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  1. Disability Pride: Celebrating the Sexual Lives of People with Disabilities

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    by Nnenaya Bloomstein (she/her) Williams College Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies student and Mabel Wadsworth Center intern

    Disclaimer: This blog post focuses solely on creating a discourse around sexual pleasure and reproductive health about and for disabled people. However, part of why we must create more discourse around the topic of sex for disabled people is a result of the sexual violence that people with disabilities experience. Many studies show that disabled people are more likely than nondisabled people to be the victims of sexual abuse, some reporting that disabled people are ten times more likely to experience this violence (“Abuse and Hate Crimes”; Seibers 45). There are many reasons why this violence occurs, but part of it is a result of our inability to view disabled people as whole sexual citizens who are capable of giving consent. As we continue to advocate for the sexual rights of disabled people, we must also advocate for the prevention and end to the sexual abuse they experience. You can learn more about this important topic from the NPR article “In Their Words, Adults with Intellectual Disabilities Tell Their Sexual Assault Stories.“

     

    July is Disability Pride Month, a month designated to celebrate the diverse lives of people with disabilities and to commemorate the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was passed in July of 1990. This year, the theme is “The World Works Better With Us,” emphasizing how increasing accessibility for disabled people means increasing accessibility for everyone (Disability Pride Month). When we think about access in the disability justice movement, we often focus on changes to infrastructure and technology. After the ADA was passed, some of the first changes to be made focused on making it possible for people with disabilities to utilize technology, to receive formal public education, and to access transportation more easily (Institute on Disabilities). The priorities of nearly every disability rights organization revolve around these and other similar issues, and for good reason. Finding accessible housing, employment, and additional support while being able to live independently are critical needs for disabled people and must be prioritized. If you can believe it, these needs are essential for abled people, not just those with disabilities. However, one essential topic that is often neglected within disability justice work and that is equally as important and conducive to every other accessibility issue, is the right to sex, pleasure, reproduction, and intimacy. If we are to truly strive for access and equity for disabled people, we can’t continue to ignore these fundamental rights. We must focus our attention on creating a culture in which sexual pleasure and reproductive health is readily accessible to everyone with disabilities.  

    In Sex and Disability, an anthology edited by Robert Mcruer and Anna Mollow, Tobin Siebers, a prominent scholar in disability studies, wrote a chapter titled, “A Sexual Culture for Disabled People.” In this chapter, Siebers writes that, “one of the chief stereotypes oppressing disabled people is the myth that they do not experience sexual feelings or that they do not have or want to have sex” (Seibers 39). This stereotype mainly comes out of our country’s history of eugenics and forced sterilization. In this complex history, entangled with slavery, immigration, and even women’s suffrage, the term “disability” was utilized as a tool to justify discrimination and sterilization of thousands of women. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if you could prove that someone was intellectually or otherwise disabled, you could legally discriminate against them and prevent them from being able to reproduce (Baynton 33). Our definition of disability has shifted drastically since then and continues to mean different things for different people within the disabled community. However, at this time, the disabled identity was synonymous with being a sex worker, Black, an immigrant, a working class woman, or frankly any kind of minority (Baynton). The mass sterilization of disabled women was justified for the progress and health of the nation, a nation that ultimately sought to sustain white supremacy at all costs (Kline 7-31). This history is both a reminder of the shared struggles of disabled people with all other minorities, and of how intrinsic the fight for reproductive care and sexual liberation is to the disability justice movement. 

    Although we’ve come a long way from this kind of discrimination, people with disabilities still struggle to gain access to resources for experiencing sex and learning how they can safely choose to have children. Not only are there still so many social barriers in place preventing people with disabilities from accessing sexual and reproductive health care, there are still laws in place that enable forced sterilization of disabled people. The infamous 1927 supreme court case Buck v. Bell, which established the compulsory sterilization “of inmates…who shall be found to be afflicted with an hereditary form of insanity or imbecility” is still an active law that has yet to be overturned (U.S. Supreme Court). This case alone reveals the importance of advocating for the sexual rights of disabled people, who, like everyone else, deserve the right to choose when, how, and if they want to have children. We seem to still be functioning under the assumption that enabling disabled people to reproduce threatens the “health” of our country. When in reality, and just as this year’s pride theme emphasizes, the more diverse our world is, the better it functions for everyone. 

