Aryna Sabalenka and Nick Kyrgios are participating in a Battle Of The Sexes match this month in Dubai. Somehow, the sentence I'm about to write is even more dispiriting than the one that precedes it: Kyrgios and Sabalenka spent a half an hour on Tuesday promoting this match on Piers Morgan's show.
The newsworthy portion of the conversation arrived about halfway through, when Morgan turned to the topic of trans participation in sports. "Martina Navratilova, a former No. 1 like yourself, says it's wrong for the Women's Tennis Association to allow trans women to compete in its events, do you agree with that?" Morgan asked. Sabalenka replied:
That's a tricky question. I have nothing to do against [trans people], but I feel like they still got a huge advantage over the woman, and I think it's just not fair to the woman to basically face biologically a man. It's not fair, the woman been working her whole life to reach her limit, and then she has to face a man, which is biologically much stronger, so for me I don't agree with this kind of stuff in sport.
When asked for his opinion, Kyrgios said that Sabalenka had "hit the nail on the head."
This is all standard fare that you've heard from anti-trans activists hundreds of times by now, but this particular conversation was made more interesting by where it went next. Immediately after agreeing with Kyrgios and Sabalenka, Morgan brought up an incident from earlier this year when Ukrainian tennis player Marta Kostyuk implied that Sabalenka has an advantage over her because of her size and potentially "higher level of testosterone."
Here was an interesting moment. Morgan, totally on accident (he asked this question in order to tee up a punchline built around putting Sabalenka's bikini pictures on screen), had plowed the conversation into a queasy and inconvenient truth that anti-trans agitators refuse to grapple with: In the absence of any actual high-level trans athletes attempting to compete, those who most prominently suffer when trans bans are put into place are cis athletes who do not conform to a particular image of femininity. In other words, if anyone currently on the tour is going to end up being subjected to gross speculation and invasive sex testing under a trans ban, it's players who look like Sabalenka.
None of this, nor the fact that they had just finished talking about how physical advantages can undermine the competitive fairness of their sport, seemed to enter into Sabalaneka's or Kyrgios's heads as they gave their response about Kostyuk:
Sabalenka: All I hear here is just excuses. And it's actually quite funny because she's a strong a girl, she probably has more muscles than I do. She looks fit and strong, and I think that's not the case in all of the matches she lost against top players.
Kyrgios: We kind of debunked that. Someone like John Isner or Ivo Karlović was a fair bit bigger than Roger Federer, but that doesn't really—
Morgan: Yeah, you're always going to get physical differences between players, obviously—
Sabalenka: I think that's not the key in sports.
The most important ingredient in maintaining a commitment to anti-trans bigotry is never stopping to think about anything for more than two seconds.
