Who wins? center-right analysis of trans athlete bans in kids’ sports hits a home run with this weary Democrat

Yesterday I’d had it up to the keister with politics, so my heart leapt up when I read JVL’s column in The Bulwark. “I know the Republic is falling and we have more pressing concerns,” he began. “I know this isn’t important, in the grand scheme of things. At all. But I want to take a minute to talk about kids’ sports. I hope you’ll indulge me.”

OK by me! JVL, more formally known as Jonathan V. Last, edits The Bulwark, a public affairs website founded by veteran neoconservative pundit and Republican political operative Bill Kristol. And he has a tongue-in-cheek way of covering public affairs like he was writing for the sports pages. I like that.

Yesterday’s column, under the counterintuitive, but intriguing, headline “Fairness is Overrated,” follows up on a podcast the week before with “my best friend Sarah Ferguson,” publisher of The Bulwark. They have a chatty, free-and-easy format that makes their arcane world of focus groups, demographics, messaging strategies and inside-the-Beltway politicking relatable. I like that, too.

And to it they bring a center-right world view that gives this old leftie a new way of looking at things. The Bulwark has been aptly described (by Wikipedia) as offering “serious coverage of events through a center-right filter” but also attracting “centrist Democratic readers who may be uncomfortable with the excesses of the progressive left’.”

As my Democrats continue to squabble over last year’s election and messaging that seems as out-of-date now as the War of the Austrian Succession, I can certainly relate to that. And it gives me a fresh perspective I don’t get from a steady diet of “Democrats in disarray” punditry.

Last week’s podcast was about the current uproar over trans athletes. Ferguson and Last didn’t see eye to eye on it. (That’s part of their brand: Conservatives, they proclaim, can disagree with each other. There’s just enough truth in that to intrigue this tired old liberal.) Last explained:

[…] Her view is that post-puberty, the participation of trans women in women’s athletics is inherently unfair to biological women. My view is that this certainly can be true, but that ideas about fairness in athletics shouldn’t really matter until money is on the line. (Either in the form of actual money or scholarship money.)

Many people in the comments disagreed with me. I want to talk about it some more because at root I think our differing perspectives don’t have anything to do with trans people. I think we have divergent views about the nature of sport itself.

My view, after watching the podcast and reading JVL’s take on it: They’re both right.

Certainly JVL’s headline captures a truth about life, and about youth sports: Life is unfair. And when salaries, endorsements and scholarships are on the line, common principles of equity require us to step in and level the playing field. But Last adds, and I think he’s right about this, too, the money is extrinsic to the value of sports for most kids:

Worrying about what’s fair to a 15-year-old pitcher on a high school baseball team is different from worrying about what’s fair to a 22-year-old woman hoping to get drafted into the WNBA and make a career. At some point external rewards become heavy enough that they force us to look at sports differently.

And that’s what we’re fighting about — however well, or however poorly — with President Trump’s trans athlete ban. Trans girls have an unfair advantage, at least in some sports, over their cisgendered peers. But tall girls have an advantage over shorter girls in sports like volleyball, and kids who can run fast and throw a ball have an advantage, period.

To cite an example that’s closer to home than Trump’s bloviating about “transgender lunacy” and a “war on women’s sports,” when I played Little League baseball, I was a skinny, clumsy little guy with the hand-to-eye coordination of a cocker spaniel puppy. So my coaches tended to put me in right field where would do the least harm. But I got to play.

And because I got to play, and I learned to love the game.

When we visited my mother’s family in Michigan, I’d watch the Detroit Tigers with my grandfather on TV, and he’d explain the fine points to me. When do they call a sacrifice bunt? Why is a good, clear base hit better sometimes than a home run? The Tigers had run-of-the-mill seasons in the 1950s, usually placing around the middle of the old American League, but to me it was endlessly fascinating. Since I’d played, however ineptly, and I could intuit the strategies I saw enacted on TV at Tiger Stadium. That didn’t last, sadly. In the mid-1950s, I learned some hard lessons about loyalty.

