Alberta’s policy banning trans kids from female sports is ripe for scapegoating and abuse

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Starting this school year in Alberta, anyone who suspects that a child playing sports in any female-only league is not actually a female can file a formal challenge with the relevant board.

The challenge can be made confidentially, which protects the identity and integrity of the applicant but obviously not the athlete, who will have to prove that she is indeed eligible to play under the province’s new Fairness and Safety in Sport Act. Her proof must come in the form of a birth registration document, but not a birth certificate, since sex on a provincial birth certificate can be changed.

This new policy and challenge process means that any child – a tomboy, a girl who is physically larger than her peers, one with masculine features or perhaps a shadow above her lip – can be made to suffer the personal humiliation of being forced to prove her sex. It’s a poorly thought-out policy to fix a problem the government has not demonstrated exists, which appears to be the modus operandi of the Alberta government under Premier Danielle Smith.

Another poorly thought-out policy – one that sought to rid school libraries of sexually explicit material, but ended up accidentally banning classics like The Handmaid’s Tale – was paused this week so that the government can attempt to clarify its intention.

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The Fairness and Safety in Sport Act, which came into effect last week, bans trans children 12 and older from participating in female-only sports in schools or private leagues, and punts the process for ensuring their sex to the relevant organizational bodies. The Edmonton Public School Board has already said it will distribute a form to parents asking them to confirm their child’s sex in order for her to be eligible to participate on a female-only team.

The government says the intention here is fairness and safety, and indeed, most can observe that there is a notable physical difference between, say, a 16-year-old female lacrosse player, and 16-year-old trans female lacrosse player, who ostensibly has not been on hormone blockers (notably, because government legislation blocked them for kids 16 and under).

We have seen the advantage that trans athletes have in competing in women’s sports at the professional and competitive level, and it is reasonable to want to ensure fairness and safety at the recreational level, too. This is the most charitable explanation for what Ms. Smith’s government is doing; the less charitable explanation is that she’s cruelly trying to win political points on the backs of the handful of trans kids who want to play sports in Alberta.

Either way, what she appears to have forgotten here – or else, what she has casually disregarded – is that we’re not talking about trans swimmer Lia Thomas dominating at the 2022 NCAA championships, or other trans athletes participating in elite sports. We’re talking about kids, at a vulnerable point in their lives, getting every pair of eyes in the classroom turned their way when the teacher distributes sex-verification forms to take home to their parents.

The broad brush of provincial legislation may alleviate the burden on schools and sports leagues to make tough decisions, but it also robs them of the opportunity to make sensitive, informed decisions with parents, community members and other children based on the particulars of each individual situation. Perhaps the best decision in a particular community will align with what the government has mandated, and perhaps the best one in another will be that the 13-year-old trans kid who wants to play recreational softball should have a spot on the team. But the community ought to have the freedom to make that choice.

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One can be skeptical of a broad-based affirmative approach to care for trans youth, which effectively accepts every claim of trans identity as equally valid, while recognizing the need to be sensitive and discreet in these matters. But a policy that effectively gender-polices every girl in the province who wants to play sports is neither; it creates opportunities for malicious, bad-faith challenges to probe what the team tomboy has between her legs, and places a spotlight on youth who are questioning their gender identity.

These are complicated issues, to be sure. But the government’s legislation doesn’t account for the various complications: the differences between recreational sports and competitive sports, for example; the differences between contact sports and non-contact sports; and the priorities of youth-level athletics, which are supposed to be about team-building, exercise, participation and skill development just as much as they are about competition and winning. When it comes to kids, tough decisions should be made sensitively, on the ground, and not from high up in the Premier’s Office, from a politician looking for her own type of win.