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Have you heard of the Female Athlete Triad (FAT)?
If you are a female athlete, or closely associate with female athletes, there's a very good chance that you've heard of the FAT, which has possibly the single most fantastically inapposite acronym in the history of acronyms. On the other hand, if you are neither a female athlete nor closely associated with female athletes, there's a good chance you've never heard of the FAT. The short version is, female athletes often show up at physician's offices experiencing menstrual dysfunction, low energy availability, and decreased bone mineral density. Sometimes this is also associated with that most famous of social contagions, the eating disorder--but often not!
The FAT is an important part of understanding female athletic health. Coaches and trainers (if they're worth anything at all) know to watch for certain warning signs, especially amenorrhea, anemia, and low body weight. Athletes exhibiting even one of these symptoms should, to the best of my understanding, be placed on lighter workout regimes or even excluded from practice altogether; athletes exhibiting all three should be excluded from athletic participation until more detailed medical examination can be done.
The FAT may be somewhat controversial in that attention to it arguably holds women back--a woman who cares more about a gold medal than about having children someday is rather unlikely to care much about amenorrhea (and may even see it as a blessing). But there are other consequences, too--like stress fractures, osteoporosis, bradycardia, and so forth. So people in charge of caring for female athletes--parents, yes, but also coaches and trainers--have for decades been generally regarded as under obligation to monitor women and girls for amenorrhea, anemia, and body weight/eating issues.
Why should you care? Well, recently there has been some culture war brouhaha over Florida (surprised?) weighing certain laws or regulations regarding the monitoring of menstrual health in teen athletes (really, just some standard questions on a standard form). Despite the AP's surprisingly helpful writeup, the Florida High School Athletic Association held an emergency meeting to "reconsider" their forms immediately, rather than waiting for their scheduled meeting later this month.
Certain folks in my social feeds have been going nuts about how monitoring menstrual health is a sneaky way of excluding trans athletes, or secretly learning who has gotten an illegal (?) abortion, and of course--it's all on Ron DeSantis, somehow. Time magazine, for example, seems happy to selectively report on the matter, as does Florida Politics. Advocate asks "why!?" Apparently, people have been asking "why!?" for months.
They've also been getting the same answer for months: "this is to make sure athletics is not endangering these girls' health." This is nothing new, and is something many states check. Should states check this sort of thing? I can imagine a certain sort of libertarian declaring that, no, this is unnecessary. But by and large it is the not the libertarians asking these questions--it seems to primarily be the people looking for something, anything to prevent Ron DeSantis from becoming President in 2024.
And they're even, apparently, willing to ignore and/or unwind a thirty-year-old staple of youth sports medicine to get the rhetoric they're after.
These sort of brave 'hold the line' moments of trans exclusionary feminism always lack self awareness. Where the typical scenario of a desperate plea in the name of 'women's health' are paraded about like a holy shield. Not recognizing the 'health' that will be sacrificed in the name of these 'women', notably the health of trans women. But on top of that not recognizing the 'health' that has already been sacrificed in the name of feminism at the cost of men.
The core mode of feminist 'meta' discourse is that of designating who is in and who is out. Who the 'actual women' are. You know feminists are in disagreement when some of them have started talking about what is best for 'actual women'. Women who find themselves on the out realize this very quickly. They are not 'actually women'. They are the outgroup. Being pro-life, for instance, functionally makes you not an 'actual woman' since your values are not going to be carried out by the people who 'actually care about women'. You might think that you are a woman and that being pro-life is good for women but you are wrong. The 'actual women' are pro-choice.
Taking this framework of feminist 'meta' discourse and applying it to the trans thing, the display is obvious. Trans is in. Even if it's just certain institutions, you can see the lightning quick reflexes. The Florida Highschool Athletic Association is not standing on their heels. There are people there who know what's up. They know what's 'in'. And in the name of every single element of society that feminism crushed to get where it is today all I can say is lol.
