Swimmer Lia Thomas becomes first transgender athlete to win an NCAA D-I title

[Bucky]

66. Right, but the basic fairness of trans athletes competing in women's sports is the controversy

Viscerally, it's easy to understand how this would bother people. In the abstract, the imagination renders a personal contest between a bulky stereotype versus a typical hard-working female athlete. It feels, in general, like the old Andy Kaufman routine about intergender wrestling. The joke was in him putting our own gender prejudices right up in our faces.

That's why we have to look at the numbers to get the truth. As John Dickinson said at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, "We must rely on history. Reason will mislead us." We must look at the statistics, because our imaginations will tell us the wrong story. The vast majority of transgender athletes never excel in their field. This is about in proportion to vast majority of born-female athletes never taking a championship. A champion is a rarity and well worth celebrating. Across the thousands of athletic victories in women's sports every year, five or six will belong to someone who, painfully, discovered in their own life that they had a female soul and desire to have a female body to put her own lives in balance. From this point each of them began a slow and heroic path through this world.

The cynical take we hear the most--that trans athletes will overwhelm the field of women's sports, that a bunch of second rate male athletes will simply get their wangs chopped off just to pick up a trophier scholarship--is cruel, harmful, and out of touch with the complex human realities that form the story of each individual who goes through this complex journey.