My daughter, Rose, is a tomboy. She is not transgender. She’s a ten-year-old girl who presents as androgynous because she likes to. When she was seven, she climbed up on the sink and gave herself a pixie cut because she preferred it to my attempts at bowl cuts, and it stayed that way. She wears jeans from the girls’ section of Old Navy and dinosaur and shark t-shirts from the unisex section. On special occasions she wears a button-down. This is what she likes to do.
We’ve sometimes been confronted, by people who misgendered Rose and thought she was in the wrong locker room. Thankfully, all I had to do was inform the person of their mistake. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to go further than that.
We live in the great state of Ohio, where I was born and raised.
Rose is a ball of energy. She loves her martial arts classes best of all, and this year she also started playing soccer. Both of those activities were in a mixed group of boys and girls, though she might end up on an all girls team sometime in the near future. When Rose puts on her dobok or her soccer uniform, you can’t tell just by looking at her whether she was male or female. A lot of little girls who play sports and have short hair go through the same thing.
Like most mothers, I worry about Rose for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes I worry that someone’s going to do the unthinkable to my child. Sometimes, when Rose is in her martial arts class, a male student or the male instructor have to jump on top of her while she lies on the mat, so she can practice pushing them off. She’s pretty good at that. I’ve seen her lock her legs around the opponent’s waist somehow and use her arms at just the right angle, and then she’s rolled them over and is sitting on top of them.
Sometimes when I watch her practice throwing off an attacker, I want to scream. I want to run into the dojo and tear the person off of her. The thought of somebody doing that in real life, not to practice martial arts but to hurt her in the worst possible way, is more than I can take. I think that that’s a normal response for a mother to have, and I can’t imagine I’m alone. We all worry about someone attacking our children. We all worry about sexual abuse.
I have informed Rose from the time she was a little girl that her genitals are her private business. The pediatrician might have to glance at them once in awhile during a checkup only to make sure that she’s healthy and not for any other reason, and even then he should ask her first. Other than that, they are hers. If anybody tries to touch them against her will, she has my permission to use every technique she learned in martial arts to get them away from her. Go ahead and tackle the assailant. Kick them. Punch them. They earned it. Protect yourself and come get me. I promise to believe you. Your private parts are your private business.
I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to insist that Rose should not be forced to endure someone meddling with her genitals, so she can play sports.
The state of Ohio doesn’t see it that way.
The Ohio House and Senate recently passed a bill, intended to ban transgender people from girls’ school sports, stating that if there is a question about an athlete’s gender they can be subjected to internal and external genitalia examination, plus a testosterone level check. This was accomplished by tucking the wording from Bill 61, the so-called “Save Women’s Sports Act,” into House Bill 151 which was supposed to be about a separate issue at the last minute, as Morgan Trau reports.
Most of my readers know that I have poly-cystic ovary syndrome, which messes with a woman’s testosterone levels. I’m not trans, I’m a regular old cisgender woman, but my testosterone levels can fluctuate because of my chronic illness. Some women with PCOS have testosterone high enough to show up as abnormal on a blood test and some don’t. PCOS runs in families. I don’t know what Rose’s testosterone levels will be once she’s gone through puberty. Either way, if Governor DeWine signs this bill, if Rose wants to play sports and someone has a question about her gender they can demand that test and a genital examination. A doctor will have to look at and touch her, not for her health or safety but because somebody else can’t mind their own business.
All of this because there is exactly one trans girl known to be playing sports on a school team in the state of Ohio. Meanwhile, 448,600 children in the state of Ohio suffer from hunger. But that’s not an issue Ohio’s lawmakers want to waste time fixing.
I’m furious, and I am afraid.
I am most furious and afraid on behalf of my trans friends who have been scapegoated in a moral panic. But I am also afraid for Rose and everyone like her. This is not an appropriate way to treat children of any gender. It’s a disgrace.
Ohio’s children deserve better than our current government. Please remember this in November.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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