A straight Texas sports commentator made a must-see segment about Mack Beggs, the transgender boy who was told to wrestle on the girls’ team and then won the state championship last week.
Dale Hansen at WFAA-TV News 8 in Dallas said that Beggs should be allowed to compete as a boy and stressed that Beggs is not the problem.
Beggs began the process of transitioning two years ago and asked to compete on the boys’ wrestling team. The state’s high school athletics oversight board told him he had to compete as the gender listed on his birth certificate. He ended up qualifying for the state tournament with a 52-0 season record and won the state championship in the 110-pound girls classification, amid jeering from other parents and students.
Hansen said he doesn’t know at what point a transgender teen should be allowed to compete with their gender identity, but that “somebody has to find a better answer than what we’re being given now.”
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Towards the end of the segment, Hansen showed a pretty profound understanding of the nature of privilege for a TV journalist:
The problems that Mack Beggs is facing and dealing with now remind me again that I don’t have any problems. He needs our support, and he does not need a group of old men in Austin telling him who to wrestle because of a genetic mix-up at birth.
"I don't understand his world…but I do understand he is a part of mine."HANSEN UNPLUGGED: http://on.wfaa.com/2lODg8p
Posted by WFAA on Monday, February 27, 2017
