In the months after being elected, President Donald Trump has caused an encouragement of laws and policies all over the country that target transgender people, specifically our youth.
Last month, Trump signed an executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” The order will bar students who are assigned male at birth from participating in women’s sports and using women’s restrooms. On top of this, it will also affect those in a non-educational setting such as the Olympics.
He remarked at a signing ceremony, “With this executive order, the war on women’s sports is over.”
New Hampshire residents Parker Tirrell, 16, and Iris Turmell, 15, are the first to challenge Trump’s executive order.
In an interview with the AP, Turmelle hopes to get across “that we are human, we don’t go to sleep in the day and go out at night and drink people’s blood. We don’t hate sunlight. We’re human, just like you.”
I would like to remind the reader that she is 15 years old. Do you know how devastating it is to be told you can’t participate in sports over something you cannot control? No 15-year-old should have that limit. It’s the age where you are slowly finding out what you like to do, what makes you happy, what makes you feel confident. If that’s playing soccer, basketball or any other sport, they should have that ability to do so.
Not only should they not be limited but they should not have to defend their humanity.
If transgender women have a significant advantage in the sports they play, why aren’t there any laws that limit genetic mutations that can create advantages in sports,such as being tall and playing basketball or having large hands as a swimmer? In their logic it should be just as unfair, yet there is no policy stating that they cannot participate.
In a statement to AP the U.S. Department of Education stated that allowing transgender females to participate in sports is unfair and dangerous.
The key word in this statement among the absurdity of it all is the word “dangerous.” When I think of the word dangerous, I envision someone who is coming at me with a knife or pointing a gun at me.While yes, there are different levels of danger, I wouldn’t describe transgender women competing in sports with any synonym of dangerous, not because I don’t just believe they have the right to play in a sport that they love and enjoy but it’s just absurd to categorize something so unrelated to dangerous as so.
Charlie Baker, the NCAA president, said in a congressional hearing in January that out of the 510,000 athletes competing at schools, there are about 10 athletes that are transgender.
Do you think that is dangerous?
This brings me to my point that it’s not the fact that Trump cares about fairness for women; we all know that’s not true. It’s about encouraging the long pattern of erasing transgender people from history,transgender youth being the largest target of it all.
This is our future generation, they will help make the U.S. continue to run. I hope the Trump administration believes that they are going to go down silently. I would love for them to be utterly surprised at the backlash that they have received.
To Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmell: Do not stop the fight!
Alice Whittemore can be contacted at
awhittemore@kscequinox.com
