Good for Kirk Herbstreit, I Guess?
Transgender and Intersex People Deserve to be Treated with Dignity, AND People Need to be Allowed to Say What they Really Think About Consequential Issues
ESPN broadcaster and personality Kirk Herbstreit has been in the headlines a bit lately, and it’s hard to know what to make of it. Never mind for now Florida State fans booing him on the College Gameday set in Dublin yesterday because of his public stances at the end of last season when the Seminoles went undefeated and were left out of the College Football Playoff, he was also uncharacteristically blunt on Twitter about the transgender question in sports recently, and then he immediately followed that up by almost strengthening his remarks and claiming that there is a bias about what people are allowed to say in his professional sphere while being interviewed on former-college-basketball-coach-and-notoriously-outspoken-and-conservative Dan Dakich’s podcast. Herbstreit hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, apologized, but he seemed to backtrack a little bit in saying that no one has ever tried to control what he says on air. This all happened around the same time ESPN decided to part with two evangelical big names—Sam Ponder and Robert Griffin III—and after a summer Olympics in which questions of gender and biology took center stage in women’s boxing.
Let’s start with the Herbstreit tweet. He was responding to a tweet that had been directed to him by someone who is not well known. The person (@shutterbug63) wrote: “Do men belong in women's sports? Time for influential men in sports media to stand up, Kirk.” Herbstreit’s response was simply: “Of course not. Ridiculous question.” Naturally that alone was enough to get the attention of the Internet, and Ponder—who has an extensive record of saying conservative-ish things (and a friendship with former ESPN broadcaster, Sage Steele, who doesn’t have only positive things to say about her former employer either), including on transgender athletes—was one who piped up to immediately express her approval of Herbreit’s view.
Herbstreit added in the Dakich podcast that Lee Corso had once told him to avoid religion and politics in his career in sports media, but having recently noticed how much religion and politics seem to show up everywhere in sports media these days, he said had been “biting” his “tongue” on this particular issue in response to a perception that it hasn’t seemed like things are quite equal in terms of who is allowed to speak up. He goes on to admit that he’s a Christian, which isn’t exactly a surprise, though it hasn’t always followed that his political orientation is wholly “conservative,” as one just needs to recall his impassioned plea on the behalf of black victims of police violence a few months after George Floyd’s death.
In response to the perception of bias in his field, I’ll say that it’s obviously true that cancellation doesn’t only work from political left to right, as one only needs to recall the “trouble” Jamele Hill seemed to stir up at ESPN (whereas she seems to have a bit more permission with her current employer The Atlantic) regarding race and politics—or the Colin Kaepernick supposed NFL “blacklisting” (pun not intended, though it works) following his decision to start taking a knee during the weekly national anthem. Kaepernick’s play had deteriorated a bit in the lead-up to his activism, but no can ever take away the fact that he started a Super Bowl game, and at the very least he was good enough to be a backup quarterback during the period of time when no team decided to sign him, though it’s not exactly clear if he was open to such offers at that time. If he shot down offers obviously that’s on him, but his decision to take a knee never should have been a dealbreaker in professional football
Even with the Hill/Kaepernick examples, if you want to see the discrepancy that Herbstreit seemed to be talking about, look no further than the U.S. women’s soccer team. In the months leading up to the Olympics, Korbin Albert, a graduate of the Catholic Notre Dame—who even now states that “Jesus is (king)” on her Instagram profile—apparently posted a sermon of some sort on TikTok that was critical of transgenderism as well as “liked” some post that was unearthed in which someone had joked that former U.S. women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe’s getting hurt in her final professional match was an act of God.
Albert issued an apology and seems to have gone silent on these issues since, but this is actually why we need to hear from the Herbstreits of the world who have enough clout and credibility and social capita to withstand any storm that might result from his declaring his views to the world. Is ESPN going to fire their top College Gameday guy? I doubt it. Because they’d lose way more than they gained. New USWNT coach Emma Hayes has stuck with the program in terms of Albert’s potential development as well, but what if Albert had chosen not to play nicely after, say, her teammates Lindsay Horan and Alex Morgan issued their dramatic sadness to whomever they were talking to about how the team’s “standards” had not been met and all? Could Albert now issue the tweet that Herbstreit did? I doubt it, and therein lies the problem. Not that Herbstreit can say it, but that Albert cannot. And Albert has some power! She’s a twenty-year-old professional soccer player. But she doesn’t have the same clout as Herbstreit (or Rapinoe), and of course we live in a country that is full of entry-level workers who feel fairly powerless and who are subject to bosses and administration’s and HR departments that keep trying to dictate way too much about what people are supposed to think on difficult issues. What we say and do at work and for work will always be and should be the concern of our employers, but this notion that we shouldn’t be allowed to say on our own time on podcasts or social media posts or whatever (while not committing crimes!) is just an absurd abuse of power that we have all but granted to corporations.
