal respect is unthinkably cruel and inhumane,” says Torres. “There is no public good that comes from traumatizing teenagers by violating their bodily autonomy.”
Britni de la Cretaz is a freelance writer whose work focuses on the intersection of sports, gender, and culture. Their book, Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League, is forthcoming from Bold Type Books.
