Transvestigating Women’s Tennis

I would love to know what your favorite break is from [gestures at the world burning].

Mine is women’s tennis.

I don’t play, just watch. When news hits hard, I find calm in the geometry of a tennis court and the sound of players grunting as momentum shifts in a rally.

Notwithstanding that tennis style has crossed into athleisure and my Instagram ads are full of pleated skorts and glittery court shoes, professional women’s tennis remains a niche sport, not much talked about in America. That makes it a pretty perfect escape.

Until last week, when my carefully curated feed blew up about new, compulsory “genetic sex testing” for women players. The WTA, or Women’s Tennis Association, is the first non-Olympic professional sports association to introduce such a policy.

The wording of the rule is chilling. And the claim the WTA makes as the basis for the test sounds more like the one drop rule than like science. More on that shortly.

First I want to say how strange it is to go from studying match highlights and reading about coaching changes—in my carefully curated feed, so many muted words!—to being back in my body as the mom of a trans kid, reacting to and withstanding a direct attack. The moments when news leaps out of your small screen and wraps around you like razor wire.

A fire

Even before I read the details, I could guess how the policy change happened now, as the validity of trans people comes more and more under attack in the U.S. And I could see the possible repercussions—not just for the VERY few trans women in sports as a whole but also for cis women and trans youth. The clarity I had was searing. I wanted to step out onto my porch and scream. Would anyone hear me, or care?

IS ANYBODY LISTENING?

Turns out some people are listening. In the days following, a few voices in tennis spoke up. In particular, The Body Serve podcast and Bounces, a newsletter by well known tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg, offered thorough reporting and political context for the new rule. (My sum-up below comes mostly from their coverage.)

Courtney Nguyen, a former senior writer at WTA and a popular match commentator for NPR and BBC World Service, said the policy is “absolutely disgusting and infuriating to see from a tour founded on defiance and moral clarity.”

I’m grateful for these insiders using their platform to spread truth as I brace for transphobic takes from players and coaches that will be dispersed into the discourse like poison.

“Once and for all”

The test itself a cheek swab that checks for SRY gene, which is found on the Y chromosome. By mandating the test, WTA implies that if you have SRY gene, you are almost certainly male.

Except that’s not the case. Even Andrew Sinclair, the scientist who discovered SRY gene in 1990, warned against genetic sex testing: “Using SRY to establish biological sex is wrong because all it tells you is whether or not the gene is present.” Dozens of genes control the development and functioning of testes. Women assigned female at birth and who have always identified as female can have sex differences on a genetic level and test positive. (Men assigned male at birth can have genetic sex differences, too.)

The new policy states that a positive test may result in ineligibility to play, “which may lead to the reason for [a player’s] ineligibility becoming public knowledge or being the subject of public speculation.”

Elsewhere the rule states: “There is no intent to disrespect or question the gender identity or the dignity of any person.”

So: there is no intent to harm a player, but there is no protection either from the test result being made public and no provision if her dignity is harmed (or she loses earnings or a career).

It’s a once in a lifetime test, WTA breezed. On the face of it, a onetime cheek swab seems less invasive than peering into a player’s skort at her genitals (which is how Olympic sex testing used to work). But the implication behind “once in a lifetime” is: Once and for all. Men are men and women are women. Which we very much know is not the truth.

Does the idea that one swab proves you’re a woman for your whole life remind you of the idea that one drop of blood—one Black relative—proves you’re Black? It does me. The bias behind the language is clear.

Fine print

If you are like most people, you don’t care what happens to the handful of women on earth who play pro tennis. To be honest, I don't give much thought to that small number of women beyond watching a yet smaller handful of them play at Wimbledon. Given vote suppression, wars, wildfires, ICE, a new test in a sport that’s barely broadcast seems minor.

But it’s what the test means, I want to scream from the rooftops. It’s what can happen.

The larger implications, especially for trans youth, are in the fine print.

The previous WTA policy allowed “a biological male with a female or non-binary gender identity” to become eligible to compete if she reached and maintained required low testosterone levels. That rule passed under New York jurisdiction.

Now, the WTA has relocated to Florida, and the new policy “may only be challenged before a court located in Saint Petersburg, Florida, which is the WTA’s principal place of business.” Needless to say, a court challenge in deep red, MAGA Florida will likely fail.

It’s a small leap, then, from mandatory sex testing in the WTA, under Florida jurisdiction, to mandatory sex tests for girls’ softball, basketball, soccer, in Florida high schools. Middle schools. Primary schools. And for those rules to spread to other red states, as bathroom bans and other anti-trans legislation have spread.

Masquerade

The idea that there are men lining up to say they are women, to masquerade as women, to take over women's tennis and attack women in locker rooms, is not reality. But the new mandatory sex testing policy creates the illusion of that possibility. The illusion is what matters. The illusion is the outrage generator.

The fact that there are no trans women on the WTA tour doesn’t matter, because the rule is about doubt farming.

Meanwhile, in this sport I love to watch, there is a real problem: domestic violence, intimate partner violence, coaches assaulting young women. Men have never needed to pose as women and sneak into locker rooms and bathrooms to harm women and girls.

— N.R.

Noa Rabinow is a health care worker, an editor at Gender Defiant, and the mom of a trans teen.

Tiny Useful Fact #3

Seizing private healthcare data of trans youth threatens all of us, not just trans youth.

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