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Charlie Cobb currently works as the nordic coach and venue manager at the Fort Kent Outdoor Center in Fort Kent. He has been coaching high school nordic skiing for six years.
There has been much debate recently in Maine about whether transgender women should be able to compete with other women in high school sports. As I finish my sixth season of coaching high school nordic skiing, I would like to share my strong opinion that trans women should be able to compete with other women in high school sports.
At their best, high school sports provide kids an opportunity to de-stress from school, make friends, learn new skills, and practice a healthy lifestyle in a fun, supportive environment. When I think back to my time as a high school athlete, the parts I value the most are not the state championship we won or the podium finishes I had, but the friendships I made and the support I felt from my teammates and coaches.
Do we really care about winning so much that we would single out trans women to deny them the opportunities to make friends and be part of a supportive team? Are these the values that we want to teach kids? That winning is more important than participating, and that if you lose, you should try to ban your competition?
I’d be the first to tell you that high school sports are not the Olympics, but I wish that more people would recall the creed of the Olympics which states that, “the important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well.” Surely the participation of trans women in high school sports doesn’t interfere with any other athlete’s ability to try their best.
As a coach, my biggest goals have always been that my athletes have fun, work hard, and see growth and improvement both as athletes and as people. I make a deliberate effort not to focus on winning and results-based goals because, realistically, whether or not one is capable of winning is at least partially based on genetics. Some people have huge genetic advantages over others, and oftentimes these are the star athletes that we praise.
How different are these genetic advantages, really, from the biological advantages that trans women possess over biological females? In my opinion, especially at the high school level, it’s not that different.
At this past year’s high school nordic ski state meet, the top cis-gender woman would have placed 11th overall in the men’s skate race, and third within the appropriate men’s divisional class. I point this out not to suggest that biological males don’t have distinct advantages in most sports, but to show that regardless of biology, winning and competing at a high level takes a lot of hard work and some genetic luck, which are things we should applaud in all athletes regardless of whether they are trans or cis.
Regardless of how you feel about the fairness of transgender athletes competing in high school sports, I would hope you could agree that the most important responsibility any parent or coach has is to keep their athletes safe. However, when parents and politicians try to ban transgender athletes from sports and single out individual athletes by name online, they are directly threatening the health and safety of trans kids.
According to a 2023 national survey of LGBTQ youth, roughly half of transgender and nonbinary youth surveyed had seriously considered killing themselves in the past year. It’s difficult to say how much the push to ban trans women from high school sports contributes to depression and suicidal thoughts among transgender youth, but I have no doubt that it does contribute.
As transgender kids are increasingly singled out and attacked by adult politicians, it just seems wrong to rob them of their achievements and ban them from the sports that give them a positive outlet for their stress. If anything, we should celebrate trans athletes for persevering in the face of all this hatred.