How on earth can radical feminists or feminists in general pretend that the sort of radical change in society, to the point of floating ideas that are to the direct detriment of someone else's health, are somehow beyond them? I've lost count of the times a radfem will stomp their foot on the ground and proclaim that no matter anything else, 'what is best for the mom is what's best for the baby'. Even if that means killing the baby so mom can continue chasing her dreams in marketing. Hell, where are the old radfem forum threads where women were floating the idea of not breastfeeding their boys so that they would become more physically equal to women? Those notions were, admittedly, radical. But the notions of drastically changing society to make these sort of 'equalities' come about via different means were not. In some aspects they've just become policy.
Feminist discourse has a very simple mode for how to view itself and 'actual women': Everything that is not 'actual women' takes a backseat. No matter what that entails. There is no principle. There is no line in the sand it will not cross. It is always and has always been a very simple mode. The ingroup always comes before the outgroup. There is no debate about anything else on that topic. The only debate is what qualifies as the ingroup. And that debate is, as it stands, over. The feminism of the past would not have batted an eye if they had to discuss this in any other context. At best they would only have acknowledged any resistance with mockery.
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Oh, this is what that comment I saw somewhere about "monitoring menstrual cycles" was all about? I couldn't figure out what the bee in the bonnet was there (it was some kind of 'this is anti-trans in sport' or something) because I couldn't see any reason parents would want to be monitoring menstrual cycles or whatever the OP was going on about.
Thanks for the explanation, now I understand the background! I had heard about female athletes having irregular or even no periods due to lower body fat/restricting weight and training hard and so on. Hadn't heard of the rest of it.
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The pertinent question here is "What does the school (or state) plan to do with this information?" I ran a high adventure program for the Boy scouts for several years, and part of the job was reviewing the medical forms of participants. These were mostly filled out by a doctor following a physical, though some doctors would just attach copies of medical records. I was concerned with three things—first, I had to make sure that is was filled out and signed by a doctor and not the kid's parents. Second, I wanted to see if the doctor noted any restrictions on participation. Finally, I wanted to see if there were any conditions that could cause acute problems during the week, things like asthma, diabetes, allergies, etc. and whether the kid had a medication that needed to be taken. I'd also ask if there was anything else I needed to know about that wasn't on the form, like if they had surgery or broke a bone since the doctor cleared them (forms were good for a year). I specifically remember one girl's form mentioning menstrual problems, and I can tell you for a fact that I didn't ask any follow up questions because there was no way I could see it affecting her participation in the program.
So what is the school going to do with this information? Are they going to subject all sports physicals and questionnaires to an independent review by their own physicians who will have the ability to override the examining physician? Unlikely. Are they going to establish strict standard for menstrual problems that will be enough to override a student's participation? Doubt it. Will they follow up regularly to detect any changes and potentially refer the student for further diagnosis? You see where I'm going with this. Most likely this information is going to be looked at once by the coach and won't be referred to again unless the kid gets injured while playing, and even in that case this specific information will probably be ignored by anyone involved.
Does this mean that all of this is just an underhanded way of rooting out trans kids to prevent them from playing on girls teams? I doubt this is the case, but when you make a name for yourself for blatant culture war waging, and a change like this is introduced right around the time you've been pushing for a ban on transgender athletes in girls sports, you can't be surprised if people get a bit suspicious.
My guess is that it is a way to notice there might be a problem. As a teenage girl it would never have occurred to me to tell anyone if my period became irregular. How horrifying to raise the topic! Most teenage girls have not yet seen a gynecologist (btw, who ask on their intake forms the date of your last period, for this very reason.) Their individual coaches should be aware of this but I can see how specifically asking would seem intrusive and weird.
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Even among libertarians, I think that's going to be a pretty fringe position, at least if they're applying the same sort of standards to female athlete reproductive safety and health as is typically done for other types of athletics safety and health. When an athlete is concussed, it is not simply up to them to decide whether they'd like to keep playing. If a male track athlete wants to run through a stress fracture, any decent and well-meaning coach will tell them that they can't do that, for their own health. For anyone who's been near competitive sports, you know that this is part of the overall deal - when you sign up, you pre-commit to doing what you're told by coaches and medical staff, and it's important that you pre-commit to it because everyone in these sports will push themselves too hard and too far if allowed to do so. We should acknowledge that bad choices made by highly competitive people in the spirit of competition aren't the same thing as coolheaded, voluntary choices and that it really is best to delegate this to someone that has the athlete's best interests at heart.
