A Few Links to Dispel Conservative Myths, Part 24: Transgender Athletes

In a recent debate for this November's South Carolina Senate race, appointed incumbent Senator Darline Graham Nordone was asked about her stance on security concerns in the South China Sea. Her response was, "I'm not that informed on national security." Attempting to clarify this baffling statement, Graham later said, "I think people in South Carolina are more worried about making ends meet, they’re concerned about boys in girls’ sports. One lady talked to me extensively about that today."

I appreciated this response to Graham from Alex Bollinger of LGBTQNation: "This raises more even questions. South Carolina banned trans kids from participating in sports teams matching their gender in 2022. There are no known trans girls playing school sports on girls’ teams in the state. The NCAA now bans trans athletes in college sports, and the president has pressured the Olympics and other amateur sports leagues to no longer let trans women participate. So in what world are South Carolina Republicans "concerned" about trans athletes? What was that "one lady" – if she even exists – talking to Graham Nordone "extensively" about? Like, what could she actually say on the matter? The right won, at least in South Carolina. They banned trans people at every level in the state from playing sports. What more could they want?"

I think what Graham and other Republicans want is to milk the transgender athlete issue for all it's worth, for the simple reason that it's just about the only issue about which Americans agree more with Republicans than they do with Democrats. Sadly, only one in four Americans agree with trans women participating in female sports in a yes/no question.

Meanwhile, President Trump's approval rating is polling in the mid-30s, and he's 19 to 40 points underwater on the economy, the war with Iran and even on immigration. 

Furthermore, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post noted in late 2024 that two-thirds or more of Americans favor:
* Green energy subsidies
* Increased wealth taxes
* Protecting and expanding both Obamacare and Medicare
* Providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children
* Reaffirming our commitment to NATO
* Protecting abortion rights
* Gay marriage
* Expanded infrastructure spending
* Banning assault weapons
* Reforming the Supreme Court
* Teaching black history
* Stopping book bans
* Legalizing marijuana

So expect Republicans to continue to talk a whole lot about the tiny number of transgender girls and women in girl's and women's sports. Also expect them to continue to spread a lot on untruths to get political mileage. Here are three.

1. From Chase Strangio and Gabriel Arkles of the American Civil Liberties Union:

Myth: Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes.

Fact: Trans athletes do not have an unfair advantage in sports.

"A person’s genetic make-up and internal and external reproductive anatomy are not useful indicators of athletic performance," according to Dr. Joshua D. Safer. "For a trans woman athlete who meets NCAA standards, "there is no inherent reason why her physiological characteristics related to athletic performance should be treated differently from the physiological characteristics of a non-transgender woman."

The Transgender Initiatives Office of San Francisco's city government also notes that, "A 2024 study, funded in part by the IOC and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, concluded that transgender women athletes may actually have several physical disadvantages when competing with cisgender women." Some of the study’s key findings were that transgender women performed worse than cisgender women and men in tests measuring lower-body strength, lung function, fat-free mass and handgrip strength. Transgender women’s bone density was found to be equivalent to that of cisgender women, which is linked to muscle strength and there were no meaningful differences found between the two groups’ hemoglobin profiles (a key factor in athletic performance).

2. Also from Strangio and Arkles of the ACLU:
Myth: Sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics. 
Fact: Trans girls are girls.
"A person’s sex is made up of multiple biological characteristics and they may not all align as typically male or female in a given person," says Dr. Joshua D. Safer. Further, many people who are not trans can have hormones levels outside of the range considered typical of a cis person of their assigned sex."

3. I recently had a lengthy argument with some MAGA types regarding transgender girls and was repeatedly told:
Myth: A DNA test can determine from birth whether every person is a boy or a girl.
Fact: From Jeffrey Kluger of Time: "Decades of scientific research have shown, that kind of test does not remotely exist. It likely never will.