    Despite all of this history and its implications, there still isn’t enough focus on the sexual health and pleasure of disabled people. But this doesn’t mean that there isn’t anyone doing this work at all. An organization that I really want to highlight that directly aligns itself with this issue, is Sins Invalid. Sins is “a disability justice-based movement building and performance project that celebrates disabled people, centering and led by disabled Black, Indigenous, and people of the global majority, and queer, trans, and nonbinary disabled people” (“Our Mission”). Their documentary titled, Sins Invalid: An Unashamed Claim to Beauty (2013), sheds light on their performances, all of which highlight the sexual stories and experiences of disabled people. Lezlie Frye, a performer who was interviewed in the film says, “it’s easy to fall into the trap of proving that you’re sexual despite your disability” (Sins Invalid). Frye continues by stating, “my sexuality, my sexual identity, my gender identity, derives directly out of my disabled body and that is what I want to sexualize, that is what I want to politicize” (Sins Invalid). Sins Invalid publicly and creatively highlights the sexual lives of disabled people, showing that these stories are important and as integral to their lives as they are to everyone else’s. 

    This film and the organization itself is a perfect example of what Tobin Seibers means when he speaks of a “sexual culture” for disabled people. Dispelling the myth that people with disabilities are incapable of having sex means creating a culture for and about disabled people in which they are given “the right to pursue a sexual future of their own choosing” (Seibers 52). It also means acknowledging people with disabilities as a sexual minority worthy of the same rights and political discourse as every other minority. Just as we have grown to advocate for the sexual rights of all LGBTQIA+ people, we must also extend this advocacy work to disabled people, whose sexualities we often neglect or assume don’t even exist. Sexual freedom and reproductive justice don’t exist without the inclusion of disabled people’s stories and experiences. This month and every month, we must continue to foster conversations in which the sexual and reproductive lives of people with disabilities can be seen as whole.

     

    Works Cited

    “Abuse and Hate Crimes.” Encyclopedia of Disability, Albrecht, Gary L., vol 1, Sage Publications, 2006, pp. 5-8. https://handicapcenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Encyclopedia-of-Disability-SAGE-2006-vol-1.pdf. 

    Baynton, Douglas C. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.” The New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, NYU Press, 2001, 33-57. Washington University, https://courses.washington.edu/intro2ds/Readings/Baynton.pdf.

    “Disability Pride Month 2026: What It Is, the 2026 Theme, and How to Celebrate.” The Arc, May 19, 2025, https://thearc.org/blog/why-and-how-to-celebrate-disability-pride-month/. Accessed July 15, 2026.

    Institute on Disabilities. “Disability Rights Timeline.” Temple University, 2019, https://disabilities.temple.edu/resources/disability-rights-timeline. Accessed July 17, 2026.

    Kline, Wendy. “Motherhood, Morality, and the ‘Moron’: The Emergence of Eugenics in America.” Building a Better Race : Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, University of California Press, 2001, 7-31. Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/willm/detail.action?docID=224649.

    Melero, Shannon. “Reproductive Justice for All of Us: Rebecca Cokley on how to stop the violence disabled people experience.” The Meteor, March 21, 2024, https://wearethemeteor.com/rebecca-cokley-reproductive-disability-justice-for-all/. Accessed July 14, 2026. 

    “Our Mission.” Sins Invalid, 2026, https://sinsinvalid.org/about-sins/. Accessed July 14, 2026.

    Seibers, Tobin. “A Sexual Culture for Disabled People.” Sex and Disability, edited by Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow, Duke University Press, 2012, 37-53. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11smzjb?turn_away=true. 

    “Sins Invalid: An Unashamed Claim to Beauty.” New Day Films, 2013. Kanopy, https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/158896?vp=williams. 

    United States, U.S. Supreme Court. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200. U.S. Case Law, vol, 274, May 2, 1927, Justia, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/274/200/.

  2. Rethinking Sex Education: Affirmative Consent, Pleasure, and Autonomy

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    by Nnenaya Bloomstein (she/her) Williams College Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies student and Mabel Wadsworth Center intern

    Over the past decade or so, consent has become a cornerstone of sex education in the United States. The formal inclusion of affirmative consent in sex education began in 2014 in California public schools and has since spread across the country (Naide). This includes Maine, which passed its first act to include affirmative consent in sex education in 2019. The incentive and drive for affirmative consent policies was an effort to reduce and prevent sexual violence (Bangor Metro). Maine’s law around consent and education was updated again in 2023 and requires that a student’s “secondary course of study must also include instruction on affirmative consent, communication and decision making regarding sexual activity.” It defines affirmative consent as “consent to sexual activity that can be revoked at any time and does not include silence, lack of resistance or consent given while intoxicated” (Maine State Legislature). Yet while affirmative consent education is “required” in Maine and dozens of other states, it isn’t enforced or regulated, meaning students aren’t necessarily receiving comprehensive or effective education about consent. Even if public schools were forced to provide students with affirmative consent education, the larger problem is that public sex education is almost always centered around cisgender and heterosexual people and fails to think about how age, race, and sexuality change the way we should be talking about sex. 