Let’s flip the names and political aisles for a moment. Can anyone for one second imagine all this rigmarole about anything that Rapinoe has done and said politically? She has been pretty free in that regard (and she should be!). Rapinoe does have plenty of critics (and that’s also also how it should be), but is there anyone out there who has seriously argued that, ‘hey, you shouldn’t allowed to be a lesbian fighting for “equal pay” and be on the national team for soccer?’ Well, then we also shouldn’t be saying, ‘hey, Albert, if you’re a conservative, be quiet; you’re not allowed to not like one of our former players.’ Please. Just because liberals are clever about the phrases they use does not mean these issues are as uncomplicated as they would love for us to think.
I did not see a the TikTok video that Albert posted, but in case I need to be clear I also do not think Herbstreit’s tweet is somehow an adequate treatment of whether or not transwomen should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. I am simply defending Herbstreit’s right to line up with roughly 60-70% of the American population on this issue.
What’s missing in his (non-) examination is also probably missing in the phrasing of the above Gallup poll question and even in a lot of Progressive treatments of this issue. Which is to say, you know, the science. At the heart of conversations about where transgender (and intersex) people belong is a definitional disagreement. What constitutes a man, what makes a woman, and are there people who don’t fit cleanly into either category? Can you change categories? If the answer to either of the latter two questions is yes, how do we then build a society that doesn’t overlook outliers or treat them as second-rate or unimportant? Now it really isn’t true that that we don’t know what a man or woman is or something and that exaggeration by the left is worthy of an eye-roll: more than at least 98% of the time, the chromosomes, hormones, and genitalia of a person matches, which solves most of the discrepancies about who is what.
What transgendered folks have inputed into the conversation is this notion of, well, maybe we just don’t feel like the gender of our biological sex, which is an interesting claim in that it seems to smuggle in an implied, concrete and objective understanding of gender that probably doesn’t exist and that left wingers would usually criticize. The solution that’s being proposed to this challenge has been hormonal and genitalia manipulations, which I have no problem saying I’m usually a bit skeptical of, though not necessarily politically opposed if: 1) they are done in and on consenting adults, 2) scientific data is collected and made public on the efficacy and long-term effects of these interventions, and 3) no efforts are made to silence or delegitimize so-called “de-transitioners.” If some people don’t like the long-term results of the interventions, that certainly seems like something we should pay attention to, and if transitioners are going to be treated with dignity and compassion (as they should!), so should de-transitioners.
In addition to trans people are the people who are often referred to as intersex, people who have a chromosome structure other than XX (female) or XY (male) and/or people with genitalia irregularity. Intersex people seem to make up somewhere between .0018% of the population and 1.7%. The differences between those two numbers are significant, and they seem to come down to differences in what the respective parties think should count. I’ll let the academics fight that one out, but either way we ought to be honest about the fact that these situations are, you know, aberrations and not the norm. Throw in another .5 to 1% of the human population experiencing some degree of gender dysphoria to the intersex numbers, and we’re at people with xx or xy chromosomes and the corresponding genitalia and no deep-suited internal gender confusion in the 97-99% range. Which, again, doesn’t mean exceptions aren’t deserving of compassion—I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to live in some of these situations—but if our politics are too often guilty of not keeping the minorities and irregularities in mind, it can be just as “problematic” (pun not intended, but I like it) to try to coerce everyone to the irregularity.
Take pronouns, for example. Again, If we’ve got 1-3%-ish of the human population dealing with some sort of gender confusion or contradiction, it logically follows that we would have a subset of people who might be uncomfortable with the common way of using pronouns and that they might need to do some experimenting to determine what feels right. This does not mean that everyone needs to put their pronouns in their e-mail signature or needs to introduce themselves on stage with their pronouns. Again, most people don’t deal with the problem, and they shouldn’t have to pretend to. If someone wants to, fine; if someone doesn’t want to, they shouldn’t be shamed for it.
