GOP congressman says the point of trans sports bans is to encourage detransition

A Republican at yesterday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on transgender people’s right to participate in school sports said that the government should be encouraging trans people to detransition and suggested that trans sports bans could help. A witness from an anti-LGBTQ+ organization agreed that trans sports bans would help erase transgender identity.

The hearing was on “The importance of protecting female athletics and Title IX,” which was about President Joe Biden’s proposed guidance for schools to help protect transgender rights.

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She just couldn’t stand it that the congresswoman called out transphobia.

“The vast majority of people, 80 to 95% of what they call discordant gender identity, eventually come back to their original gender,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) said at the hearing.

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He was incorrect; estimates of the rate of detransition are fairly low. One study found that the rate is between one and eight percent, with those numbers including trans people who temporarily detransition due to social pressures, like their families or jobs being unsupportive.

“And I sometimes wonder if we normalize this idea of guys playing in women’s sports, are you kinda creating a situation which would be tragic if it’s true, that some of these guys are never gonna switch back because their whole social setting is praising them for switching?” Grothman continued in the clip reported on by journalist Erin Reed.

Sarah Parshall Perry of the anti-LGBTQ+ Heritage Foundation responded by claiming that 75% of trans kids “make peace with their natal biological sex” by the time they’re adults, which is also not true.

She also claimed that “Playing on the team that you want specifically for your gender identity, not based on sex, is an entree into ultimate medical transitioning.”

The vast majority of trans youth do not play school sports as their gender identity. Some states that have been passing trans sports bans have had as few as one transgender student-athlete in the entire state. There are still an estimated 1.6 million transgender people in the country – and almost none of them played on a sports team in school with others of their gender.

Conservatives generally defend transgender sports bans by claiming that cisgender women can’t compete against transgender women, even though there are trans women who participate in sports without winning but generally don’t make headlines.

Others say that allowing transgender women to compete will open the doors to cisgender men pretending to be trans in order to win women’s sports trophies, something that hasn’t happened in leagues and states where trans women are allowed to play on women’s teams. Cis men generally do not want to undergo the years of hormone replacement therapy and other medical requirements necessary to compete as women.

Grothman’s and Perry’s admissions that the point of such bans is to increase social pressure on transgender people so that they go back in the closet, while perhaps honest, shows that the real problem many conservatives have is with the existence of trans people.

Grothman has a history of anti-LGBTQ+ actions. Last year he said that it’s “horrible” that the U.S. State Department sometimes flies the rainbow flag at embassies because other countries might turn gay if they think that “the gay flag” is “the secret to America’s wealth and prosperity.”

This year he complained that Biden nominated too many people of color and women to federal courts and complained that some of the remaining “white guys… were gay.”

“So almost impossible for a white guy who’s not gay, apparently, to get appointed here,” he said, even though it’s not clear how he even arrived at his numbers.

Grothman has consistently gotten a score of “0” on HRC’s Congressional Scorecard, showing his longstanding and solid opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.

And while Grothman and Perry seem to think that detransitioning is common, doctors who actually work with transgender people don’t.

“My own personal experience is that it is quite uncommon,” Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center director of transgender medicine Dr. Michael Irwig told the AP earlier this year. “I’ve taken care of over 350 gender-diverse patients and probably fewer than five have told me that they decided to detransition or changed their minds.”