You Know It When You See It

In Utah, a woman is what the state decides

A mosaic in Villa del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily, Italy

Last fall, a group of Utah parents stood in front of a state-ordered committee waiting for the committee members to decide who, among their adolescent children, gets to be a girl. HB 11, passed in 2022 over a veto from Utah Governor Spencer Cox, prohibits transgender girls from competing on school athletic teams consistent with their gender identity, categorically requiring them to participate on teams based on “the biological, physical condition of being male or female, determined by an individual's genetics and anatomy at birth” and enforced by students submitting their original birth certificate to school officials.

When the portion of HB 11 categorically banning transgender athletes was blocked by a federal judge a few months later, a provision of the law required the state to instead allow transgender girls the “opportunity” to play on girls’ teams—but only after a “School Activity Eligibility Commission” determined each trans girl was sufficiently female. The commissioners were appointed by the Republican Speaker of the Utah House and included Dr. Paul Hruz, a pediatric endocrinologist with no experience treating transgender youth who nonetheless opines to federal judges and state legislatures that transgender identities are born from “earlier heresies in the Church,” same-sex couples are unfit to be parents, and once shrugged off concerns about high suicidality among transgender teens by suggesting “some children are born in this world to suffer and die.”

Transgender girls hoping to prove their female bona fides to this commission must turn over medical records detailing what gender-affirming care they’ve accessed, any past athletic competitions they’ve competed in, and their physical measurements with the commission reserving the right to request any additional information they see fit before determining the student is legitimately, in their eyes, female.

And while that might seem like an arduous level of bureaucracy to answer a question conservatives have repeatedly suggested has a deeply obvious answer, the commission fails to answer what is a woman. As the Salt Lake Tribune reports:

But while the commission will look at those measurements — and some have raised concerns about the members looking at minors’ bodies in that way — the policy doesn’t spell out any baselines. Not for weight, height, wingspan or muscle mass, for instance, which the law said the commission would consider. Nor does it provide standards for individual sports. Instead, the commission has said it will judge each student’s request to play on a case-by-case basis.

The student can testify to the committee about their case, along with their parents and any chosen witnesses, including a doctor, during a closed session to protect their privacy.

But even the commission’s deliberations are kept private from them. According to the passed policy, the commission members “shall deliberate the facts relevant to the student’s physical characteristics and eligibility in camera or otherwise after temporarily excusing” the athlete and other participants.

The student and their family, along with their local athletic association, are told only the commission’s final decision — which is otherwise private under the law.

Far from the claims about muscle mass or lung capacity or the relative advantages accrued during puberty often made by anti-trans activists and pundits—all of which give this “debate” the veneer of objectivity and scientific grounding—the state’s solution to the messy, complicated reality of the sexes is to invest itself with the sole authority to determine the sex of any given student subjectively. After all, it is notoriously difficult to draw any circle around the term “female” that won’t inevitably exclude some cisgender women, and policies that attempt to do so have a proven record of relying on standards that are, like so much biological essentialism, overwhelmingly racist.

Instead of opening that process for defining “female” up to public scrutiny, Utah adopts roughly the same standard Supreme Court Justice Stewart Potter famously applied to his 1963 definition of obscenity—“I know it when I see it.”

Or do they? This week, the same Utah legislature that passed HB 11 voted to censure Natalie Cline, a member of the state’s board of education who publicly accused a female athlete of being transgender. After posting about the student on her X account, Cline’s followers subjected the girl to a predictable deluge of violent threats and online harassment. As the girl’s parents told a local news station:

“To look at someone’s outer appearance and make an assumption that they’re either playing in the right arena or not, based on how someone looks I don’t think is appropriate,” Rachel van der Beek said.

Al van der Beek called the comments underneath the post, which Cline later deleted, disgusting.

“It was cyberbullying at its finest,” he said. The couple describes their daughter as a tomboy.

“She cut her hair short because that’s how she feels comfortable, she wears clothes that are a little baggy, she goes to the gym all the time so she’s got muscles,” Al van der Beek said.

Just two weeks before Cline’s post, a parent at a junior varsity girl’s basketball team also accused a student of being transgender, refusing to believe school officials when they assured him she had submitted the appropriate paperwork. “I wasn’t born yesterday,” the belligerent father said. “I know that’s a boy and you better be able to prove yourself because I am going to the top.”

Back in 2022, a group of parents demanded to see proof of another student’s gender after she placed above their kids in a local event. As a spokesperson for the Utah High School Athletics Association told the state legislature, such dustups frequently occur “when an athlete doesn’t look feminine enough.”

A few colleagues have asked me how transgender rights advocates should think about such incidents where cisgender girls are the victims of policies targeting and fueled by animus aimed at trans girls. As anti-transgender activists have loudly declared, policies restricting trans athletes are simply the path of least political resistance towards denying transgender people any subjectivity over our own identity altogether, be it on our driver’s licenses or which bathroom we use, or our access to hormone treatments and gender-affirming surgeries. That cisgender women may catch the rare stray in these fights should not distract from the overall goal of, to borrow a phrase, “eradicating transgenderism from public life entirely.”

