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Winter Woe is a disabled resident of Bangor and chair of the Bangor Green Independent Committee.
I often remember my experiences in the locker rooms in high school, commonly in changing rooms when I need to buy new clothes. I zip up a dress and still hear an old classmate ranking the girl’s basketball team by their anatomy. Looking at how a bustier fits in the mirror wells up how they all came to consensus that our classmate had a perfect body but her face was a dealbreaker, and some paper bag comments were made. Or coming to gentlemen’s agreements about who gets the leftover girls. In short, locker room talk. It turned my stomach.
I wish I didn’t have to be as aware of the comments that, by virtue of being a woman, I know are said about me, and I know they’re far less flattering. Because as a trans teenager, I knew that was to be my fate. Trans women know, from an early age, what we are signing up for better than most people give us credit for.
“Trans girls can simply play on the boy’s team,” some say. But to do so deprives children of the experience of youth sports. Organized athletics for children are about far more than how many points they scored. The group pile into the team mom’s van to head from the practice field to the game. The overnight events where children gossip in their blankets far later than they should because they are too excited to sleep. The jokes told to your friends on the bench. The swapping of lip gloss in a locker room. To try out for varsity and make the cut, or to fail and steel your resolve for next season. To learn how to lose with dignity and win with grace. All of these memories are just as important to your development as any game you played.
Experiences that trans children, simply because they had the audacity to be recognized for themselves, are told that they do not have the privilege of enjoying. The trans girl playing on a boys sports team gets to change in the bathroom, alone. If there’s an overnight event, she gets to sleep alone, because the team member wearing a sports bra would be a “distraction” to the boys. And on the bus rides to games across the state, she gets to listen to her male teammates tell her which of her best friends they are sexually interested in. How could you, as a child, not see these things as punishments because you were born wrong?
Children aren’t predators, and it is astounding that so many of our neighbors will side with the adjudicated predator sitting in the Oval Office in his war against children who just want to run track and field. As of right now, this issue encompasses two high school students in Maine, and zero university students here.
Gov. Janet Mills must continue her leadership against these illegal and highly targeted demands to prosecute children. Cruelty inflicted against one group is a fire that quickly spreads, because the hatred directed at trans girls (Mainers seem more evenly split on trans boys) is a hatred borne towards a person who could have been a man, including all the privilege that came with it, and chose instead to be something else.
Meanwhile, the SAVE Act is moving through Congress, a bill which says that the name you register to vote with must match the one on your birth certificate. As has been pointed out, this would deny the right to vote to tens of millions of married women who took their husband’s name. While Mainers seem to want to protect soccer fields as a female space, Republicans are using that sentiment, hoping you will hear “birth certificate” and think “trans,” to declare the voting booth a male space.
