On Thursday's NPR talk show "Tell Me More," host Michel Martin celebrated "Keelin Godsey, the first openly transgender contender for the American Olympic team. Last month, Keelin qualified for the women's track and field Olympic trials in the hammer throw. Keelin was born female, but identifies as a male and, in fact, lives as a male when he is not competing." Martin compared her to Jackie Robinson integrating the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Her guest was a liberal activist-journalist. Sports Illustrated staff writer and recent Harvard grad Pablo Torre wrote an article, and complained on NPR that "we're very far away from where we need to be in terms of tolerance and acknowledgement that transgender people and transgender athletes exist." Torres hammered away at how bullying and victimization put transgenders on the edge of suicide.
Martin asked "Why does Keelin compete as a woman when he lives as a man in every other part of his life?" Torre said transgender athletes often have scholarships in their actual gender instead of their aspirational gender. (That's my terminology, not Torre's). Then came the empathy and advocacy for Kelly Godsey (now going by Keelin):
As soon as Olympic contention is done, as soon as the Olympic trials are over or -- fingers crossed [that Godsey makes the Olympic team] -- the London games are over, Keelin will be taking testosterone and physically transitioning, he told us in Sports Illustrated. And that's, you know, this other second dream beyond Olympic contention that Keelin hopes to finally fulfill...
Certainly, you have an increasing number of people who are coming out and that's, one hopes, is because of a little shift in culture. You know, we're very far away from where we need to be in terms of tolerance and acknowledgement that transgender people and transgender athletes exist. But there are more of them coming out, it seems, year over year. And one hopes that's because they feel more comfortable and they're seeing these governing bodies actually acknowledge them in the actual bylaws of the sport.
Martin wanted to assert that it shouldn't be a "big deal" that transgender athletes exist and want to do their pretending without anyone throwing their "pronoun discrimination" at them. Then came the Jackie Robinson metaphors:
MARTIN: I mean, Jackie Robinson upended the Brooklyn Dodgers and the fans and was an object, you know, had to deal with a lot of stuff.
TORRE: Exactly.
MARTIN: But if there is no argument being made that these athletes have a competitive advantage over other athletes and it can be demonstrated that they don't - an unfair advantage. Right? Again, I have to ask, what's the big deal?
TORRE: Let's just talk about what happens when you have a transgender athlete coming out. I mean, what we're talking about is a civil rights issue on principle. It's the idea of finding a space for somebody who has the right to identify as whatever gender they wish and making sure that they're accommodated in the way that any other "normal," quote, unquote, athlete should be. And that's just something that structurally and on principle isn't in place yet. And it's something that awareness has yet to catch up with. It's something that you need to be able to be prepared for when it happens.
MARTIN: On the other hand, let's look at it from a different direction. On the other hand, that the window in which an elite athlete is going to compete is relatively short. OK? So, is there an argument to be made about why can't you just wait until your playing days are over?
TORRE: Yeah. I mean...
MARTIN: What about that argument?
TORRE: And that's something that every transgender athlete has heard. The problem is that we need to recognize how tough it is to suppress who you are. You talk to a transgender athlete. There's a reason, for example, why you look at surveys of levels of victimization, levels of bullying, levels of discrimination and just thoughts of suicide on the fact that they can't express who they are. And that's something that's incredibly, incredibly tough.
And that was something that I was, you know, I was really moved by when talking to transgender athletes, personally, which was they want to be able to express themselves in some way. Sports is not built to accommodate somebody who fits outside of the traditional gender binary. That's just the fact of how sports was segregated and that's why it is that way.
As the conversation wrapped up, Martin wanted to know whether Godsey is going to make the Olympic team. Torre said "There is a tough field, but Keelin really has a shot and God knows that if Keelin were to make the Olympic team, that would be the biggest moment, a watershed moment, more than anything else, in the history of sports and transgender athletes."
Actually, what "God knows" and these people don't seem to accept is that Godsey is a female.
