Transcript:
OLIVIA: I’m Olivia Barnes.
The NCAA has come under national attention for something besides March Madness. Transgender student athletes have entered the public consciousness with concerns of fairness and moral panic, especially of transfeminine athletes competing in women’s single-sexed events. I went to the landmark swimming championship as a trans woman to swim and hear how this has affected sports on a localized level.
On February 5th, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled, quote “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” unquote. The president had talked about banning transgender athletes on the campaign trail, so this was not a surprise.
DONALD TRUMP: With my action this afternoon, we are putting every school receiving taxpayer dollars on notice that if you let men take over women’s sports teams or invade your locker rooms, you will be investigated for violations of title nine and risk your federal funding. There will be no federal funding.
OLIVIA: In a Student Government meeting on February 12th, Goucher President Kent Devereaux spoke on how this order would affect Goucher college. President Devereaux was adamant that the federal actions affecting the college would be held in court on unconstitutionality. When I asked how Goucher would handle losing federal funding if the order was enforced, the president cited Goucher college’s seventy-million dollar budget, and having only received five million from the federal government. The loss would be less than the 15 million that he reported the college lost due to COVID-19.
The president did not express plans to prohibit transgender students from their preferred bathrooms in addition to stressing commitment to DEI efforts and requiring judicial warrants for ICE officers to come on campus.
On the matter, President Devereaux said, quote,
CLIP: Don’t expect me to make performative statements on this.
OLIVIA: The NCAA responded to President Trump’s executive order on February 6th with a policy update, saying, quote,
CLIP: A student athlete assigned male at birth may not compete on a woman’s team.
OLIVIA:Unquote. And quote,
CLIP: A student athlete assigned female at birth who has begun hormone therapy may not compete on a woman’s team. If such competition occurs, the team is subject to NCAA mixed team legislation, and the team will no longer be eligible for the NCAA women’s championships.
OLIVIA: The landmark conference championships were held at the Mangione Aquatic Center at Loyola University. In a recent article from the New York Times, which, as a newspaper is conventionally considered to have a politically liberal readership, commenters on an article about the president’s executive order were generally favorable towards the change. Matt from Royal Oak, Michigan wrote,
CLIP: Why can’t we ban transgender athletes while also accepting their humanity and providing them support?
OLIVIA: And M. Roberts, in Tokyo, wrote,
CLIP: This is just common sense. Probably one of the only Trump politics that will end up making sense aside from deporting illegal immigrants who committed crimes and strengthening border policies.
OLIVIA:A recent poll from the New York Times and Ipsos concluded that, quote,
CLIP: 94% of Republicans and 67% of Democrats believed that transgender women should not compete against other women.
OLIVIA: This statistic, along with comments from readers on the article, led to me approaching the conference with an expectation of hostility. I was expecting more resistance to my existence than I got.
I was lucky that the commissioner of our conference got around forcing me to use the men’s locker room by letting me use a gender-neutral restroom in an office usually reserved for conference officials. It was a run of the mill, ADA compliant bathroom. The only issue I faced with the bathroom was that I had to share it with the coaches and referees, which meant that whenever I wanted to change into my swimsuit, I usually had to wait at least 15 minutes before I could change while someone else was in the bathroom. I remember saying to one of my teammates that the nicest thing about the bathroom was that I wasn’t forced to use the men’s locker room.
After that, the conference continued as anyone would expect. I swam two individual races, getting eighteenth, and a personal best, in the 1650 freestyle. Over the course of four days I had been expecting a confrontation with either conference officials or other swimmers, but the reality is that the athletes at the landmark conference championships are not there to make statements on gender or politics.
They were there for the same reason I was.
JACK:I’m actually a diver. But My name’s Jack Walsh. I’m from Catholic University.
LENA: Okay, okay, I’m Lena. I’m from Juniata College and I swim breaststroke.
RICKY:My name is Ricky Kilichowski. I’m a junior at Drew University and my main event is the 200 backstroke.
OLIVIA: As you may know, though there was a new NCAA guideline saying that transgender folks have to use the locker room, they have to swim on single-sex events corresponding to their assigned sex of birth. What’s your initial reaction to this as an athlete?
JACK: In all honesty, it doesn’t bother me, like I don’t particularly care. So it didn’t surprise me or bother me or anything like that. Whatever bathroom someone uses doesn’t bother me. I’m not particularly one to care or care about other people, you know, let someone live their life and whatever they do doesn’t doesn’t bother me.
LENA; I hate it.
OLIVIA: You hate it?
LENA: Yeah, and it-I use they/them pronouns and that like, just like, don’t be a baby about it. Like-let people do what they want. It really does not make it not that big of a deal. And I think, like, people are just uneducated and don’t know what they’re talking about and they just make these rules because of, like, higher powers-President Trump.
Like, they’re just making these rules to go along with, like, what they think is correct, even though they don’t actually know what is correct.
RICKY: I mean, I think you should be able to go on whatever-what, sorry-whatever bathroom you identify as, I-that’s if you’re someone who identifies as a woman, I feel like you should be able to use the woman’s bathroom.
OLIVIA:Would you have any opposition to swimming in a single sex event against a swimmer of the opposite sex?
JACK: Ours is kind of unique in that men’s in women’s diving is a pretty even sport because there are in all honesty, some attributes that are as men are better at than women and women are better at than men. Men have a better jump. They’re stronger off the board so they can get more height. Women have a little bit more of a-like control over the body so they’re smoother, so it ends up being pretty similar in and in points and all that. So honestly I wouldn’t care.
LENA:I don’t care. I like-I will swim against ever and like, win or lose, good race, like good job.
RICKY:I personally have no issue with that. I know some people do, but I disagree. I think-I think whatever you would like to identify as is what you should be able to compete against, whether it’s a girl who identifies as a guy or vice versa. I feel like you should be able to compete against what you want to be, you know what I mean?
OLIVIA: The athletes were at the last big meet of the season to determine that year’s champions, so the swimmers were focused on swimming their best races of the season. Every athlete I interviewed or asked to interview about their opinions on transgender athletes either declined because they felt that they didn’t know enough about the issue or explicitly stated that they didn’t care that they shared a pool with transgender athletes.
On the last night of the meet there was an energy in the air that you cannot find anywhere else. A mixture of exhaustion, chlorine and noise filled the air as swimmers swam their last races. teams would all gather behind the lanes of their teammates swimming to cheer them on, and for a brief moment it felt like the entire world was watching our races. Any argument about locker rooms or gender ideology were irrelevant for the student athletes who had worked so hard to get where they were when the conference was finished, we packed our things and left, and that was that.
This article was made with reporting by myself and production by Jimmy and editing by RAR. The audio of Donald Trump came from the Associated Press and is included under fair use. The quote from Kent Deverux was read by Christian Houck, the NCAA guidelines were read by Emily Strickland. The New York Times comments were read by Sam Rose and Opal Monaghan. These statistics from the poll by Ipsos and the New York Times were read by Eden Rovner. You’re listening to Goucher radio. a part of the Quindecim. I’m Olivia Barnes. See you in two weeks. Goodbye.
