A coward needs a scapegoat

The NCAA sold out its trans athletes to Trump, but these exercises in cruelty won't stop.

A coward always needs a scapegoat. History does too.

The preceding emperor for most every incoming Roman emperor. The cows Catherine O’Leary was milking and the Chicago Fire. Older, typically single women society had no use for and the witch trials. Leon Trotsky for Joseph Stalin. My dogs for a small longhaired dachshund that lives in my building named Brunello.

History wants an other because others are easy conduits between action and outcome. An other, whether specific person or group, crises or cow, delivers us a bridge that spans over decades or more of complicated, multipronged precursors to zip across. That and we’re lazy.

Here’s where the cowards come in.

We grow especially lazy when we’re angry or scared. When, even if we know in our logical minds that nothing is ever caused by just one thing, out of hurt, fear, doubt, and powerlessness there is an overwhelming desire to lash out. Better yet, to direct that hostility toward a target.

History has its fair share of cowards, people who were willing and happy to throw their family, friends, really anybody, under the proverbial bus in order to get ahead or else pad themselves with a sense of security and control. Through a contemporary lens, this kind of person has been rebranded as resourceful, a self-starter. Driven. But whether classic or modern, cruelty has always been the coward’s favoured tool.

The NCAA banned trans athletes from competing in women’s sports this week, a policy change that spits in the face of Title IX and came less than 24-hours after Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring the same. To say that the NCAA’s total capitulation was swift is not accurate enough — the reaction was practically knee-jerk, premeditated. It’s easy to fold when it’s never been clear you had a spine in the first place.

There are fewer than a dozen athletes who identify as trans within the NCAA’s 530,000+ student-athlete population. A number, you’d think, given the organization’s $1.3 billion in annual revenue (and climbing) that would not pose much of a financial risk to support. Especially considering that the career of any student-athlete can be as truncated as a year, four years at its zenith.

It’s callous to point to the money first but that’s always where the NCAA’s lizard brain goes, and Trump’s order dictates the Department of Education pull funding from institutions deemed non-compliant.

For dismantling decades of tireless work, protest and action by student-athletes who demanded equity in recognition and pay, NCAA president Charlie Baker’s statement was brief, but reading it you can still hear a visceral sigh of relief, maybe even the susurrous sound of piss running down his leg.

We strongly believe that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today's student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions. To that end, President Trump's order provides a clear, national standard.

Baker ends by affirming, in an arm’s-length sort of way, that he and the NCAA “stand ready to assist schools as they look for ways to support any student-athletes affected by changes in the policy.”

Can you imagine looking to this craven collection of selfish, greedy stiffs in active retreat for help? After they just sold you out to a megalomaniac who signed this executive order surrounded by young women and girls, some barely taller than the desk he was sitting and grinning at, giving institutions express permission to forcibly examine girls and women for biological proof of gender?

That’s the glaring contradiction I’ve yet to see mentioned in any of this, either the NCAA’s cowardice or the clarion clear hypocrisy of the order itself (titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports”) — this only targets women. Trans women absolutely, but for cis women this is antiquated protectionism. It springs out of the belief that women are inherently lesser, that they need to be secured from a boogeyman lurking in the shadows (or in this case, some steamy locker room with the overhead lights flickering on and off for effect) as much as from their own agency.

Trump said he and his administration won’t stand by and “watch men beat and batter female athletes”, but he and his administration will bar and limit women’s control of their bodies while flaunting then vaulting to power men who assault women. This is not about giving power “back” to cis women. It’s about enforcing the same old virgin-whore trope of preservation and women’s bodies existing as some fantasy, revisionist ideal, and that cis and trans women’s assertion over their own bodies is a threat to patriarchal systems of dominance and oppression.

The only reason this order and its outcome are framed as empowerment, or a whiff of autonomy for women, is because it falls within the bounds of an already restrictive and predatory system like the NCAA. It’s the arena inside the Colosseum, it’s not and never will be the wider world.

Though it’s an exercise in futility because it assumes the people who view this order as necessary, or a win, or both, use logic in their day-to-day thinking, I wonder whether any have taken their Cro-Magnon thought experiment all the way through.

To hypothesize that a Division I athlete, fiercely competitive and brought up in a cultural and competitive system that demands and lauds singular dedication and perseverance above all, would wake up one day and decide transitioning would be, actually, easier. That it would give them a smoother field to win on. No matter the complete overhauls required in training, nutrition, recovery and more brought on by hormone treatment, or the logistical adjustments in training (staff, equipment, schedule, an open roster spot on a new and just as competitive team) brought on by going from, in this moronic exercise, a men to women’s program.

None of this includes the mental impact of making such a life-changing decision. The familial and social fallout, the optics, the pointed hatred one would willingly take on in choosing to become the other of this contemporary moment. To become vulnerable, marginalized, relentlessly policed — even when you make up less than 1% of the population in the U.S. over the age of 13 — all for the benefit of winning one race, one game, one title?

It is so hard to become a professional athlete in any sport, to make the jump from high school to college athletics, then a jump further into a corresponding pro league. This also assumes a pro league of said sport pays a living wage, or is in geographic proximity, and is not so steeped in the same regressive waters of this moment that it would not balk at the prospect (by which I mean having backbone enough to stand up for and support) of rostering a trans athlete.

What I’m trying to point out with this exercise in futility is that it takes a coward, someone who has their whole life benefitted from cheating, undercutting, taking the shortcut and happily harming others in the process, to think of this as an attractive or even viable route to success. To think it’s what athletes brave enough, with the mental and physical fortitude, the talent, ability and resiliency would choose on a whim rather than feel in their bones is not a choice, but their reality.

The problem with assigning such an obvious charade a logical thought exercise is that you soon realize there is no end. Not to the cruelty Trump’s administration wants to inflict, or the cruelty lackeys like Baker permit with their inaction; not to the number of boogeymen they’ll invent or the problems they’ll have those phantoms produce. The point is for this to be endless, not rational.

An endless war against an ever-expansive other, if one is vanquished the next will be named. When you keep a country in fear, when you extend the reach of that fear to neighbouring nations, you have the opportunity to turn everyone into cowards. Bloated on fear, starved for logic, eager for a scapegoat, hungry for more.

These are kids, is the underpinning thought I keep coming back to. Kids and such a scant number of individuals, made out to be an existential threat for Baker, with his palpable fear of losing donors and money, and Trump, in his fear of losing his handle on chaos to manipulate through. Beyond them, I guarantee, are people in no way directly affected by this order or these athletes, who had barely given it a stray thought before they were told to. People who prefer to be terrified for the false power it lends them, so have chosen this as a line in the sand, their triumph, their due.

I wonder if they know paths of no return aren’t labeled. That they look the same as any other fork in the road. That history holds plenty of bridges to be thrown off, in retrospect.