In her new book, Sex and Sports: Transgender Rights and the Culture War Over Girls’ Sports, Kimberly A. Yuracko, the Judd and Mary Morris Leighton Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker Law, examines one of the most controversial and polarizing questions of the last decade — namely whether transgender girls should be permitted to participate in girls’ sports. Yuracko’s book discusses the legal, medical, and policy matters the issue raises. Yuracko rejects the absolutist positions that have dominated public discourse and argues instead for a context-specific approach to inclusion that recognizes the different benefits that sports provide to players of different ages and levels.
“My goal in this book was not, primarily, to convince people to adopt my view of how eligibility lines should be drawn, but instead to help readers better identify and articulate their own views by providing an analytical framework for thinking about what is at stake.”
Yuracko’s approach builds on her longstanding scholarship on antidiscrimination law in education, employment, sports, and tort law. Across contexts, Yuracko focuses on what it means to treat people fairly and equally when they differ in meaningful and relevant ways. Sex-segregated sports was one of her first areas of interest, and in early work she addressed the question of what nondiscrimination looks like in a context in which women and men cannot be evaluated and compared using the same unitary metric. If the standard way to ensure nondiscriminatory treatment is to require that women and men compete directly against each other, with rewards going to the best performer, what does nondiscrimination look like and require when women and men do not compete directly against each other?
Years later, as transgender athletes’ participation in sports became a heated public and legal issue, Yuracko turned back to the topic. “I thought it was an interesting and hard question to think about how we draw eligibility rules and how we categorize transgender girls and women across sex-segregated contexts,” she said.
She was concerned at the time by the seeming lack of room for a layered discussion. “There was very little space for nuance because people were being rhetorically pushed into one absolute view or the other,” she said. Yuracko argues that the conversation should begin with a close look at context: Why is sport sex-segregated, and what goals are that segregation intended to achieve?
Yuracko identifies three categories of benefits: basic benefits, such as the physical and psychological rewards of participation; special benefits, such as prizes, recognition, scholarships, and professional opportunities that go to winners; and group benefits, which flow to non-participants when members of a group they are socially identified with are celebrated and rewarded.
The importance of those benefits changes depending on the level of competition.
At the recreational and early-childhood levels, basic benefits are generally the primary reason children participate. Winning carries few tangible rewards, and the emphasis is on participation. At those levels, Yuracko said, there is little justification for excluding transgender girls.
“We just want people to play, and the benefits come from playing, not from winning,” she said.
At elite high school and college levels, however, winning can bring significant rewards, including scholarships, recognition, university admissions advantages, and professional opportunities. The question of eligibility consequently becomes more complicated.
Yuracko said the strongest justification for exclusion at those levels is not that an individual athlete might lose a particular competition. Instead, she focuses on the broader group benefits associated with women’s sports. If transgender girls and women were to dominate particular athletic categories or competitions, biological girls and women could lose some of the benefits that come from seeing those with similar bodies celebrated for athletic achievement. The tradeoffs regarding inclusion and the difficult questions of line-drawing arise, she explains, precisely in those instances — and it is there that some measure of exclusion is most warranted.
The debate also raises difficult questions about Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education. Yuracko said that Title IX’s role in sports is distinctive because the law does more than prohibit discrimination. In the context of sex-segregated athletics, Title IX has a broader purpose: encouraging girls and women to participate in sports and changing how society values women’s bodies and athletic achievements.
“It’s hard to really understand Title IX in the context of sports without seeing its substantive goal,” she said.
The legal landscape has continued to evolve since Yuracko began the project. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in West Virginia v. B.P.J. addressed whether Title IX permits states to categorically exclude transgender girls from girls’ sports. The Court held that categorical exclusion was permissible, but this does not mean that it is required. States continue to have in place a range of policies requiring or permitting inclusion. Those too are likely to be subject to legal challenge. The resulting legal landscape remains unsettled, Yuracko said, with further questions likely to be addressed by courts and potentially Congress.
“I don’t think politics can be taken out of this,” she said. “But I think that we would benefit if the politics became more thoughtful and nuanced.”
For Yuracko, the central contribution of Sex and Sports is not a simple answer to a complicated question. It is a framework for thinking about the question more carefully. The book examines the arguments for both inclusion and exclusion and considers the assumptions underlying them before presenting a pragmatic proposal for women’s sports.
Yuracko hopes the approach will move the conversation away from absolutist positions and toward a more contextual analysis of what sports are intended to accomplish at different levels and why they are sex-segregated. “When I started the book, there was very little room for a middle ground, context-based position. People seemed pushed, or pulled, by their political groups to the extremes. I think that is changing,” she said.As courts, Congress, athletic organizations, schools, and policymakers continue to address transgender participation in sports, Yuracko hopes decisions will be grounded not simply in political rhetoric, but in careful consideration of the goals of sex-segregated athletics and the interests of all athletes.
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