Concerns about children playing sports have been in the news a lot these days. Thisgot me thinking about my personal career as a child athlete.
I grew up in semi-rural southern Minnesota in the late 80s and early 90s. Homeschooled K-12, they still let me play sports with the local public schools, football, basketball, baseball, and soccer.
To be clear, I was not good at any of them.
Tucked somewhere there’s a picture of me in my football uniform in late elementary school, the smallest pads they had still too big, draped over my shoulders, looking like David in Saul’s armor, the number “1” on my jersey only highlighting how skinny I was. My stats were not impressive. I broke up a single pass. I lasted one season.
I didn’t fare much better in basketball.
I was easily distracted. Throwing the ball in was especially stressful. Everybody yelling. Whatever play coach had drawn up during the timeout was completely forgotten.
Later, in high school, I ran in a summer track club, deciding (foolishly) that distance running would be “easier” than sprinting because you “ran slower.” I remember my first 800m race, digging deep in that last 200m, determined to beat the only person I had a lead on so as not to come in dead last.
It was still good for me to participate, though. It taught me grit, determination, how to work with others. Running even became a favorite activity of mine as an adult. Many years later I ran a half marathon at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, NM to qualify for a starting carrel in a marathon back in Minnesota later that fall. My marathon time certainly wouldn’t get you into the Olympics, but it was my personal best and a victory all the same.
With all the supposed concern these days about which groups trans folks should be allowed to play sports with, some things occurred to me from these memories:
If you’d put me on the girls’ basketball team, I would have been no threat to them, heck, I would have been as much a liability to them as I was to the boys;
If you’d let a girl on the football team in my place—maybe one who’d grown up playing football with friends and siblings on one of the many farms nearby—the team probably would have been better off;
And that 800m I ran? It was a co-ed race. I was second to last behind every boy running that day and every girl but one. And, if I’m being honest? She almost caught me at the end too…
When I ran in Albuquerque as an adult, I remember watching the top male competitors sprinting past on the return route to the finish. Not that much later, the woman who would go on to win her top bracket sprinted by as well. I didn’t think for a second about whether it was “fair.” I knew I wasn’t ever going to catch them. But it didn’t matter. I continued running my race.
Being a kid—or an adult for that matter—is hard enough as it is, no matter who you are. You have to figure out what you like, what you don’t like, what you’re capable of, what it means to be you—all while everyone seems to have strong feelings about who you are and who you should be. If you’re someone who feels like they don’t fit in the categories everyone else seems to think they should be in, I can imagine it’s all that much harder.
Having politicians, pastors, and everyday folks online and in public, working themselves into a lather about whose kid is or isn’t a boy or girl or spreading lies about “sex-changes being conducted at school” makes it even worse. It’s abusive and downright embarrassing, honestly.
Nor does it help to have “allies” hemming and hawing about how they “identify” as a “future governor” or walking back their previous support insisting they do “not want boys to play on teams with girls.” It makes it seem like there’s good reasons for all this concern and abuse. But there just isn’t.
Having lived here on and off for over 20 years now, I’ve been struck at how open and generous Texans can be while at the same time chasing after the most obvious nonsense, willing to bully vulnerable groups who are no threat to anyone.
Regardless of what the days, weeks, and months to come may bring, we Texans need to grow up a little bit. It costs us nothing to leave trans folks and children alone. We’re not saving anyone and we’re certainly not making the world better by getting all up in their business and making their lives about us and our fears.
Because in the end, if the “least of these” are not free, then neither are we.
- Beau Pihlaja, Lubbock
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This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Lubbock letter writer questions politicized debate on sports, gender