It’s easy enough to determine basic physical sex with a quick scan for X and Y chromosomes. That can also determine some gender disorders, most commonly XXY—or a person who is superficially male, but carries an extra X, or female, chromosome. The condition, known as Klinefelter syndrome, can result in a range of problems, including delayed or incomplete puberty, comparatively weak bones and undescended testicles. X and Y chromosomes, however, tell you absolutely nothing about gender identity, which is a vastly more complicated matter.

The genes that live on the chromosomes may play some role in determining gender identity—just as they do in determining height and weight and heart disease and athleticism—but it’s a limited one. For example, identical twins share effectively identical genomes, but there are nevertheless cases in which one twin is transgender and the other is not. (It does appear to be likelier that identical twins will have matching gender identities, and the small sample group of ones who are mismatched makes it hard to establish conclusive answers.) In all transgender people, twins or not, womb environment, hormonal factors and differences in brain architecture may be involved as well."

My home state of Washington still allows transgender girls to play girls sports. But that may change. From LaVendrick Smith of the ACLU: "Instead of focusing on solutions that keep kids safe and engaged in the classroom, the group Let’s Go Washington is sponsoring ballot initiatives that invite bullying and discrimination into our children’s schools.

Washington voters will see two of these harmful initiatives on their ballots this fall. One initiative, IL26-638, discriminates against transgender girls by banning them from playing girls’ sports in public schools. The other initiative, IL26-001, seeks to partially repeal a key student privacy law that protects students’ access to counselors and health care."

I'm praying the blue wave this November will keep these initiatives from passing. Things are currently pretty bleak in this country for transgender people. But progressive action had brought positive change before. And as Dr. King said the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.

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A Few Links to Dispel Conservative Myths, Part 23: Dr. Anthony Fauci and COVID

Here's what Rockefeller University has to say about Dr. Anthony Fauci M.D.

"Through seven presidential administrations, Dr. Fauci has provided guidance on public health and medical issues to the U.S. population and its presidents. During the COVID-19 pandemic, NIAID investigators made critical contributions to development of the safe and effective vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Dr. Fauci earned the nation’s trust by providing clear, compassionate advice rooted in the available facts through the rapidly evolving pandemic. He is revered for his insistence on the pursuit of truth, and the distinction between what is known and what is not, serving with unwavering dedication despite an extremely challenging political environment."

A brief list of Dr. Fauci's accomplishments as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the COVID pandemic include (copied from Google AI):

• mRNA Research: Supported decades of prior National Institutes of Health (NIH) research that built the foundation for safe, fast mRNA vaccine development.

  Trial Partnerships: Directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to collaborate directly with private companies on vaccine design and clinical testing.

  Financial Risk Strategy: Backed the bold federal strategy to fund large-scale manufacturing concurrent with early clinical trials to save months of pandemic response time.

• Safety Validation: Championed independent data boards and FDA authorization steps to protect scientific integrity.

  Public Advocacy: Publicly credited government-private framework investments for the ultimate success of the accelerated vaccine timeline.

I consider Dr. Fauci one of America's greatest heroes for his leadership in the development and distribution of the COVID vaccine. More than one million Americans died of COVID, and more than 99% of those Americans were unvaccinated. 

However, for reasons I don't entirely understand, last week Dr. Fauci was forced to appear before a Senate hearing led by Senator Rand Paul. Here are the attacks Republicans directed to Dr. Fauci during and after the hearing:

Myth: Under Fauci's leadership, NIAID made a grant to a Chinese lab that ultimately aided that lab in developing and subsequently leaking the 2020 COVID pandemic virus. Dr. Fauci's private diary reveals that he knew that the COVID virus originated from a lab and not from a public "wet market". (This claim is most of the basis for Senator Rand Paul's hearing this week.)

Fact: NIAID did give money to the the US-based EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to look into possible coronaviruses from bats. However, the scientific evidence regarding COVID supports a natural spillover from an infected animal to humans rather than a leak from a lab.

