The debate may be complicated, but the science is even more so.
For all the arguing and misinformation about transgender athletes in sports, we rarely hear from the athletes themselves. They are not large in number. They are not speaking out with a litany of demands. They are not trying to rewrite the rules of fair play, as you might assume based on the right-wing effort in state legislatures to limit or bar their participation. |
Their absent voices became a call to action this spring for my colleagues in Opinion Video, who wanted to deepen the conversation by hearing from someone who is impacted by these noisy debates and legislation. |
My colleagues started by looking at scientific research — and quickly realized how inadequate it was, simply because the sample size of trans athletes is low. The number of elite and world-class trans athletes is even smaller. We were surprised to learn that one of the most influential studies has only eight people in it. And when pressed, state lawmakers struggled to name instances of trans athletes displacing cisgender athletes at the high school or college level. The chief example people produce is that of two trans girls from Connecticut who beat out their cisgender competitors in a high school level competition. |
In our new video, we introduce you to Andie Taylor, a trans woman whose experience with running and competition has shaped her nuanced outlook on the science — an outlook that reflects how complicated the science really is. |
Taylor worries that her years as a biological male give her an advantage in distance running over cisgender women. She grapples with how hormone therapy does — and doesn't — affect her ability to compete. Most political discussion about the "fairness" of trans athletes in competition deals with the high school and college level, but nearly all of the scientific studies on trans athletes focus on adults. These debates lean toward hyperbole and absolute conclusions; the scientific research is more complicated than the rhetoric suggests. |
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Taylor shows how trans competitors defy stereotyping and caricature: She is caught in the middle of this messy debate, and genuinely doesn't know what the answer is. She feels ostracized by the right and the left in a fight over fairness. |
My video colleagues went to lengths to bring her journey to visual life. The opening scene, for instance, aims to place Taylor directly in the middle of the culture war surrounding trans participation in sports. The creative challenge was to find a way to surround her with superimposed video clips creating a cacophony of voices in her head as she ran through the streets. Our visual concept required us to find a location that was narrow enough to fly a drone where we could see buildings on both sides; assess that it was legal to fly that drone in that specific location, which required training a location scout on how to check airspace; and looking at sun dials and understanding when light would be even on both sides of the buildings, so our video projections would be visible. |
Once we knew where and when to shoot (and that it was legal), we hired a cinematographer who could both fly a drone and film on Rollerblades, as well as a graphic artist to rotoscope realistic images on the buildings as Taylor moved through the space. |
The scene, shot in Minneapolis, is a reminder of the level of care that my video colleagues take with all their work, and that they brought sensitivity and thoughtfulness to Taylor's story. |
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