As for using the pronouns someone requests, this is more of an interpersonal conflict than a political one. If someone wants to be called something and you insist on something else instead that they don’t wish to be called, the relationship probably is in some trouble, but we don’t need Federal legislation to solve that problem. Though it might make sense to come up with some institutional approaches, though those attempts will surely come up with further problems like: what about if/when someone just avoids using pronouns at all? Or just uses a person’s name? There are different scenarios, which surely call for different approaches. A worst-case possibility, though no doubt real, is when one person is basically demanding another to take on their metaphysical worldview and using the pronoun game as that line in the sand. It’s tough to honor that. There are also, let’s be honest, fads at stake sometimes, and I don’t think we’re completely unable to recognize when that’s going on. If something may not be long-term or fully sincere doesn’t mean we need to throw a fit about it, but it also shouldn’t mean we make it the most important thing in the world that day. Of all the overreaches on the left, the idea that “affirmation” ought always to be aspired to strikes me as highly dangerous. People do need affirmation sometimes, and sometimes they also need challenge, or even a nod and a grin and then going on with your life.
I worked briefly for a semester at a 6-12 charter school a few years back. Our population of students was mostly suburban but troubled. Most of our students had either been kicked out or pulled out of a nearby school because of grades or behavioral issues or some combination of the two. Drug use seemed to be a common theme, as did suicidal ideation. Though I was not any kind of therapist or mental health counselor (we brought one of those in), I was something of an academic counselor, and there were times when someone’s crisis or misbehavior in class or even just someone’s request to “talk to someone” resulted in their sitting across from me in my office. Most people, whether they are goofing around for attention or they are in some genuine emotional crisis, really do want someone who will listen, and as one who asks investigative questions, I found that students often responded in ways that could be quite beautiful (as long as I gave them some real freedom to express themselves) and these conversations became a pretty meaningful part of my job. Occasionally even real progress got made before the student returned to class in a lighter mood.
Presenting one’s self as trans was popular in our school, and I couldn’t help but notice that it was mainly middle school girls who were requesting adjustments to their names and pronouns. I have to admit that I was not among the school staff who worked the hardest to keep up with every new development, but there was at least one student I met with many times who I will never forget. I won’t use the exact name the student requested to be called by, but suffice it to say that the name itself was not a traditional name, it suggest neither male nor female even by basic stereotype, and that there was something sort of darkly comic about it. It was misspelled and plural, and from my interactions with the student I have no doubt these moves were intentional. I will try not in this essay to use pronouns to describe the student because quite honestly I’m not sure what’s appropriate. I suspect that the student was probably biologically female according to some of the scientific characteristics spelled out above, but I suppose I can’t be sure about that and nor do I think it’s the most important thing anyway (which isn’t the same as saying it doesn’t matter). The first time we met, I was told to use “it” (which I never did, though I also didn’t explicitly announce that I wasn’t going to), and at other times, “they” and “he” were suggested (by the student) as options.
Like several other students I met in this school, not only did I learn the litany of pronouns that they identified as, but I was also barraged with a few psychological diagnoses and sexual orientations (not ones that are as simple as gay or straight). Again, this student was in middle school. I wish I could describe well the way the student dressed, but it defies any category I can think of. Sometimes there were dresses, and there was often a good bit of color but also lots of black. Now all of that, I would learn, was the presentation. The outward communication of who the student wanted the world to see. Which, for many of us, does mean something, though it’s rarely adequate or fully honest.
The conversations I had with this student were as interesting as any I have had with anyone anywhere. They were mostly about existence, about what the hell this all even is and what we are doing. It was a college philosophy class, but with thoughts that were more scattered and trippy than systematic, and somehow with a heart that was more fully engaged. I don’t think we solved any of the student’s conflictedness or desires about gender and/or sexuality in that room, but I do think I was able to validate some of the questions and longings about life, and that in doing so there was a little bit of a softening or opening simply because there might be someone somewhere out there who could understand, or at least would try without inserting judgements or moralism into every single response. To be honest, I may have benefited from interaction as much as the student did.
I still don’t know the depth of the details that were going into the student’s anger and pain—i.e. everything that had happened (or not happened) before me, though I will say that through interacting with the parents a little bit, they did seem to be trying, in spite of how impossible the situation may have seemed. As one example, the student told me about a couple instances of the father taking this student and a friend to a grungy rock concert.