    Within this deeply misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic framework, consent education reinforces the idea that “normal” sex is always heterosexual, penetrative, and reproductive. This isn’t to say that all penetrative penile-vaginal sex within cisgender and straight couples, for reproduction or otherwise, is a problem–the issue is framing this narrow definition of sex as “normal” and everything else as “abnormal” or nonexistent. Only teaching students how to consent to cisheteronormative sex is not teaching students about affirmative consent. Current mainstream sex education makes queer sex and all of the ways we can experience pleasure out of reach for so many young people. Rather than supporting students with the information they need to begin learning about sex and sexuality, we undereducate them, leaving them unequipped with the tools they need to make informed decisions about sex. 

    The inclusion of affirmative consent in public secondary education has been a largely ineffective method at reducing stigma and preventing sexual violence. However, this doesn’t mean that learning about consent isn’t essential. Consent is one of the most important aspects of sex education, that, when used effectively, promotes both safety and pleasure for everyone involved. There are many examples of how sexual health educators can use consent effectively, one of which is the Portland, Maine organization Speak About It, which is a “consent education and sexual assault prevention non-profit” that educates young people about safer sex practices through the art of theatre (SpeakAboutIt). Another organization doing amazing work is called “YES! Your Empowered Sexuality” which is a Philadelphia-based group providing “anti-oppressive, consent-based, pleasure focused sexuality education for people of all ages” (YES!). The Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault (MECASA) is another institution that utilizes a comprehensive approach to consent education and believes that it is part of the primary prevention against sexual violence (MECASA). In addition to these and many other alternative sex education resources, Mabel Wadsworth Center’s very own Aspen Ruhlin, our Community Engagement Manager, teaches sex education that is also trauma-informed, pleasure-focused, and queer-inclusive. For sex educators like Aspen and the many others doing this essential work, consent isn’t taught as something that a man asks for and a woman provides. Instead, consent exists in all sexual relationships as a way to provide both/all individuals with autonomy and pleasure. It’s taught in both a nuanced way that acknowledges that consent looks different for everyone, and also in a way that allows us to see how we navigate consent outside of sex every single day. 

    These approaches to sex education reveal that consent isn’t the problem here. The problem is our cultural understanding of sex itself, which teaches us that sex is something to be shameful of rather than something to celebrate. But this no longer has to be the truth, and those engaging in alternative sex education are modeling this. While our understanding of what good sexual health education looks like will be constantly evolving, we know that sex education must start earlier on, provide students with accurate information, and ensure that they can play a role in their education. Using this approach, affirmative consent can finally function in the way it’s supposed to, as a tool to make sex more safe and joyful for everyone. 

     

    Works Cited

    Bangor Metro. “Why Maine High Schoolers Are Now Learning ‘Yes Means Yes’ in Health Class.” Bangor Daily News, November 5, 2019. https://www.bangordailynews.com/2019/11/05/bangor-metro/why-maine-students-are-learning-about-affirmative-consent-and-how-it-might-change-a-culture/. 

    Maine State Legislature. 20-A §4723: Health and Physical Education. Education, 2023, Maine Legislature Maine Revised Statutes, https://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/20-a/title20-Asec4723.html 

    https://doi.org/10.1002/sgp2.12040. 

    Albert Sekhar, Monica et al. “Understanding Comprehensive Sexuality Education: A Worldwide Narrative Review.” Cureus vol. 16(11):e74788. 29 Nov. 2024, doi:10.7759/cureus.74788, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11683015/. 

    Naide, Sophia. “State Lawmakers Say Yes to Consent Education.” Guttmacher, Guttmacher Institute, January 2020, https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2020/01/state-lawmakers-say-yes-consent-education.

    “Hey! We Speak About It. Do you?” Speak About It. 2020, https://wespeakaboutit.org/who-is-sai.

    “YES!” Your Empowered Sexuality. 2022, https://yourempoweredsexuality.org/. 

    “Home” MECASA. 2026, https://www.mecasa.org/.

