UCP's transgender sport ban steps in U.S. culture wars again

Time for another round of vicious compliance.

I’ve written about Danielle Smith and the UCP’s transgender sport ban before; many times. I attempted it again yesterday and was overwhelmed with how awful this legislation is for those kids, and the ones who will be targeted over not looking “feminine enough” despite having all the right body parts from birth.

As the UCP’s pilot project for targeting teenagers began September 1, parents of girls — and only girls — who wish to play sport in Edmonton Public Schools must sign an affidavit attesting to the sex assigned to their child at birth.

As a bonus for people who prefer girls to look a certain way, anyone who thinks a player isn’t feminine enough can file an official complaint demanding to know whether that player was born with the right genitalia to play the game. Any challenges to a girl athlete’s femininity must also be reported to the government.

Yes; challenges must be reported… to… the government.

I also hate that I had to write “girl athletes” but this is the UCP’s influence on the “freest” province in Canada in 2025.

The juxtapositions just keep coming.

While I was going down that bad path again, something else occurred to me: transgender girls give up a lot to play on a junior and senior high school team with girl athletes for a few years.

These aren’t even full-year teams — it’s three months or so each year.

In junior and senior high schools.

We are not the U.S., and we are not facing the same issues they are — yet.

In the U.S., where post-secondary education is purposely out of reach for those without the ability to pay $100,000 (and more) for an undergraduate degree program, the best the rest of the kids can hope for is a scholarship.

That’s not the case here where we have publicly-funded post-secondary that allows students to access higher learning at a quarter of the cost, and college athletics are nowhere near what they are in the U.S.. We also have scholarships but there are far fewer for sport than there are for academics.

College sports in the U.S. is nothing like it is in Canada. It’s big money down there and it’s a chance to secure a spot and play professionally; but not if you’re a girl.

I was reminded that there is no high paying professional sport team for women, here or there. Hell, even our CFL teams are part time. Those guys on the field every weekend have day jobs. And the girls?

Kidding, of course. There are no pro football teams for girls.

There is the WNBA, which has a decent salary, but nowhere near what the boys make. I’m simply saying if going pro is the goal, girls simply don’t have as many avenues as boys.

I was also reminded that hormone testing is a thing in the Olympics and they don’t even like people with vaginas from birth to have bodies that naturally produce more testosterone. It’s not like the junior high basketball team is an “in” for transgender girls to get themselves to the Olympics.

It’s not just about the fact that there’s no real benefit to being a transgender girl in secondary school sports, it’s that I don’t see the benefit to segregated sport in school at all.

Insert my regular reminder that the only reason we have girls teams at all is because they weren’t allowed to play sports lest it harm their fragile feminine parts.

My sport experience was in smaller, rural centres rather than an urban one, but that’s why this sort of legislation is even more nonsensical to me as a blanket policy.

My experience in junior and senior high school sports, and my daughter’s, was in rural Alberta where they might be begging for enough players to form an actual team. If those smaller schools are lucky, they might get three or four actual athletes, and if they’re really lucky, they might also get some with natural advantages like height, or speed, or hand-eye coordination.

In both mine and my daughter’s cases, where we were blessed with some of those natural advantages, we were also in athletic clubs that had absolutely nothing to do with the schools.

It’s also the case that on a junior or senior high school team, at least in my experience, everyone who makes the team gets the chance to play. While some specialized athletic clubs might just take your money, they are typically focused on winning and their players come from multiple jurisdictions not available to one school; they pick the best of the best.

Junior and senior high teams get what they get.

I’ve heard the justifications from parents who are really invested in their girl athlete’s sport. In those cases, their girls also played for athletic clubs — not on school teams.

That, to me, is the difference.

I’m no longer a competitive athlete and I am perhaps more realistic about the likelihood of a professional or semi-professional career for those who are. Many dream, only a select few will reach that dream, and far fewer still will have to prove they were female at birth to “make it”.

Junior and senior high school sports for girls in Canada are not seeding grounds for pro-athletes and they should not be about excluding students, especially from voluntary participation on school teams.

Most of us start school sports in mixed gender phys-ed, or intramural teams that are randomly labeled “blue” or “green”. And then we’re told we can’t play together anymore, or compete against one another. That led to a decade of me winning every race I entered, ever field day, because I was the fastest girl in my class throughout. I hated it, and my classmates — sorry, my “girl classmates” — probably hated it, too. I had no competition, and they were trying for second place for years. It sucked for all of us.

I’d like to see the Edmonton Public School Board practice more “vicious compliance” and get the non-gendered teams up and running at the same time, because here’s the thing about competitive people: they’ll choose the team that’s going to win and they don’t care if that’s a mixed gender team — only that it’s the best one.

Junior and senior high is already a place of self-exclusion and group exclusion and there’s simply no point in doing that to a couple of kids who just want to play volleyball for a few months out of the year.

It’s not like they’re going to take the place of some other girl in the big leagues.

Maybe that will be a story for another generation.

In the meantime, schools in Alberta should work to include more kids in every opportunity they have available. We’ve managed to erase the stigma of girls taking shop class and boys taking cosmetology, so I have absolute faith that we can find a way to let them play volleyball, or basketball, at school for a few months out of the year when they’re teenagers.

Ffs.