To the editor:
I’m writing in response to The Oregonian/OregonLive’s story the Lincoln Chronicle published about three high school girls suing to ban transgender athletes from girls high school sports.
Competition in sports has been an important part of people’s lives for a very long time. The benefits around both individual and team sports is unarguable. Sportsmanship, equity, and respect have also been at the heart of sports. But things seem to have changed.
There are approximately 1-2% of the U.S. population who are transgender. Transgender athletes make up only .002% of college athletics. Yet in 2025 some 118 anti-trans pieces of legislation have passed so far and 948 anti-trans bills are under consideration across the country with more expected.
Aren’t there more important things we need to be discussing?
Humans have disrupted the environment to such a degree that increasingly intense storms are killing and leaving homeless thousands of people every year. Here in the U.S. we have a current administration taking away food and healthcare from the most vulnerable people. We have masked, armed assailants grabbing people off the streets and sending them to detention centers where they are living in dangerous substandard conditions while employees at the highest levels of government are joking and laughing about it.
And yet we are being distracted, becoming angry and frightening young people so they feel they must leave the country to be safe. Our priorities seem to be very much out of balance.
Perhaps it is time for adults to begin acting like adults and get our priorities right. Perhaps it is time to create activities that are not segregated into binaries. Transgender athletes have been competing in sports for a very long time. More young people are (were) feeling free to be open about who they are and that’s an amazingly positive thing. Maybe it’s time we started feeling free to accept societal changes rather than listen to the noise working to keep us separate and distrustful of one another.
Rather than lawsuits how about working together to create a third way, an inclusive way. Don’t we have more important things happening that really need our attention?
— Jacqueline Danos/Yachats
Yours is the best letter on this subject I have read in a very long time. Picking on some of the most vulnerable young people in society for political purposes is despicable beyond comprehension.
And for those of you who keep chanting the mantra that there’s only men and women, you are just wrong. Haven’t you ever heard of hermaphrodites? There is a spectrum of human sexes, and even more so a spectrum of gender identification. There are also numerous cases in the animal kingdom.