Is there anyone that wants to do a sneaky ban on trans athletes competing with girls? I'd be pretty irritated by a political process that tried to just make it inconvenient rather than openly saying that males should not be allowed to participate in girl's sports.
Openly saying that is easy. Actually instituting a policy that has any chance of being effective is difficult. The most straightforward way would be to simply implement mandatory sports physicals performed by a school doctor that included a genital examination. Of course, that would never happen, as the backlash among normal parents would be greater than any concern about a few trans athletes slipping through. Another way would be to establish a reporting system, where those suspected of being male can be reported to the body governing scholastic athletics, and that body can conduct its own investigation. This eliminates the problem of effectively punishing everyone for the sins of the few, but creates a system that might even be worse—any well-built female athlete could be reported to the commission and forced to undergo a humiliating investigation where her womanhood is called into question and could still possibly end up with a doctor conducting a genital exam. An obvious, straightforward way would be to simply require a copy of a birth certificate with the registration. The only problem here is that Florida has already made it relatively easy to get an amended birth certificate with a different sex, and undoing that system do to concerns about high school athletics would open a whole new can of worms.
Or you can create a bunch of half-assed policies that aren't fundamentally related to the issue but could help catch it indirectly. So if you start asking questions about menstruation you can flag all of the ones that say they've never menstruated; most school sports start at seventh grade and most girls have hit puberty by then and the ones that haven't probably aren't setting any records. But when a 16 year old who has never menstruated wins regionals and is obviously pretty athletic, you have some basis to conduct an investigation that isn't based on rumor and innuendo. I don't think that this is what's going on here, but it's at least a plausible strategy.
Somehow sports bodies are able to determine if a person has a minutely increased levels of some perfomance enchancing drug (some athletes find present such measures a significant obligation), but determining if they posses functioning testicles is to big of an ask.
We're not talking about international governing sports bodies here, we're talking about state and local scholastic sports bodies. It's understood that more is at stake when competing at the highest levels, or even at the collegiate level, than competing at the high school level. There you're talking about athletes who have already shown a significant dedication to their sport and they're more likely to jump through hoops to continue playing. The same can't be said about the girl who wants to run track because all her friends are doing it, or the girl who gets recruited from youth league to play soccer at a small high school that will take practically anybody just so they can field a team.
Anyway, the real question here is for whom is this too big of an ask? If any of these protocols were put into place the biggest objections wouldn't come from disinterested observers like you or me, or even from liberal or trans rights activists. They would be from the parents of the children affected, many of whom are conservative and would otherwise support the transgender athlete ban. Just not when enforcing it subjects their children to invasive examinations.
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From those linked articles, the main complaints are not that these questions are there, but seemingly that in the new draft they are:
Mandatory, whereas they were previously optional.
Now fully shared with the school, as opposed to a physician. Previously the school received only a one pager affirming the athlete was healthy with a doctor's signature.
Digitized, stored, and shared by a newly formed third-party company, allegedly not under HIPPA, which would allow the subpoena of medical records.
I don't really have any opinion on #1.
#2 and #3 are reasonably concerning at a glance, and would be especially so if I was worried about getting prosecuted under Florida abortion law.
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Obligatory concurrence that 30 years of sports medicine are probably alright, barring new and exciting evidence, and this is most likely dumb political wrangling.
BUT what sort of dumb political wrangling?
I’d be wary of assuming specific motives. All the usual warnings about correlation and causation apply, plus everyone involved has incentive to lie. My prior is that most activists on both sides are more interested in winning their policy niches than in a Presidential strategy. They’re happy to use DeSantis as a bludgeon, but don’t care about building/demolishing his credentials.
I’ve been tossing around a theory about culture war battles as opportunism; maybe this is a good example. How could we distinguish “fishing for dirt on DeSantis” from “using him as a lightning rod”? (Your anything link is obviously the former.) Or perhaps “presidential politics” from “policy-wonk politics?”
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Florida’s abortion time limit is 15 weeks. This is well after when elective abortions actually take place, and, one would assume that going through the entire first trimester and then some would be immediately noticeable in a female athlete without needing to check her menstrual cycles.
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