“There is a long history of excluding Black girls from sports and policing our bodies,” she said. “I am a runner and I will keep running and keep fighting for my existence, my community, and my rights.”
She’s right: Black women in sports — whether they are cis, trans, or intersex — constantly encounter shifting rules and expectations as a reprimand for their successes. They are accused of doping or cheating in order to win. People make cruel remarks about their perceived femininity and create racist depictions of their physicality, all in attempts to discourage and exclude them from competing — and ultimately to keep them from winning.
Nevermind that one of the youth plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Chelsea Mitchell, a white student who at the time was a senior at Canton High School, defeated her rival Miller in their last two races, and had earned state championship titles of her own.
“No matter how hard you work, you don’t have a fair shot at victory,” Mitchell said two weeks before the competition, when the lawsuit was filed.
What was the difference between all the other times Miller won, and Mitchell’s last two major victories? Someone had a better day on the track, plain and simple. But instead of honoring her competitor’s prowess, white girls and white people like Mitchell oftentimes undermine Black excellence by serving up excuses that betray an underlying sense of fragility and entitlement — the belief that white mediocrity should always reign supreme.
For precedent, look no further than the longstanding “rivalry” between tennis stars Maria Sharapova and 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams, who along with her sister Venus has had to combat misogynoir in sports for decades.
Williams has been chided in the press for looking “too masculine” in stature and build, even as she trained for the hard-hitting, fast-serving tennis gameplay that is characteristic of the “Big Babe Tennis” era. Despite Williams’ grand slam victories, and an overwhelming track record of wins against Sharapova, the blond-haired, green-eyed Russian athlete was once out-earning Williams by as much as $10 million thanks to numerous product endorsement deals, ostensibly because she was more mainstream, feminine and white.
Williams has passed every anti-doping test with flying colors, but over the years she’s been probed for drugs much more than her counterparts, activities she denounced as discriminatory in 2018. But after levying every excuse in the book for why she couldn’t be more competitive against Williams, Sharapova herself was suspended for 2 years after testing positive for a doping substance. Her career never quite recovered, and she retired from professional tennis in February 2020.
Whether the discourse focuses on an all-time great like Williams or on high school track stars like Miller and Yearwood, an athlete’s gender identity, presentation, skin color, and physicality aren’t considered a cause for affirmation as much as they are decried as liabilities or “unfair advantages.”
The anti-trans sports bills, as many others have said, seek to create a problem where one doesn’t exist, all for the sake of perpetuating hate against vulnerable groups. This isn’t about preserving competition in sports; it’s a way to mobilize would-be voters by turning trans rights into a political football. There is no conclusive scientific evidence to back any claim that trans girls are “biologically male” and therefore shouldn’t compete against cisgender girls because of higher testosterone levels, differing bone structure, or the like.
This same racist pattern plays out in debates over intersex athletes, too. South African track star and Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya has mounted a human rights challenge against World Athletics, the international governing body for track and field, after they moved to restrict testosterone levels in female runners. If she is unsuccessful in winning a policy change, Semenya, who was assigned female at birth and has naturally higher testosterone levels, may not be able to defend her Olympic gold this year.
The policy would also crush the Olympic hopes of 2016 silver medalist Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi and bronze medalist Margaret Wambui of Kenya, both of whom have hyperandrogenism, which results in higher levels of testosterone. As a result, Semenya, Niyonsaba and Wambui cannot compete in 400-meter, 800-meter, 1500-meter and 1-mile events.
While the policy indeed affects all women, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that three African women in particular have labored tirelessly to reach the pinnacle of their sport, only to be barred from doing what they love because of prejudiced accusations about their medical characteristics.
And so history repeats itself for Miller and Yearwood, two young trans women who should be celebrating themselves and other trans athletes, instead of facing anti-trans rhetoric from ignorant lawmakers or being scapegoated in lawsuits that seek to denigrate trans personhood.
In their story and in the story of these anti-trans sports bills, we see an old pattern of discrimination playing out yet again: Policing women’s sports is often about policing Black women in sports.
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