In Utah where I previously lived, and in many other deep red states, the legislature instituted a new rule that its proponents say will protect young female athletes by prohibiting participation of transgender youth in girls' teams. The rule is supposed to protect girls from both unfair competition and sexual predation.
A funny story from my own life experience occurred to me when I read an article about parents who wanted a successful youth athlete investigated all the way back to kindergarten to assure themselves that their daughter lost to a "real" girl rather than to a transgender girl. Texas, where I did my age group swimming, is clearly a geographically large state. What that means in practical terms is that the parents of athletes and the athletes themselves probably aren't always that familiar with each other. Though San Antonio and Corpus Christi are both in South Texas, in most local age group meets (especially back in the days when I was a young swimmer), your daughter will probably see the same people but if you go from San Antonio to Corpus Christi you may not recognize the other competitors. After all more than a hundred miles separates the two cities.
To add to that sort of confusion, the local officials at these meets, even if they were fully qualified to judge, might not be familiar to a swimmer or her parent. My mother, who was a fully qualified stroke and meet judge, often worked on a voluntary basis at our local meets. Adding even more to the confusion, I matured very young, certainly well before the norm. So I hadn't grown in height since the age of 11 and I was physically mature in all other ways as well so I looked like a woman in the pool with little girls. At the finals of one meet (so far back in the dark ages even local meets had heats, finals, ready benches, etc.), a woman came up to my mother who was the stroke judge just as the final for my event was about to start. She wanted to lodge a complaint to have me removed from the event because she just knew that I was a ringer, a fully grown woman pretending to be a girl. My mother asked which girl she meant even though she knew damned well which one was the target. Sure enough, this mother said that obviously the swimmer who had qualified first was not in the right age group of 13/14 years. As she said to my mother, "Just look at her!"
My mother said that she happened to know that I was not only not too old to swim with the 13/14 group, I would still be in the same age group the next year because I was still 13 not even 14. The irate parent asked my mother how she knew so much about me. "I was there when she was born."
When I saw the following headline coming out of Utah I simply smiled:
After a girl beat their daughters in sports, Utah parents triggered investigation into whether she was transgender
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