In last week's hearing, Senator Paul focused on a Jan. 26, 2020, diary entry in which Fauci stated that "the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier." Factcheck.org notes, "This is not the "gotcha" that Paul makes it out to be. Citing this one passage removes critical context for Fauci’s statements and falsely implies that if the pandemic didn’t originate in the one market (the Huanan seafood market), that it couldn’t have had a natural origin." "There’s overwhelming scientific evidence that COVID emerged from an animal market in Wuhan, which was miles away from a virology lab," Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, told us for a previous story."

Myth: Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville said that week regarding Dr. Fauci, "We’re going to go after the guy with everything we’ve got because the guy killed, or had something to do with killing, 9 million people," because, Fauci was, "in on the gain-of-function".

Fact: "Gain-of-function" is an attempt to enable an organism to develop new abilities. This can happen in nature, or it can be achieved in a lab, when scientists modify the genetic code or place organisms in different environments, to change them in some way.  From the BBC: "For example, (gain-of-function research) might involve scientists trying to create drought-resistant plants or modify disease vectors in mosquitoes to make them less likely to pass on infections. With viruses that could pose a risk to human health, it means developing viruses that are potentially more transmissible and dangerous." 

The claim here is that the research described in Myth #1 above included gain-of-function and that the research went awry, releasing the deadly COVID virus. From the BBC article linked above, "Dr Fauci told the Senate hearing the research in question "has been evaluated multiple times by qualified people to not fall under the gain-of-function definition". He also said it was "molecularly impossible" for these viruses to have resulted in the coronavirus." "The NIH and EcoHealth Alliance have also rejected suggestions they supported or funded "gain-of-function" research in China."

Myth: "Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, proposed that the pulmonary infarction Fauci experienced in 2021—the details of which were revealed in the pages from Fauci’s private diary that Paul released last weekend—may have resulted from COVID vaccination and booster shots. More than 39,000 deaths had resulted from COVID-19 vaccination, he said, and although Facebook had censored his supporters when they tried to share that fact, "this wasn’t disinformation, this was the truth." - The Atlantic
Fact: (Also from The Atlantic) "Fauci only sat there with his fingers clasped. He did not point out that this was not the truth at all, and that Johnson’s data—derived from unvetted, user-submitted information in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System—are likely to overestimate the real total by about 1,000 times."
In terms of the COVID vaccine causing deaths, a comprehensive scientific literature review published by the National Library of Medicine identified only 38 to 55 deaths globally among the more than 8 billion doses administered by 2022.

Myth: Peter Navarro, who was the Trump White House defense policy coordinator during the pandemic said last week: "I had a million doses of hydroxychloroquine in warehouses as the defense policy coordinator for the DPA that I was trying to distribute to hospitals, and he got the FDA to stop me from doing that. Thousands of people could be here in this country right now alive if I had been able to distribute that, take that to the bank. That's what the science says."
Fact: The scientific community has, with no uncertain terms, rejected hydroxychloroquine as a valid COVID-19 treatment. After reviewing dozens of trials involving more than 10,000 patients, the World Health Organization concluded that hydroxychloroquine:
*Does not reduce deaths.
*Does not reduce the need for mechanical ventilation.
*Does not provide meaningful clinical benefit for treating COVID-19.
*Carries risks, including heart rhythm abnormalities in some patients.
The NIH likewise concluded that it did not improve outcomes in hospitalized patients.

Myth: Prior to last week's hearing, Senator Paul suggested that natural immunity gained from contracting COVID is more effective in protecting a person's health that getting vaccinated, writing, "Remember: Anthony Fauci was all about 'following the science,' until it came to vaccines. He was all about forcing you into compliance, even though we all knew infection was the best protection."
Fact: A 2021 CDC study, "found that those who were unvaccinated had 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with those who were fully vaccinated.  The findings suggest that among people who have had COVID-19 previously, getting fully vaccinated provides additional protection against reinfection."

Note: There is strong evidence that Senator Rand Paul has been vaccinated against COVID.

In conclusion, Dr. Fauci offered no testimony during the Senate hearing, other than to offer a brief initial statement, in which he referred to Chairman Rand Paul’s "unhinged obsession" with slandering his reputation and putting him in prison. I think that sums up this entire witch hunt quite well.

 

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