Perhaps the summer Olympic version of my middle school student was Algeria’s Imane Khelif, who got the bulk of the controversial attention even though Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting seemed to be in a similar situation, meaning they both won gold medals in women’s boxing after “failing a gender test,” according to the Russia-connected International Boxing Association (IBA). Khelif got more of the attention than Yu-ting because in one of the tournament’s earlier matches, Italy’s Angela Carini quit a match in tears (and then didn’t shake Khelif’s hands afterwards). Carini would later apologize, though I’ll say I trust the sincerity of the first act more than the second one, in part because there was something for her to lose by effectively dropping out of the tournament she’d spent the last four years training for (rather than potentially gain by shoring up her country’s image) and also because I don’t know what powerful actors found her afterwards and may have demanded the apology. Carini’s initial perception and experience, by the way, were backed up by Mexico’s Brianda Tamara Cruz, who faught Khelif in Guadalajara just a couple years ago. “I have never in my 13 years as a boxer felt like this,” she said, “not even in my sparring with men. Thank God, that day I came out of the ring well.”
What happened next in the media borders, in my opinion, on malpractice, though most of us our so used to it by now that it barely registers. The conservative names and publications ran with, “See how unfair this is for women?! Ban transwomen from women’s sports!” Whereas the more-left sources went with ‘This girl isn’t even trans! The IBA is corrupt and the results of that supposed test weren’t even made public.’ Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), who used to work with and honor IBA results as part the process of qualifying for the Olympics, worked to emphasize that the partnership had recently severed.
The narratives that quickly developed allowed for both main “sides” of the dispute to to keep glossing over the part of the story that is inconvenient to what that they want to be true. Let’s start with: to the degree that we can test for biological sex (and this is an empirical question), like a condom it appears to be very reliable and yet less than 100%. So what about that extreme anomaly in a test that might get somebody wrong? And maybe more importantly, can we trust the IBA? That’s a question, not an answer. It demands real investigation, which would require time and not just click-baity headlines. If the organization is corrupt, is it possible that Khelif has been slandered and unfairly maligned as a result? That’s sure some of what the lawsuit she’s filing will aledge.
But not so fast. There’s plenty of other questions and indications that early judgements may not have been so far off. Let’s start with the obvious discomfort that the two people who supposedly failed IBA’s gender test both won gold. So then the question you won’t see many lefty sources entertaining is: well if the IBA is corrupt and just wanted a Russian boxer instead of Khelif or Yu-ting, why not just take a karyotype test with a neutral actor and release it to the public on your own accord accord to relieve the concerns? Hmm. But then there would be something to potentially lose.
Oh, and by the way, the plot thickened by some other people who know Khelif. There’s a former sparring partner (Bulgarian-Nigerian Joana Nwamerue) who insisted to the New York Post that “(Khelif) has some kind of internal issues. But he is a man.” She added that she “will stay by (her) words until he/she does a test to prove to the world that he/she is a woman. But we all know that won’t happen.” Oh, and Khelif’s coach also sort of stumbled publicly on the matter, perhaps not being as skilled in Western political correctness as some of our politicians and journalists. Georges Cazorla is his name, and he admitted that the IBA test revealed “a problem with hormones…with chromosomes.”
The reason you won’t find a lot of Progressives admitting these things out loud and wrestling honestly with them in public is because they are smart enough to know damn well that at this point they may lose the argument. If it happens to be that either Khelif or Yu-ting is something other than XX, then the argument zeroes in on the science of hormonal levels (testosterone in this instance) that stem from chromosome structure, and it’s not very much in question that significantly more testosterone than your female peers would be a huge advantage in a sport like boxing that relies on sheer power. As it relates to fairness in sport, these realities matter a helluva lot more than whether or not we call someone “trans.”
Now the best counter to any of this that I’ve ever heard from anyone didn’t involve any denial of biology and didn’t even come from someone who is particularly left wing (though her views are what I would call heterodox-ish). She’s a college basketball coach, and she’s fairly unmoved by the idea that ‘biological advantage' → exclusion from’ because, well, hormonal levels aren’t the only advantages in sports! Skills like shooting in her sport of hoops are largely developed by hours and hours of deliberate practice, like a lot of domains, but other ones like height and speed and jumping ability are hardly equal among the participants, and it’s not like we’re out here banning tall people from playing basketball. And at that point, though, we really have to be honest that the conclusion is basically not to believe in gender segregation when it comes to competitive sports. Advantage: men (in most athletic settings). Because much to the dismay of our dominant (which isn’t to say majority) cultural milieu that somehow manages to call endless for both diversity and equality at the same time, the state of nature is a lot more like diversity than it is sameness. And we don’t need to skirt the science, or lie about the empirical truth in order to acknowledge that these observations are not any indication of the overall value of women in relationship to men, as I’m not sure value is always tied to function, and even it is, women are surely also better at other things than men are, and just because we happen to be entertained by sports doesn’t, in fact, make it the most important aspect of life.
