It has never, ever been about protecting women’s sports. Never.

If elected officials are serious in practicing what they preach, they should stop using trans athletes as scapegoats to further a hateful agenda.

Hate is hate for folks like Sonja Shaw. We’ve seen it before, we’ll see it again.

By Caleb Otte

Guest to The Truth OC

I grew up playing soccer. If you are seen as a talent from a young age, then you get funneled into an elite academy program with the best coaches. From there you are heavily recruited by the top colleges, semi-professional teams or even professional clubs. This isn’t how my life panned out, but I know plenty of stories like it.

There is a pipeline for men’s sports, but the same can’t be said about the women’s side. The opportunities are more scarce. There are less high level teams to join. Players aren’t scouted as heavily. Go to any weekend tournament and you’ll see tons more college coaches at the men’s games.

This is what real unfairness in youth sports looks like, despite what people like Sonja Shaw and Amber Smith will have you believe.

Women’s sports are mostly an afterthought for conservative politicians. Equal opportunity? Never heard of it. Ending the cycle of coaching abuse? Meh. Making sure our girls get enough physical activity in a major socializing environment? Not important.

But god forbid a transgender girl, who has gone through years of hormone replacement and has taken the proper steps to compete with other girls, wants to play a game with her friends. The horror. Cue Helen Lovejoy.

I am firmly on the side of letting trans girls compete. However, this isn’t about making the argument for trans inclusion in sports.

I’m not writing to talk about how heartless it is to make trans kids feel less than. To feel like the other. To be excluded. John Oliver delivered those points much more eloquently than I can, and anything I write about it would simply be ripping him off.

No, my point is about the one thing that is the most pervasive in our politics: hypocrisy.

Specifically, how the “protecting women’s sports” crowd only seems to care about protection when a couple of transgender teenagers want to play lacrosse or run track—not about the actual harmful issues.

According to a 2019 study by the Women’s Sports Foundation, which was founded by Billie Jean King and focuses on female involvement in sports, 31 percent of girls aged 6-12 play sports. For boys that number rises to over 38 percent. This might not seem like a big deal, but that represents about 700,000 kids in the US.

At the high school level, in 2019, over one million more boys participated in athletics than girls. There are simply less opportunities for girls to get involved in youth sports. They have less role models to look up to. Men coach the boys and they coach the girls. Young women, for a long period of time, have only seen male professional athletes on their screens.

There is so much less media coverage of women’s sports at every level. Parents spend less money on athletics for their daughters and worry more about their sons. From a young age, girls get made fun of for playing sports.

But you won’t hear a peep about that from those who, under the guise of caring about women’s sports, want to ban transgender athletes. They would never quote the National Women’s Law Center, even though it has reported the following: “Girls often receive worse locker rooms (or none at all); inconvenient game time slots; second-rate equipment; inferior playing fields located farther away from school; less publicity; and less access to school cheerleaders, band, and dance teams.”

They turn a blind eye. Until, of course, some transgender teenager just wants to be included in athletics. Just wants to get the physical and social benefits from being on a team.

They’ll never admit that this crusade has always been about belittling trans kids. Even though Shaw actively went out and belittled a trans kid. No, they say “your daughters are being treated unfairly and their athletic opportunities are being ruined!” because it gets a rise out of people.

You know how I know they don’t give a shit about young girls in sports? Because if they did, they’d be banging a completely different gong. All you’d hear Shaw and Smith talk about is the rampant abuse from coaches in youth athletics.

Last summer, a football coach in Santa Ana was arrested for molesting a child. He did this for an entire year. Christopher Flores was able to abuse a girl in 2021 because nobody was diligent enough to stop him before he had the chance.

There are more stories just like this in Orange County. In just April of this year, wrestling coach Anthony Alcala was arrested for raping multiple underage women. He did this for six years. Six. Fucking. Years. This was in Huntington Beach.

It doesn’t end there. Aaron Raya, the now former head track and field coach at Godinez High School in Santa Ana, was arrested last year for grooming his students and messaging them with the intent to commit a sexual crime.

These people thrive on gaining positions of power, and the earning trust of the community, to do sick and twisted things. These are just a few cases of it, and it happens pretty much everywhere in the nation.

This is what deserves diligence from our elected officials. You tell me—what is more dangerous? Middle aged men grooming and assaulting and raping young girls, or a few transgender kids running fast or kicking a ball hard every now and then?

Shaw and Smith should think really long and hard about their answer to that question. Considering that there are barely any trans athletes in Orange County, and none in the Capo Unified School District (where this issue has seen long debate), I would hope the answer is the former.

Even if there were hundreds of trans athletes, I hope they realize deep down where the real threat to our young female athletes are. It comes in the form of less opportunity, worse equipment/fields and, especially, genuine abuse.

Any resolution or law or bill that talks about “protecting women’s sports” should be protecting them against these issues. It should be about lifting one group up without harming another.

If a bill reads like it wants to exclude a small part of the population. If it reads like veiled hate speech. If it comes from the conservatives in this country. Dismiss it. Don’t give it one iota of the thought about the potential of taking it with the smallest grain of salt. It’s bullshit, and it will only serve to both distract you from more important issues and to further the divide between us.

Caleb Otte is a journalism student at Chapman University and an editor at The Panther, the school newspaper. You can visit his substack here.