Texas officials had a dilemma: a girl who was transgender became a boy. His name is Mack Beggs. He took testosterone for the past two years to aid his transition. Mack loved to wrestle. He was a good wrestler. He wanted to wrestle boys, but state officials insisted he had to wrestle girls, because his birth certificate said he was born a girl. So Mack wrestled girls and won the state championship. Mack had 52 matches against girls and won every one of them. Some people in the crowd booed and jeered and said that “she” had cheated because Mack was pumped up with testosterone.
Beyond the politics are the young people who have been forced to participate within a discussion and scene that, by any measure, is difficult to make sense of. The coach said one of his girls quit the wrestling team rather than face Beggs, who has documented and shared the results of his testosterone use on social media. James Baudhuin, the attorney suing the UIL over Beggs’s participation in the girls’ division, has a daughter who had wrestled against Beggs and, at least before the suit, was among his friends.
The ordeal grew complicated, on and off the mat. Baudhuin himself said he was so conflicted that, though he’d filed a petition to keep Beggs off the mat, he would nonetheless be cheering for Beggs to win the championship.
“The 16 girls who are in [Beggs’s] bracket have been put in a very, very unfair situation because of the grown-ups,” Baudhuin said. “To me, this is a complete abject failure of leadership and accountability from the people who regulate sports in Texas. They’re doing wrong by Mack, and not just these 15 girls but all the other girls she wrestled all year.”
Veteran sportscaster Dale Hansen in Dallas tried to think his way through this nuttiness.
Mack has been taking testosterone and it shows. There’s a reason we have rules in sports against steroids, and it was an incredibly unfair advantage for him. It was also unfair to the girls who had to wrestle him….
Transitioning is a struggle I cannot imagine. It is a journey I could not make… and it is a life that too many cannot live.
The problems that Mack Beggs is facing and dealing with now remind me again that I don’t have any problems. He needs our support, and he does not need a group of old men in Austin telling him who to wrestle because of a genetic mix-up at birth.
We have argued long enough about birth certificates. It’s an argument that needs to end. You don’t have to understand – I myself don’t understand. But Mack Beggs is not the problem so many people make him out to be. He’s a child simply looking for his place in the world, and a chance to compete in the world.
Do we really not have the simple decency to allow him at least that? Because it seems to me it’s the very least we can do.
Diane Ravitch's blog 