My friend’s point about other inequalities than hormones aside (though I do think it’s worth considering), if people with XY chromosomes/male levels of testosterone constitute an advantage that is too significant to ignore and maybe even present a safety concern, the next question is, well, do people who don’t fit cleanly on the spectrum of sex and gender not get to compete at all then? And of course the answer that a lot of people won’t like is yes, they do get to compete, they just get to do it on the male side. But what if they’re not good enough on the male side? And that’s where, again, the answer is actually pretty obvious if we can get this far into the argument. The cultural and political left try almost too hard to make their case an altruistic one, all about “inclusion.” But let us, again, be real here: high levels of sports are not inclusive. Just like higher education isn’t all that inclusive either. How many people out there are really trying to get rid of admissions departments?! Maybe one or two, but not many. How many of us got invitations to compete in the Olympics? How many of us get our names called during the NFL or WNBA drafts? Oh, not very many of us. Because the truth is that the upper echelons of sport—like in almost any other desirable domain!—are extremely exclusive environments. Now matter how much virtue signaling they do in their marketing.
That’s almost surely unavoidable, by the way. If you let everyone into medical school, and let everyone who wants to finish get placed into a job in that field what you end up with is a very low competence of the doctors who are then responsible for helping us heal our health problems. There’s purpose, in other words, in the exclusion, in how hard it is to climb to that life. The stakes with sports maybe aren’t as high as the medical world, but let’s again be real that if everyone gets to compete in the Olympics, the Olympics become a lot less interesting phenomenon to pay attention to. A logistical nightmare, first of all, but also the whole thing just comes to mean less. The whole thing works because it’s an exclusive enterprise. And that’s where I often say that rather than the usual framing of good people versus bad people (or smart people verus dumb people) our very real cultural and political disputes usually derive from either 1) two competing visions of metaphysics (explanations for our existence, first principles, understandings of why we’re here) OR 2) competing values. So the two at stake that I’m describing in either high-level sports or other domains might be something like inclusion (a good value but not the only or even highest value) and something like quality. You can’t ax the whole standard of everything to let everyone in the door. And you can’t pay so little attention to inclusion that you let one percent or something like that of people be Taylor Swift and Elon Musk and Caitlin Clark and LeBron James while everyone else works mind-numbing jobs for low wages with increasing numbers of these people becoming depressed and even killing themselves. This is one of the critical tensions that we’re endlessly fighting about, and unfortunately it’s unlikely to be resolved very soon. We get to keep living with it.
I said I would return to Colin Kaepernick, and so I want to point out another uncomfortable fact that perhaps no person of consequence in the high-level football scene has been more genuine in his embrace of Kap than—wait for it—recent national champion, now-San-Diego-Chargers coach, and former-Kaepernick-coach Jim Harbaugh. Having also been punished at the University of Michigan for charges of cheating (ranging from buying a recruit lunch to sending a scout to opponent’s stadiums to steal signs from the sideline), Harbaugh is an interesting person to prop up as Kaepernick’s biggest fan in that we also know him as an awkward-ish pro-life guy.
Heaven forbid we have to reckon with someone (Herbstreit) who is both a skeptic of transwomen competing in female sports while also wanting black men to be safer in the presence of police officers. And someone (Harbaugh) who doesn’t like abortion-as-contraception but thinks the black man who sent the NFL (and country!) into a tizzy with a simple-but-strategic act of protest shouldn’t be so casually dismissed by the league.
These seemingly diverging men and views only seem awkward because we live in such a silly partisan environment. Obviously everyone can’t study and know everything—media and academia should be the best in these areas, and much of my own frustrations arise from experiences that confirm they’re at least on par with if not worse than other sectors of society—but what a real discussion of the scientific and philosophic complexities at stake on debates about who should be allowed to compete in women’s sports (and news flash: most other ones, too) would do is show how much distance there is between outright bigotry and a full embrace of everything the latest Progressive activist comes up with on the issues of the day. Most people fall between the extremes (and are just trying to get through the day anyway). That’s the good news; the bad is that because our biggest problems aren’t caused by mere bigotry we actually still have to come up with ideas for solving (or at least mitigating) them that go beyond trying to get everyone to say and think exactly the same way about everything.