Since my father’s family was from Brooklyn, I grew up as a loyal Dodgers fan. So I was thrilled in 1955, when they finally beat the Yankees in the World Series. So what did my heroes do next? They promptly moved to LA, and I more-or-less lost interest in major league baseball. (It was another 10 years before the Boston Braves moved to Atlanta, after a stint in Milwaukee, and the South got its first MLB team.) Money talks, and the money was telling me pro ball was big business and 13-year-old fans didn’t matter.

Something else Jonathan Last said in his trans sports column also rang a bell: “The most important lessons sports teach center around loss.” He explained:

Winning is great. Don’t get me wrong. But a lot of times it masks the internal rewards. Kids get so high on the thrill of victory that they miss the important stuff, or even learn the wrong lessons.

But defeat? Failure? Injury? Adversity? Unfairness? That’s where the important stuff lives. That’s where we learn compassion, charity, determination, honor.

Another trip down memory lane. I don’t know exactly where it fits here, but I transferred schools in the spring semester, and my first high school newspaper assignment was a baseball game. If memory serves, our starting pitcher walked the first five batters, and we were behind something like 17-2 when the game was called by darkness at the top of the 3rd inning.

I’d like to think I learned something about loss, charity and tact by the time I finished that writeup! (It was the first story I ever wrote for publication, and I also think it helped prepare me for later in life, when I moved to Illinois and married into a family of die-hard Cub fans.)

JVL promised he wasn’t going to write about politics. But I think he wrote about something more important than politics. Not only that, but I’ll take a wild swing at the ball and say it helps explain something that’s gone badly wrong with our politics. He starts with a familiar complaint: Our society is too competitive, and we offload it onto our kids too young:

I have seen parents scream at a 14-year-old umpire during a Little League game. I have seen coaches berating their teams for poor performance during middle school girls’ CYO [Catholic Youth Organization] basketball while they were winning by 30 points.

(Italics in the original.) Adds JVL in a footnote: “I have seen grown men get into fights at beer-league softball games. It’s like the old line about faculty lounge politics: The fights are so bitter because the stakes are so small.” To that, I can also relate!

A father of three who’s paid his dues as CYO basketball coach, Last thinks for most kids, the rewards are internal. The external rewards, are for adults. And, well, they’re external:

What’s odd to me is that in youth sports we try to create external rewards incredibly early. There are tournaments and leagues. We give out trophies and medals. We try to simulate external rewards when the kids are 6 years old and 15 years old. And to be honest, I don’t know why. I’m not sure that these fake external rewards help the kids in any way.

In fact, says JVL, external rewards can get in the way of the things that matter the mostL “those internal lessons that sports teaches us. About hard work. About leadership. About camaraderie. About perseverance. About humility. About sportsmanship.” Even winning, he adds, isn’t everything:

The most important lessons sports teach center around loss.

Winning is great. Don’t get me wrong. But a lot of times it masks the internal rewards. Kids get so high on the thrill of victory that they miss the important stuff, or even learn the wrong lessons.

But defeat? Failure? Injury? Adversity? Unfairness? That’s where the important stuff lives. That’s where we learn compassion, charity, determination, honor.

JVL promised not to talk about politics. But I think there’s a lesson here for my Democrats as we litigate who undercut whom in 2024 by staying in the race too long, or not long enough, or who should have said what about Gaza, immigration, pet-eating immigrants, childless cat ladies, or the price of eggs.

But there may just be a lesson there for Rpublicans, too. Says JVL:

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that we have set up a system that worships the external rewards to the near-exclusion of the internal rewards. And so perhaps we should not be surprised that a guy like Donald Trump got elected president. After all: He does so much #winning and that’s all that matters, right?

I tend to believe that America would be a better, healthier place if we tempered some of our competitiveness with virtue. With character.

There’s nothing I could possibly add to that.

[Uplinked March 22, 2025]