WNBA star Brianna Turner is no fan of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) recently announced testing policies aimed at keeping men out of women’s sports, and she doesn’t want her name being used to exclude “trans women.”
The Chicago Sky star co-wrote a piece in USA Today Sports along with Los Angeles Sparks player Layshia Clarendon, in which the pair took issue with the IOC’s stance against allowing transgender athletes to compete in the female category, saying in part, that “the final hurdle to represent your country should not be proving to a panel of strangers that you are the woman you say you are”.
The pair wrote, “Do not use the names of women athletes to target, shame, or exclude transgender women. Transgender women are women. Women with intersex variations are women. I welcome these women – and all women – onto my teams.”
The article continues, “Policies banning transgender athletes from participation by international sport governing bodies for swimming and track and field, the recent policy announcement by the National Association for Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) and a lawsuit against the NCAA are all byproducts of this mounting pressure, in which time and time again facts and inclusive values are drowned out by political pressure and blatant discrimination.”
Turner and Cameron argue that the IOC’s previous framework of understanding, which allowed transgender athletes, was actually the correct view and consistent with science. While the “new mandate” flies in the face of what the scientific data argues for.
“This new mandate abandons that ground-breaking and collaborative framework, ignores established medical and human-rights guidance, and rejects the science that says physical appearance, chromosomes, or individual traits do not determine athletic performance or success,” the article claims.
In addition to flying in the face of science, Clarendon and Turner also argue that the belief that men have an inherent athletic advantage over women contrasts with their many years of experience playing basketball against people of other genders.
“In more than 15 years of organised basketball, I’ve played with and against people who are transgender and undoubtedly people with intersex variations, and I’ve never experienced any unfair advantages. I saw these players as my fellow athletes, not my enemies. We cannot choose our genes or chromosomes, but we can choose how hard we work, how we treat one another, and whether we protect the dignity of every athlete,” Clarendon and Turner claim.
The WNBA stars then assert that the attention given to transgender athletes is misguided. Instead, the pair believes the real threat to women’s sports is “unequal pay,” among other things.
“Right now, we are seeing extreme scrutiny of the far less than 1% of NCAA athletes who are transgender — that’s less than 40 out of over 500,000 — and not of what we know to be the documented threats to women’s sports: unequal pay, rampant sexual abuse and harassment, a failure to uphold Title IX (a federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools or educational programs receiving federal funding, which President Joe Biden clarified also extends to LGBTQ+ students), which was shown clearly in viral TikToks during the 2021 March Madness tournaments.”
Both Clarendon and Turner are ambassadors for Athlete Ally, a national nonprofit organization seeking to increase LGBTQI+ inclusion in sports.
