"I'm still a child, you're an adult, and for you to act like a child…” (1978)

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I.

Nearly five decades ago, a professional tennis player named JoAnne Russell flashed the middle finger at an opponent named Renee Richards during a match. Several of Richards’ other opponents walked off the court in protest while on the verge of losing matches; an Australian player dismissed Richards as a “sideshow,” and two British players appeared at a tournament wearing T-shirts that read “I AM A REAL WOMAN.”

You might argue, as some did at the time and as some still would, that Richards brought this vitriol upon herself. She wrestled with that quandary years ago when I interviewed her; she had grappled with it ever since her decision in the 1970s to play professional tennis after undergoing gender reassignment surgery instead of folding into a quiet life as an optometrist in southern California. She made the decision to fight for the ability to play professionally, she later said, largely because she had been told that she couldn’t do it.

At the peak of the angst over her presence on tour in 1978, Richards was 43 years old. She was a full-grown adult who often found herself playing against women who were barely half her age. “She could be their mother,” said the brash men’s tennis player and Richards supporter Ilie Nastase, “and yet they complain.”

Whatever the merits of the case against Richards, it appeared that a middle-aged woman had frightened some people beyond rationality. But as history repeats itself, it is no longer a middle-aged woman—a full-grown adult with a recognition of the consequence of her choices—who is at the center of this controversy. Now, it is an adolescent.

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II.

In April, reporter Cerise Castle of the website Capital and Main published an outstanding profile of a 16-year-old track athlete named AB Hernandez, who grew up on a ranch in the small California town of Jurupa Valley, and whose mother learned her youngest child was transgender when she was in the eighth grade. For three years, Hernandez competed on the girls track team and never drew much attention. Sports became a healthy outlet for her at a fraught moment in her life—which most sane people would agree is the very purpose of youth sports beyond winning and losing—and then the president of a nearby school board outed her. That led to stories in national media outlets, which led to a deranged statement from the president of the United States, who has recognized the political utility of such vitriol, particularly when it is centered on the deep blue state of California.

And yet none of this fury has been driven by the people who actually know AB Hernandez and her family; one local city council member in Jurupa Valley declared that the majority of the town had accepted Hernandez regardless of their politics, because “we all realize we’re neighbors first.”

“A small faction of adults have made AB Hernandez the face of a campaign to rewrite California law that has allowed transgender children to play on their school’s sports teams for over a decade,” Castle writes. “None of them has children enrolled in the Jurupa Valley Unified School District; several homeschool their kids.”

I do think there are legitimate questions to be debated about the proper place of transgender athletes in sports, as rare as their presence might be. This is an issue that’s laced with complexity; years later, I look back on my profile of Renee Richards as one of the most complicated pieces I’ve ever had to write, and I still don’t know if I got everything right, or if I got anything right. But there is no room for complexity in this conversation right now. There is only the cudgel. And this is why it’s unbelievably frustrating to watch as the whole thing devolves into bigotry and outright cruelty for the sake of political convenience.