The National Collegiate Athletic Association is under pressure to draft an impossible piece of policy: a stance on transgender athletes that makes progressives and conservatives happy. The best it’s come up with so far is to say late last month that its rules are “under review,” after a smaller student-athlete association effectively banned trans women from competing in women’s sports.
It’s the latest development in a conversation that has been blown way out of proportion by opportunistic conservative politicians, many of whom pushed for bans on transgender athletes even though the politicians couldn’t point to any real-world problems as a result of trans participation in sports.
I hope that the NCAA’s decision-makers are guided by better intentions and science than lawmakers were. And they will be if they first answer one fundamental question: Why do we play?
Few have spent as much time trying to answer that as psychiatrist and author Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play. He has spent four decades interviewing thousands about their childhoods, gathering data that he says add up to the same conclusion: “Play is more than just fun.” It’s key in our development as young children and anchors our mental and physical well-being as adults. Sports is one pursuit in which many people are comfortable continuing to play when they feel too old or self-conscious to use their imaginations. Sports let us continue to grow through play in later childhood and in adulthood.
To study play, Brown had to define it. Here’s one rule of thumb: “If its purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it’s probably not play.”