  3. Historical Parallels Between Witch Hunts and the Anti-Abortion Movement

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    by Nnenaya Bloomstein (she/her) Williams College Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies student and Mabel Wadsworth Center intern

     

    Today in the United States, actions are taken every day by politicians and right-wing activists to restrict access to abortion. One of the most recent major actions was taken by politicians in the state of Louisiana who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in an attempt to prevent the mailing of the drug mifepristone. If passed, this law would require in-person appointments to receive this medication, even in states where there are no laws against abortion. It’s important to note that medication abortion provided through the mail has been proven to be safe and effective (Grossman, Raifman, and Morris 2024). Although the Supreme Court halted this ruling, sending it back for review, this action has extremely dangerous implications, one of which is a full abortion ban across the United States (Serwer 2026). As most who advocate for access to abortion know, the anti-abortion movement has nothing to do with protecting the lives of those who can become pregnant. Instead, it’s about controlling these bodies and in doing so forcing them to conform to an established norm. Part of this norm is the idea that people with uteruses are biologically predetermined to be mothers. While rhetorics like this can often feel as if we are living in an unprecedented time of attacks on access to reproductive rights, this is far from the truth. Attitudes towards abortions have shifted greatly across time, and anti-abortion sentiments are simultaneously new and not unheard of. Today I’d like to take us back roughly 500 years ago to think about witches. Although they aren’t often thought of as having any connection to reproductive justice, the witchcraft trials and hunts of the early modern period can teach us a great deal about how women’s bodies have been managed throughout history and how witches, just by existing, resisted the attacks on their bodies. 

    The early modern period, characteristically thought of as the era between the 1500s and 1800s, was a time in which witchcraft accusations and witch-hunts were rampant throughout western Europe and the United States due to colonization (Weisner 2008). The targets of these witchcraft prosecutions varied regionally and throughout time. But to put it generally, witches were people who acted in out-of-character ways, people who caused harm to others, people who kept strange pets, and, if you could prove it, people who made pacts with the devil. While anyone could be accused of witchcraft, gender identity also became an important qualifier for this accusation. As most people know, the majority of those accused of being witches were women. Part of the reason why women were more likely to be accused had to do with the ways women’s behaviors were regulated by both political and religious powers in the early modern period (Weisner 2008). 

    The most widely supported belief about women and their sexualities was that they were inherently sinful. Because women had such strong sinful tendencies, they were expected to be pure, chaste, innocent, and above all else to be submissive wives and mothers (Gowing 2012). As a result, when women became the targets of witchcraft accusations, it had less to do with them actually perpetrating harmful magic and more to do with their lack of conformance to the idealized femininity of the early modern period. The story of Elizabeth Frauncis, a witch in the first ever published witchcraft pamphlet, supports the significance of conformity for early modern women. After having sex with a man outside of marriage, her first sinful act, she becomes pregnant. But when this man realizes that she is pregnant, he leaves her and Elizabeth is said to have “destroyed the child forthwyth” (Gibson 2000). Meaning, in very judgmental old English terms, that she used the power she was given from Satan to have an abortion. In this, and all of the crimes Elizabeth commits, she fails to conform to the femininity that was expected of her. She is not only impure and sexually lewd, she fails at being a mother, the thing that was most important to early modern women’s identities. This pamphlet makes it clear that Elizabeth’s true crimes are choosing what she wanted to do with her body and in doing so, deviating from normative femininity. 

    Punishing women for doing things for their bodies that are not considered “normal” sounds eerily familiar. Despite coming a long way from the rigid expectations for early modern women, contemporary women and everyone who can give birth, are still judged within the same framework that places value on motherhood and child-bearing above all else. Despite there being so many more opportunities for women, the importance of motherhood feels deeply entrenched into our identities. As women gain more control over their lives and choose to engage in practices that do not align with the idealized mother and wife, it seems as though our reproductive rights are only diminishing. Rather than being celebrated for our independence, women across the country are being punished just as Elizabeth and the thousands of other witches were in early modern times. This punishment reinforces the idea that motherhood is an essential part of womanhood and that our bodies and our choices are not truly ours.

