Via Power Plays, an interview with author Katie Barnes on ‘Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates’

Hi friends! My good friend, ESPN writer Katie Barnes, has a phenomenal book coming out next week, “Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates.” It’s a must-read for those who want to know more about transgender inclusion — or exclusion, as it too-often the case — in sports.

Katie was nice enough to join me for an interview on the Power Plays Podcast. You can listen to part of it on the free podcast, or become a paying subscriber to Power Plays in order to listen to the entire thing.

Here are some excerpts from my conversation with Katie. These answers have been lightly edited for clarity, and I highly recommend you listen to the entire podcast episode if you have time! It’s great.

On why they decided to share their personal story with readers:
As the author of the book, I felt that the reader was entitled to know a little bit about me, especially on this topic. I have found that there’s so much rhetoric, everybody has an opinion and is coming from their particular perspective. And oftentimes, those things can be obfuscated by rhetoric. It felt like … on this particular topic, in this particular moment, the best way to maintain credibility, and to have an impact in the way that I wanted to have would be to be as transparent as possible, and that meant also talking about my own background, and sharing stories about myself.

On why they interviewed anti-trans voices for the book:
I think part of it is that I truly, fundamentally believe that those interviews are really important. When it comes to journalism, for me, I believe that if an issue or a topic or an idea is controversial, which this is, then by definition, there are going to be multiple perspectives. And I think that voice selection is really important. You know, I don’t talk to just anybody. But like, Barbara Ehardt wrote the first bill in Idaho. So I’m going to talk to her I want to know why she made the choice to do that. What was the story behind that? How did that happen? Who is she? Why does she care about this? I think seeking to answer those questions and presenting her perspective, in a way that is fair and is I think reflective of the conversation that we had, that’s important.

And it goes back when I say earlier, from a credibility perspective, the reality is that for many people who I hope find this book, if we know that this is controversial and there are only voices from one particular side that are being presented, then the text loses credibility from a journalistic perspective. And it also loses credibility with an audience. And for me, I want to answer the questions as holistically as I possibly can, and that means including perspectives from a wide range of people. On a personal level, is it hard sometimes to listen to certain perspectives because I am nonbinary and I am trans? Yes, of course, that is hard. But my job in that moment is, it’s not an adversarial interview. I’m not trying to change anybody’s mind.

On what they hope people get from revisiting the stories of successful trans athletes, such as wrestler Mack Beggs from Texas, runners Andrea Yearwood and Terry Miller from Connecticut, and Princeton swimmer Lia Thomas:
So much of those particular stories that are still talked about publicly, they’ve kind of been vaporized into the public narrative. It’s like this ethereal mist of Mack Beggs and Andrea Yearwood and Lia Thomas. It’s like they’re not real people, they are clouds. And I want to, first of all, remind folks that they are people and they have stories and they have lives. I think that was really important. And also – for me, it’s not necessarily correcting the narrative per se, but it is about, you know, re-centering those stories in a fact-based way, and in some ways cutting through the narrative and saying, like, “This is Mack Beggs, and this is actually what he went through.”

On the consequences of the outsized attention and scrutiny on a handful of successful transgender athletes:
In addition to the specific athletes that I talked about in the book, there are a number of athletes whose voices are not included in the book for various reasons, who are still trying to play or who have been unable to continue to play because of legislative action taken in their states The reality is that 23 states have some sort of restrictive policy or law on the books. And with that comes the natural effect that there are a number of transgender children who are not able to play school sports in a manner that’s consistent with their gender identity. And so, from that perspective, of course, that’s going to push trans kids out of sports. There’s just no way around that. And that’s where we are right now. And that’s a hard thing to sit with.

On finding nuance in the conversation about testosterone:
I think for those who are in favor of restrictive policy, I think they over-index on the importance of testosterone. And for those who are in favor of inclusive policy, I think they downplay the importance of testosterone by sort of saying it doesn’t matter, or it’s not an issue. The reality is that both of those perspectives are wrong, in my opinion – I shouldn’t say that they’re wrong, I would say that there’s more nuance than is currently represented in the conversation. In terms of what level of sport we’re talking about, to be clear, when we’re talking about youth sports, K-12 sports, there is no real reason to be talking about testosterone in my personal opinion.

So, when is it appropriate to consider testosterone? And for me, that’s elite level sports, you know, competitive college, etc. We’re talking about, you know, somebody who’s gone through testosterone-driven puberty, what are the effects that they are actually given metabolically and physiologically, how much do they maintain those effects after testosterone suppression? From a physiological standpoint, is there still a competitive advantage in many respects

I think the way that people have been engaging with this topic, for those who are in favor of restrictive policy, or who thinks that restrictive policy isn’t that big of a deal, or, you know, they think that maybe it should be done for various reasons, is that testosterone doesn’t just give someone the ability to be a great athlete, right? Just because you are tall does not mean you’re good at basketball. I think we’ve sort of lost the fact that sports are skills, and they require training. Is it athletically helpful? Of course it is, like, we know that this is true. But there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t know in terms of the effects of suppression and what those effects look like at different points of suppression.

On language meant to invalidate transgender women:
Because we gender hormones in such a way, in particular testosterone, it becomes difficult for folks to see beyond the cultural assumptions that we make about testosterone. And that is often paired with specific language meant to invalidate transgender women and conjure a different image. And so it’s one of the reasons why – and I will use this language here in this particular instance so folks know what I’m talking about – when we hear people say “biological male,” it’s not meant to describe a transgender woman. Instead, it’s meant to conjure an image of a cisgender boy running track alongside cisgender girls. And physiologically (and also separate from that, from an identity perspective, but we’re talking about testosterone suppression, so physiologically) that is just inappropriate.

There’s study upon study upon study that shows that testosterone suppression does change physiological chemistry, and does have an effect on athletic outputs for transgender women. From that perspective, they are not cisgender men, but in our public discourse, transgender women and cisgender men are often talked about as if they’re physiologically the same. And it’s very hard to break that linkage, it requires a lot of nuance, it requires really thinking about it in different ways. But for me, if there’s anything that comes out of this book, if I can break that linkage for folks, that I think is the number one thing.

On the state of transgender athlete policy discussions:
From a policy perspective, having a good faith discussion about appropriate policy [for top collegiate and elite sports] is important — and that being science based, that being open, and folks getting to weigh in on those conversations. But I would say publicly, at large in the United States, legislatively, we are not having that conversation. At all.

So for me, what I hope is that “Fair Play” brings us closer to that place by allowing folks who have questions where they don’t know where to go, they don’t know who to ask, they can get them answered in the book. For those who are having conversations with loved ones, who get asked about this a lot and aren’t quite sure what to say, this is the book for you. And then also for those of us who’ve been in this space, sometimes, as you were saying earlier, it’s just really powerful to go back to where we started. And in some ways it can be very heartbreaking. But in others … I go back to stories that I wrote about Mack and Andrea and it feels like a completely different time than where we are now. And I think that’s also really important to be reminded that there was a different time, which means there can be a different time again.