So for those of you who don’t know there is a trans boy (born a girl but identifies as a boy) in Texas who has been undergoing hormone therapy for about a year and a half. His name is Mack Beggs and he wants to wrestle in the boys league. However, the governing body for high school wrestling in Texas has said that because he is listed as a girl on his birth certificate he must compete as a girl.

Because his hormone levels are equal that to other boys his age he has a greater muscle density than do the girls he is competing against. The other day he won the girls state championship.

I’m writing this because I think it’s funny. Not for Mack mind you. He just wants to wrestle in the boys league and since he has been on hormones for a year or more should be able to (just as olympic athletes can). It’s also not funny for the girls he competed against because they were at a disadvantage and one of them would have been state champion in his stead. Those are both unfair situations that shouldn’t have happened.

Rather, I think it’s fitting because the State of Texas forced this situation on themselves. They didn’t want to recognize Mack as a boy because that wasn’t how he was identified at birth. They were being dogmatic and pushing back against what they see as a progressive agenda and, if we’re being honest, probably something they think is against God’s will.

They thought they would punish him for choosing his identity. To be fair they did hurt him, but they also hurt the girl wrestlers and deprived the boy’s team of a teammate. What they also achieved though is to illustrate the idiocy of their policy. They got a girls wrestling state champion who is a boy with the physique to match. I’d like to congratulate them on a job well done.

Extend this lunacy to the situation with bathrooms and we end up with legislators who don’t want transmen to use men’s restrooms or transwomen to use women’s restrooms. However, none of those legislators (or people on the street who talk shit about transfolk) would be comfortable sharing their restroom space with someone who doesn’t look like them. Imagine a person who looks like and identifies as a woman walking into a men’s restroom because her birth certificate said she was born male.

These conservative legislators are so afraid of men ending up in women’s restrooms that they are actually going to force that very scenario into existence should they get their way. And that, Alanis Morrisette, is the original definition of irony.

Thank you Texas. You are leading the way in showing us the absurdity of policing identity. We owe you more than you know.