Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better: The Sexist Implications & Health Consequences of K-12 Transgender Girls Sports Bans

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The musical Annie Get Your Gun tells the story of real-life sharpshooter Annie Oakley, "[a] backwoods gal" who defied gender norms by using her marksmanship skill to support her family by selling game. 1 After she was persuaded to join a Wild West Show, she quickly eclipsed the show's leading man and star marksman, Frank Butler, thereby jeopardizing her chance at romance with him. 2 "Anything You Can Do" is a duet between the two characters in which both attempt to assert their superiority over the other before a competition.Annie is only able to ensure the future of their romance by pretending to lose to Frank during a shoot-out, 3 illustrating not only the historic fragility of the male ego, but also the requirement for many women to dim their lights for the love of men.Annie's story is not unique for the women of her time (the early 1900s), but today's girls and women often still must tiptoe around the egos of boys and men to receive their love and admiration-or to simply avoid their ire.Misogyny persists, and sometimes it shows its ugly head in the oddest of places-like a transgender girls sports ban.In recent years, several state legislatures have enacted legislation intended to prevent male-to-female transgender students from participating on the sports teams which affirm their gender identities. 4 Legislatures frame this legislation as protective in nature, the purported intention being to protect equality in women's and girls' sports by limiting access to biologically female student athletes.Idaho was the first state to enact such legislation with its 2020 Fairness in Women's Sports Act. 5 The Idaho law reaches collegiate athletes and purportedly tracks various biological, psychological, and judicial rationales which suggest that biologically male athletes possess inherently superior athletic ability due to their sex-based characteristics.