    While there are many ways to analyze and understand witches throughout history, where I think we can find the most power in their history is by thinking about how witches are connected to our everyday lives. The way they were treated was not just about protecting communities and weeding the devil out of society; it was about controlling women’s choices and to ensure they remained submissive wives. The anti-abortion movement, like the witchcraft prosecutions of the early modern period, relies on the belief that women’s bodies and those perceived as women should be governed by others rather than by the people who inhabit them. While women like Elizabeth were imprisoned for their defiance, their resistance to their roles means so much more than their punishment. Their stories are reminders that sexual deviance and queerness have always existed in many different forms. Understanding this history allows us to see contemporary attacks on reproductive rights not as isolated political disputes, but as part of an enduring effort to control who gets to make decisions about their own body.

     

     

     

     

    References

    Gibson, Marion, “The Examination and Confession of certaine Wytches (1566).” In Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing. Psychology Press, 2000. 

    Laura, Gowing, ‘Women’s Bodies and the Making of Sex in Seventeenth-Century England,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 37:4 (2012): 813-822. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/664469. 

    Serwer, Adam. “So Much for Leaving Abortion Up to the States.” In The Atlantic, 2026. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/mifepristone-abortion-pill-access-impossible/687519/. 

    Wiesner, Merry E. “Ideas and Laws Regarding Women.” In Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2008. https://archive.org/details/womengenderinear0000wies. 

    Grossman D, Raifman S, and Morris N. “Mail-Order Pharmacy Dispensing of Mifepristone for Medication Abortion After In-Person Screening.” In JAMA Internal Medicine, 184:8 (2024): 873-881. https://www.ansirh.org/research/research/abortion-pills-mail-are-safe-and-effective-study-shows

  4. Mabel Wadsworth Center Statement Regarding Fourth Anniversary of Dobbs Decision

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    Four years ago today, the Supreme Court of the United States passed down a ruling that paved the way for states to deny the personhood and humanity of roughly half the population. Commonly referred to as the “Dobbs decision,” SCOTUS’ ruling removed the federal protections of Roe, allowing states to implement draconian abortion bans and restrictions. Any attempt to restrict, limit, or prevent abortion access and bodily autonomy is draconian.

    We must hold two truths about Roe–it was never enough, and its loss has been harrowing. Even with the protections of Roe, abortion access was not guaranteed for many across this country, and harmful restrictions abounded. Roe was the floor, not the ceiling, and it was a floor that failed to hold up many. The protections of Roe also prevented states from implementing full abortion bans, and gave many in need of abortion care a path forward. We hold these truths of importance and incomplete protection with our grief.

    Anti-abortion legislation and attitudes are always about control. They are rooted in misogyny and have a ripple effect that harms women and all people of marginalized genders, including nonbinary people, transgender men, and others that may need abortion care. Anti-abortion extremism goes hand-in-hand with anti-trans and anti-queer extremism–it is a Venn diagram that is a circle. We see this in state legislatures that restrict abortion access alongside restricting trans rights. Patriarchal control is far-reaching and suffocating.

    On this anniversary, we do not only mourn the loss of rights for those who need abortion care, though that is enough to mourn in its own right. We also mourn for those whose lives have been willingly and deliberately taken by abortion bans. Josseli Barnica. Amber Nicole Thurman. Nevaeh Crain. Candi Miller. These are only a handful of the names we know, and do not account for the many names we may never know. These were women with lives and dreams and hopes. Their families are left to mourn them because their lives were devalued by anti-abortion laws and politicians.

    Maine laws may be protective of abortion access, but that does not mean that we can sit back. “Leaving it to the states” was never going to be enough for anti-abortion extremists, and we continue to face federal attacks on abortion rights. Additionally, Mainers being protected isn’t enough–where you live should not determine your rights or access to the care you know you need. Our friends in Texas and other banned states deserve every freedom we have and more. Abortion is normal, common, essential care, and while we mourn, we also fight.

  5. (Actual) Threats to Girls’ Sports (hint–it’s not trans people)

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    by Aspen Ruhlin (they/them) Mabel Wadsworth Center Community Engagement Manager

    Content Warning: this blog includes mentions of sexual violence, specifically in regards to minors. Details are not discussed, but we understand this can still be triggering to other victims/survivors of sexual violence and assault. If you are a victim/survivor, please know that we believe you. You are deserving of compassion, support, and safety. If you need support as a victim/survivor yourself or as a loved one of someone who was assaulted, regardless of when it happened, you can call our friends at Rape Response Services (Bangor area) or Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault (entire state) at 1-800-871-7741. You are not alone.

