Using Tax Exemption to Enforce Orthodoxy (or Hate)
Is this what we’re doing now? Using tax exemption to enforce orthodoxy? I have four daughters and one of them will hardly play a round of golf with me anymore, that’s how bad I suck at it. Good players don’t often want to play with those of us who suck. They think our sucky skills will rub off on them somehow. But I can always drive the white ball much longer than my daughter, even if the usual destination is in the woods or the water.
Honestly, I would have been indignant if a transgender woman competed against my daughter when she played college golf. With practice and coaching I assume a trans woman can hit the ball farther and just as straight as a cisgender woman. My view might be ignorant, but it’s certainly not hate. My feelings do not extend to the rest of a trans person’s life, except that I still have qualms about a trans man using the latrine marked “hombre” or a trans woman using the one marked “Damas.” Not so much that I couldn’t get over it though. In the hombre, there is an unwritten rule against looking sideways and down anyway. None of us are ever even supposed to know what the next person has in his hands. And don’t people use private stalls in the Damas bathroom? Even so, I would probably allow – or at least not be bothered by – laws acknowledging other people’s different bathroom sensibilities. Because one side or the other is going to have to be inconvenienced at some point. For the rest of life, trans people have a right to live according to what is natural to them. Much of the rhetoric against that thought seems like hate to me.
The NCAA, in response to President Trump’s Executive Order banning the transfer of federal funds to educational programs allowing transgender women to compete against cisgender women, recently changed its old policy to avoid the loss of those funds. The Executive Order doesn’t even bother to acknowledge a trans person’s gender, never mind the person’s humanity:
Therefore, it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy. It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.
The new NCAA policy allows transgender women, or a cisgender woman undergoing hormone therapy, to practice with but not compete against cisgender women. It allows any student athlete to compete in men’s sports:
A student-athlete assigned male at birth may not compete for an NCAA women’s team. A student-athlete assigned male at birth may practice on an NCAA women’s team and receive all other benefits applicable to student-athletes.
A student-athlete assigned female at birth who has begun hormone therapy (e.g., testosterone) may not compete on a women’s team. If such competition occurs, the team will be subject to NCAA mixed-team legislation, and the team will no longer be eligible for NCAA women’s championships. A student-athlete assigned female at birth who has begun hormone therapy (e.g., testosterone) may continue practicing with a women’s team and receive all other benefits applicable to student-athletes. NCAA schools are subject to local, state and federal legislation and such policy supersedes the rules of the NCAA. Sports with mixed men’s and women’s NCAA championships are exempt from this policy (e.g., rifle).
Except for its refusal to acknowledge a trans person’s humanity, I cannot categorically condemn the Executive Order or the NCAA’s new rule. The prison of my experience and my self-interest will not allow it. At least I admit that much. But the rule is still not good enough for those whose voices sound like hate. Hence, the X post above suggesting the NCAA should lose its tax exemption. Enforcing orthodoxy via the Tax Code is bad enough, particularly against a sector characterized by unorthodoxy.
And sometimes I think people want to use the Tax Code to enforce hate.
darryll k. jones