Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

NEERAJA DESHPANDE: The Washington Post Inadvertently Revealed The Truth About Puberty Blockers

By Daniel X. O'Neil from USA ,via Wikimedia Commons

The Washington Post recently published a story titled, “A trans girl was banned from her track team. Now she’s competing with the boys.” It follows Eliza Munshi, an 18-year-old male who identifies as transgender. Munshi joined the girls’ track team earlier this year, after President Trump’s executive order “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports.” But because of the executive order, Munshi was unable to play with the girls without invalidating the league—so Munshi had to compete with the boys.

In many ways, this is a success story from the perspective of those of us who have fought to protect single-sex spaces: Munshi, who is male, was able to compete with other males, even if Munshi does not conform to sex stereotypes (the Post story says Munshi preferred “glittery red flats” and “fairy dresses” as a young child, and Taylor Swift and pink hair as an adolescent—none of which make a person female). Activists have unfairly maligned the women’s sports movement, stating that it wants to keep people who identify as transgender out of sports altogether—but in reality, no proponent of single-sex women’s sports cares if someone like Eliza Munshi plays on the boys’ track team, and in fact, many supporters would actively encourage someone like Eliza Munshi to play on the boys’ track team. The Washington Post story, if anything, proves that protecting women’s sports was always about protecting single-sex spaces, not about “transphobia” or “banning trans people from sports.”

That said, there is still cause for concern with the story: namely, the medicalization of children who identify as transgender. The Post’s Karina Elwood writes, “Eliza couldn’t help but think that if more people saw trans girls…they might think differently. [Eliza] never went through male puberty, starting blockers before [Eliza’s] body began making high levels of testosterone—the hormone that causes boys to typically be more muscular, grow facial hair and develop deeper voices.” Because of this, Elwood implies, Munshi might not have a physical advantage over the girls.

It is worth noting that Elwood is implying that puberty-blocked males are weaker than males who went through natural puberty. This should be cause for general concern, not limited to sports, and should raise the question: how are puberty blockers affecting the strength and health of the boys they are prescribed to?

We have some answers on this. Per a 2023 study from Amsterdam, puberty-blocked males, even after they begin taking estrogen in adulthood, have low spinal bone density. 36% of those sampled in the study were found to be at significant risk of future osteoporosis. They are also likely to have decreased adult height and, if prescribed puberty blockers early enough, will suffer from decreased penis and scrotum size, and what is often total loss of sexual function, including capacity for orgasm, as well as sterility.

But the fact that puberty-blocked males are shorter and weaker than their male counterparts who went through natural male puberty does not mean that the body of a puberty-blocked male resembles, let alone becomes, the female body. Physically healthy females may have smaller bones on average than physically healthy males, but that is a natural biological distinction, not artificially created, drug-induced weakness.

Elwood insinuates at the end of the piece that because Munshi’s throw at the first track meet of the season was the shortest in the boys’ competition, Munshi should really have been competing with the girls. But reading between the lines of the story should point us to a different conclusion: that the medicalization of children who do not conform to sex stereotypes is physically harming them by weakening them. The fact that puberty blockers cause irreversible damage in males does not mean that puberty-blocked males belong in female-only sports. Instead, it means that we should end the medical experiment of puberty blockers on minors altogether.

Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst and engagement coordinator at Independent Women.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.