    While I know myself to be a nonbinary trans person now, I had not yet figured out that piece of my identity as a high schooler. As such, I lived my life as a typical cis teen girl, and as a freshman and sophomore, played on my school’s field hockey team. It was an intensive sport that I still carry both memories of and injuries from almost two decades later: feeling like I was flying as I ran full tilt down the field; the solid thunk as I hit a drive; the hard and heavy ball smashing straight into my exposed ankle. The only athletes at our school that ran more than us were the cross country and track and field kids. Our team didn’t have a great record when it came to wins, but we had a blast and were rugged, strong teens because of the nature of the sport.

    Like most, if not all, high school field hockey teams in Maine, our school only had a girls’ team. Our coaches let us know that because of this and Title IX rules, boys were allowed to try out and potentially play, both at our school and the ones we would play against. We weren’t concerned. In fact, we were hopeful, and immediately sought to recruit a boy or two to try out. This wasn’t because we thought having boys on the team would give us an advantage that would turn around our losing streak (we had gym class with these boys and, to put it as kindly as possible, did not think highly of their strength, stamina, or speed as a general rule). This was because of our uniforms. The standard uniform for girls’ and women’s field hockey is a skirt or kilt. We all hated them. We figured that if we could recruit a boy onto the team, they would never make him wear a skirt, and then to make the whole team uniform aligned, we would get to wear shorts. Our uniform kilts, which were really just black pleated wrap skirts, were short enough that we couldn’t wear them at school without getting a dress code violation. We had to buy our own under shorts to avoid flashing onlookers during games.

    The idea of boys playing with or against us wasn’t a concern, nor was the idea of any trans girls playing. Skill and strength in field hockey or any other sport comes from practice, not chromosomes or genitalia. The cis teen girls playing high school sports aren’t delicate flowers that need to be protected from their trans teammates and opponents–but they do need protection.

    During and after my time as an athlete in high school, both myself and my teen girl classmates were subjected to gendered violence and mistreatment. Some of this looked like the typical prioritization of boys’ sports in our culture, whether in the form of distribution of funding or just how much attention was focused on the boys’ teams vs. the girls’ teams. Some of this looked like the consistent degradation of women and girls by my teen boy peers that went unchallenged by teachers, like when a boy in my class argued that a woman could never be president of the United States because, “once a month, she’d set off the nukes.” Some of this looked like a dress code that existed to control, shame, and sexualize the bodies of teen girls with the argument that we “couldn’t risk distracting the boys.” Some of this looked like the history teacher who, a handful of years after I graduated, was found to be a predator who had been sexually harassing and stalking a 15-year-old student of his. When he committed suicide to evade the consequences, she was blamed and bullied to the point of transferring schools. Some of this looked like being the victim of two different sexually abusive relationships, one of which occurred while I was still a field hockey player. Like many, my physical strength was not enough to prevent me from being assaulted by someone I thought I could trust.

    I was not the only teen girl in my school subjected to gendered violence and mistreatment. I wasn’t even the only one on my field hockey team. Not a single one of us subjected to gendered violence and mistreatment faced harm at the hands of a trans person. Every single one of us who faced harm were harmed by cis boys and men. That doesn’t mean trans people are incapable of causing harm–trans people are people, and people in general can cause harm, intentionally or otherwise. It is very clear, however, whether we look at the anecdotal experiences of people like myself who actually played girls’ high school sports or look at the data and research that the presence of trans girls and women in sports is not a threat. Teen girls, trans and cis alike, face many threats, but inclusion isn’t one of them.

    If you advocate against allowing trans girls to play school sports, I know that you do not care about girls sports or the general safety of cis women and girls. Not think. Know. Transphobia is a tool of patriarchal violence that functions to harm trans people first and cis people second. It works alongside racism and white supremacy to create a narrow vision of girlhood and womanhood that is small, fragile, and weak. I will give some grace and say that, if you are not knowledgeable about women’s and girls’ sports and/or trans people, I can understand being misled into thinking there may be legitimate safety concerns, to a certain degree. With that grace given, it’s also important to be critical of any call to further restrict and scapegoat a marginalized group. It is far too easy for far too many people to immediately accept excluding and fearing trans people without question.

    Trans people are not the enemy. We are not the monster hiding under your bed or in a dark alley. We are part of your community. We are your neighbors, cashiers, family members, librarians, and more. Trans people are a marginalized group far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of violence. Trans girls and women deserve to be honored for who they know themselves to be in every sphere of life, and the notion that cis women and girls need to be “protected” from them is one rooted in the devaluation of trans and cis women and girls alike. Seeking to exclude trans girls from school sports is transphobic and misogynistic, plain and simple.