The LBCC Queer Space club hosted Jenna Weiner, a transgender athlete in a virtual educational discussion about the obstacles transgender athletes face today along with her personal experience and anti-transgender legislation.
“I guess I just went through puberty once and decided I wanted to do it all over again,” Weiner said with a smile.
Weiner had no idea she was transgender until she was 22 years old and stumbled upon an online post from someone who detailed they sometimes felt like they were assigned the wrong gender at birth.
She realized she had felt that way most of her life but never spoke up about it.
Now, five years after coming out, Weiner has enjoyed her life as a woman and a female athlete.
Weiner is an ultimate frisbee and disc golf player. Her transition opened her eyes to the harsh realities that many transgender athletes struggle with.
Throught her transition, she was accepted by her coaches and peers, but strict rules enforced by USA Ultimate regarding transgender individuals kept her from playing on the team for an entire year.
“I lost a year of eligibility because of a school policy,” Weiner said.
Ultimate’s policy at the time required transgender women to do twelve months of hormone replacement therapy in order to be eligible to play.
Such regulations are not foreign to transgender athletes. The NCAA has a similar requirement for its transgender athletes and the International Olympic Committee requires for the total level of testosterone to be below 10 nanomoles per liter for at least a year in order to compete.
The debate about whether testosterone levels in male to female transgender athletes gives them an unfair advantage over cisgender female athletes is widely controversial. In fact, there are currently over 35 bills nationwide introduced by state legislatures that hope to ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports for this exact assumption.
“There’s this idea that testosterone is some kind of magic hormone that magically makes people really strong and really fast and really athletic … it’s just not true,” Weiner said.
Yet, just as recently as two months ago Mississippi passed the “Mississippi Fairness Act,” a bill that prohibits transgender athletes from participating in girls’ teams on school campuses and requires them to compete according to their sex assigned at birth. Arkansas and Tennessee passed similar legislation.
16 states including California, Colorado, and Connecticut have all passed laws that prohibit transgender athletes from being excluded in any capacity regardless of personal or religious beliefs.
In December 2020 the USAU implemented new inclusive policies that ensures transgender people do not need any medical interventions to play in the gender division they feel most comfortable in.
Overall, Weiner has hopes that anti-transgender bills that have yet to pass will be labeled as unconstitutional so that transgender kids will have the same opportunity as their cisgender classmates to play sports at a competitive level.
“We need to implement policies that make sense and don’t necessarily isolate transgender and non-binary people,” Weiner said.
She urged participants to demand policy makers to implement flexible and inclusive policies moving forward.
Towards the end, Queer Space member Linda Olmos spoke about the importance of LBCC students and staff making sure transgender students feel comfortable on campus.
“We need more students and folks on campus so that we can create these [safe] spaces of inclusion …” Olmos said.