After all, just a week before he condemned Natalie Cline for accusing a cisgender girl of being transgender, Governor Cox signed a law offering even more state validation of gender paranoia by prohibiting transgender people from accessing select public facilities aligned with their gender identity. In that context, the public condemnation of Natalie Cline isn’t a condemnation of her lack of respect for student privacy or the obsessive scrutiny that led her to question a student’s gender. What really troubled Cox and the Utah state legislature is that, from their perspective, Cline was wrong.

Compare the response to Cline’s targeting of a cisgender girl in Utah to a similar campaign waged against a transgender girl in Florida. Five employees at a Broward County high school were reassigned after the school superintendent received an anonymous tip about a transgender girl playing on the girl’s volleyball team. The student was barred from representing the school in any activity and, as her mother noted in a public statement, outed as transgender against her will. "A lot of things were taken from my family this week,” said the girl’s mother. “Our privacy, sense of safety, and right to self-determination."

The student had been playing on girls’ teams starting in middle school with little incident, and hundreds of students staged a walkout in support of her and the punished staff members. The captain of the girl’s volleyball team expressed concern for her teammate to local news, saying the girl hadn’t returned to school since the incident. “A lot of the complaints are about, like, fairness in sports,” she said. “But what about fairness among us as humans? Because right now, she’s not being treated like a human.”

Suppose your concern is about paranoia and privacy and the implications of every MAGA-obsessed vigilante deciding they’re the final arbiter of who is and who is not an imposter. In that case, both the incidents in Utah and the incident in Florida are of equal concern. But if you’re goal is investing the state with the power to police gender norms to erase transgender people from public life, then a cisgender girl facing consequences in Utah is but a misfire and a transgender girl in Florida being openly dehumanized by the state is the system working exactly as it has been designed.

As I wrote last year, however, the gender war is a forever war. The activists, organizations, politicians, and ideologues fueling the wave of anti-transgender legislation across the country are not only concerned with the small population of people who call themselves transgender. The ability to defy your gender assignment altogether is just one outcome of the freedom to self-determination that threatens a white Christian nationalist perspective on gender identity, a perspective eager to control and police and limit bodies based strictly on patriarchal, misogynistic norms.

Just this week, two states took a brief break from the ongoing wave of restrictions on transgender rights to consider proposals limiting access to birth control and divorce, two legal rights that represented pillars of the Second Wave of feminism and granted cisgender women a new degree of agency over their bodies and their lives. Oklahoma’s HB 3216 defines life as beginning at fertilization and thus bans doctors from prescribing the morning-after pill or IUDs as a form of emergency contraception. In South Dakota, HB 1254 (which was thankfully killed in committee) would have eliminated “irreconcilable differences” as due cause for divorce, making it significantly harder for women in abusive marriages to legally separate from their abusers.

The Oklahoma bill was drafted by state Rep. Kevin West with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom, the far-right legal organization that overturned Roe v. Wade and drafted much of the anti-transgender legislation proposed across the country—including athletic bans. Back in 2021, Grace Waggoner—daughter of ADF chief executive Kriston Waggoner—told the Arizona state legislature about her experience suffering the indignity of competing against a transgender athlete. But as USA Today reported:

The game Waggoner referenced in her testimony turned out to be a state tournament play-in game in 2019 that Scottsdale Christian Academy lost to Heritage Academy, 16-6. Heritage Academy coach Steve LaDrigue said his team did not have a transgender player.

LaDrigue guesses the suspicion fell on the team’s catcher, his daughter, because she has short hair.

The surveillance and humiliation of cisgender girls in the name of policing transgender girls is not a misfire or a fluke—it is by design. The organizations targeting transgender people understand that most people already police themselves and others along gendered lines largely based on behavior and appearance, and stoking fears and anxiety about transgender people is simply the path of least resistance to stoking fears and anxiety about gender altogether, forces that will target a broad range of nonconforming people and behaviors—be it the divorcee, the childfree, or (it seems) the short-haired.

The Utah legislators who censured Natalie Cline are right to be outraged by her actions and the online obsessives who directed threats and hate at a young cisgender girl who just wanted to play basketball. Ultimately, however, if that same humanity is denied to transgender girls when they’re forced to parade themselves in front of a state commission helmed by a doctor opposed to their very existence—or have their privacy ripped away from them like the young woman in Florida—then it’s not privacy and dignity you’re protecting. Cline’s actions are the logical consequence of a movement that relies on the fact that gender is socially enforced to turn up the heat on that enforcement with the backing of the state and deny everyone the right to defy their assumptions about who we should be.

In terms of rhetoric, culture, and legal strategy, transgender people are simply the on-ramp to investing the state with the power not just to determine who gets to be a man or a woman but, as the restrictions on reproductive autonomy and sexual rights suggest, what men and women are for. Anyone in opposition to that power must resist not only who it targets but the whole of that power altogether.