Youth sports have a significant impact on the development of all children. Sports provide children opportunities to build their social skills and confidence, as well as improve their sense of belonging and physical fitness.
What happens to these spaces when adults are given permission to inspect a child’s body to determine their gender?
The Supreme Court rulings on Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. decided that transgender girls cannot play sports that align with their gender identity. Not only does this ruling essentially prohibit transgender kids from participating in most youth sports – codifying the exclusion this vulnerable population already experiences – it also puts all children at risk of the harmful consequences of body surveillance.
I am a social work scholar who studies LGBTQ+ belonging and organizational climate. I’m also a former NCAA Division II women’s volleyball athlete, and I know firsthand what it’s like to have uninvited scrutiny of your body because strangers doubt your gender.
Based on my research and experience, when policies allow for the bodily surveillance of children, all children are at risk of losing the benefits of youth sports – not just transgender children.
Youth sports as developmental spaces
School sports are not just about competition. They can provide children an important developmental space.
Youth sports can help children improve their sense of competence and confidence. They offer opportunities to practice life skills, such as setting goals, solving problems and thinking positively. Sports can also help protect against depression and stress by bringing supportive adults and positive role models into children’s lives.
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However, when youth sports environments become overly stressful, unfair or humiliating, they can also serve as grounds for potentially harmful experiences. For example, coaches and parents can negatively affect a child’s body image by repeatedly criticizing their weight. Teammates and peers can also pressure each other in destructive ways.
The developmental value of youth sports depends on the environment it creates. It stands to follow that ensuring youth sports spaces have as many positive influences as possible is in the best interest of all children.
Research suggests that policies legalizing bodily surveillance are not a positive influence for any child in youth sports.
Bodily surveillance as an avenue for harm
Bodily surveillance plays out in significant ways for all children in youth sports, not just transgender youth. Policies that legalize bodily surveillance for youth open the door to causing harm in unsuspecting children.
Researchers define bodily surveillance as “viewing the body as an outside observer” through active judgments of a person’s physicality, superficial appearance or perceived gender presentation. While bodily surveillance claims to regulate women’s sports in the name of fairness, experts contest the scientific basis of these claims.
Women’s sports have been the site of bodily surveillance for decades, and the cisgender women involved in those sports are all too aware of the ways their bodies are judged through the lens of sexism. Often, how their bodies are judged are influenced by a definition of femininity based primarily on white bodies.
Bodily surveillance can involve assessing how tall is too tall for someone to be a girl? How strong is too strong? How fast is too fast? Who decides when a child exceeds that threshold, and what happens to that child if they do?
Children who compete at the top of their division or class will have to contend with invasive procedures. To evaluate claims of unfair advantages, strangers may request hormone or genetic testing to look for common biological variations that cisgender children and their parents may not even be aware of. Testing may also include genital or pelvic inspection to look for the presence or absence of a penis, or even transvaginal ultrasounds to detect the presence of ovaries.
Strangers are already policing children’s bodies
Bodily scrutiny is not restricted to just transgender children – it already affects cisgender children, too.
In 2022, a high school athlete in Utah was secretly investigated after she defeated other children in a sports competition. Parents of the second- and third-place finishers raised a complaint that led the high school athletics association to analyze her school records back to kindergarten to determine the child’s gender, without consulting her parents. This is a strong example of how people can initiate investigations simply because the child does not look “feminine enough.” In this case the child in question was indeed a cisgender girl.
In 2023, two adults harassed a 9-year-old child at an elementary school track meet. The adults, claiming the girl was transgender, stopped the entire event and demanded she show “certification of her sex.” This was also a cisgender female child.
Strong, athletic women are often subject to suspicion because of their so-called “masculine traits.” As a taller-than-average person who was assigned female at birth, I personally experienced countless moments of bodily scrutiny during my time as a NCAA Division II women’s volleyball athlete. These experiences made me want to shrink out of public view and did not give me confidence in my athletic performance. Moreover, the effects of this scrutity bled into my personal life, significantly affecting my self-esteem and self-perception throughout my young adulthood.
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Imagine if that scrutiny happened when I was much younger, when I did not yet possess the emotional maturity or life experiences to cope with it. Research shows that such bodily scrutiny is already damaging transgender youth and that bodily shame can significantly affect young people’s mental health, leading to disordered eating and other physical and psychological harm.
When societies give formal permission to scrutinize a child’s body and question whether they belong in a sport, it opens the door to potential harm against all children. Children’s bodies, regardless of their gender identity, become open for people to inspect, create rumors about or render public judgment against them, often without any recourse for the children experiencing harm.
Children who had previously never faced the harms of bodily surveillance may soon be subject to its violence because of this law.
Inclusivity benefits all children
Just as all children can potentially suffer from bodily surveillance regardless of their gender identity, embracing inclusivity can improve the well-being of all children.
Research shows that LGBTQ+-inclusive environments can help all children succeed in school. A 2012 study of nearly 16,000 students in 45 schools found that the presence of a gay-straight alliance reduced truancy, smoking, drinking and suicide attempts. A 2020 study of over 895,000 children found that those in LGBTQ+-inclusive environments reported doing better in school, lower substance use and better mental health.
On the other hand, a 2024 study found that anti-LGBTQ+ language in youth sports negatively affected the self-esteem of all children, including those who do not identify as LGBTQ+.
Youth sports, just like schools and churches, are not just places where children compete, learn facts or practice their faith. These community institutions are places where children build the confidence, relationships and sense of belonging that can shape their adult lives and the impact they’ll have on their family and community in the future.
The scope of sex-based bodily surveillance by necessity extends beyond transgender students, and the effects of this surveillance negatively affects all children involved in youth sports, regardless of identity.
