A sporting chance

 I saw Richard Raskind play tennis once.

It was at the U.S. Clay Courts in Indy and the sun was baking everything as it tends to do in an Indiana summer, and across the net from Raskind was Chris Evert. Evert ate Raskind's lunch and half his dinner that day. And later Raskind, in his husky voice, said what a lot of people used to say about Evert, which is that she was one of the greatest women's tennis players ever and you couldn't out-rally her with a howitzer when she was on her game.

One thing, though: Richard Raskind wasn't Richard Raskind by that time. He was Renee Richards, and he was now a she.

Richards was my first exposure, and lot of people's first exposure, to a transgender athlete, and it left me with a couple of impressions. One, she wasn't at all creepy, which is what we were led to believe transgenders were at the time, and which an unfortunate number of people still believe. And, two, she wasn't all that great a  tennis player.

The latter comes back to me now that certain state lawmakers of the Republican variety are hard at work protecting us from their newest boogeyman, transgender kids. Eight states have now passed statutes that forbid transgenders from participating in girls high school sports, on the theory that they'd have some sort of unfair advantage and would ruin girls sports.

That's their story, at least.

Me?

I remember Renee Richards, who as Richard Raskind was a better-than-fair male athlete. As Raskind, Richards was a good enough baseball player to draw the interest of the New York Yankees; as a male college tennis player at Yale, Richards was regarded as one of the best college players in the country.

According to Republican orthodoxy, then, she should have had an unfair advantage as a women's player and thus been dominant. But she didn't, and wasn't.

This is why I'm completely on board with U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona -- who, unlike his predecessor, has some actual credentials for his position, and for whom naked self-interest does not drive policy. 

What Cardona told ESPN the other day is transgender girls have a "right to compete," and he's hoping the Biden administration will step in to protect their civil rights in the states where they've been banned from girls and women's sports.

Now, I'm no legal scholar, so I can't tell you if someone's civil rights include the right to play tennis or basketball or soccer for good old Millard Fillmore High. But I can tell you singling out transgender girls for exclusion is damned mean-spirited, and disingenuous besides. Based as it is on such rickety assumptions, it amounts to picking on transgender kids just because, well, we think they're creepy and we don't like them.

The rest is whole lot of stuff and feathers. No matter what they say.