Former UNC basketball coach launches an airball with ill-informed advocacy

Former UNC women’s basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell doesn’t appear to be an insincere person. At a rally at the Legislative Building on Aug. 16, organized by right-wing culture warriors in support of a bill to ban transgender girls and women from participating in middle, high school, and college level sports, Hatchell seemed to really believe the things she was saying — however crudely articulated they might have been.

But also evident — both in her speech and during a brief conversation we had afterward — is that she is strikingly ill-informed (or, at the very least, naive) about politics and public policy.

The gist of Hatchell’s spiel is that she’s a lifelong supporter of women’s sports — she lauded Title IX, for instance — and believes that if transgender girls are allowed to play on women’s teams, it will lead to the ruin of female athletics.

Hatchell told me that because of the intensely competitive environment in which coaches must operate — hello, state legislators, maybe this is a subject y’all should be addressing — they’ll be forced to recruit “transgenders” to keep their jobs if the bill did not pass. Never mind that coaches would likely find this difficult given that a) the statewide pool of such athletes is probably in the low double digits, and b) many if not most trans athletes are, at best, average competitors who will never win a contest or a scholarship.

Hatchell went on to say that while she personally had nothing against “transgenders,” she had no opinion regarding the crusade pursued by her pals on the far right to ban gender affirming healthcare for all transgender people. “I don’t know about that,” she told me.

And that wasn’t the only point on which Hatchell seemed to be rather ill-informed and/or awkwardly out of step with her allies.

One of the contentions regularly espoused by those who support bans on trans girls and women from competition is that they supposedly enjoy a physical advantage and could injure cisgender females if allowed to compete against them.

Hatchell, however, emphasized during her presentation that her teams at UNC and many other women’s basketball squads regularly scrimmage against men’s teams, on the theory that it makes the women tougher and better.

When I asked her about this apparent contradiction, she seemed flummoxed for a second, but then responded (along with some North Carolina Values Coalition handlers, who by this time, were attempting to intervene in our conversation) that the men in these scrimmages wouldn’t get too rough. For example, she said, the men wouldn’t “try to dunk” on the women.

You got that? It’s okay for women athletes to play against an entire team of men in a tough, physical game like basketball, but it’s necessary for the state of North Carolina to pass a law to ensure that a handful of transgender females don’t get on any team – be it in basketball, or even non-contact sports like cross country and golf.

The fact that Hatchell struggles to grasp or convey a coherent and consistent argument around the safety issue probably comes as little surprise. One of the reasons that she was forced out at UNC after 30 years in 2019 was – in addition to having made racially insensitive remarks – the finding of an external review that found she exercised “undue influence” on athletes to play while injured. Safety indeed!

What’s ultimately most maddening about Hatchell’s myopic stance and the alliances she’s made, however, is that they betray the very concepts of inclusion and equality that are at the heart of the women’s sports movement that she purports to champion.

Hatchell may feel passionate about Title IX, but as veteran sports journalist Nancy Colasurdo argued persuasively a few months back in a “must read” op-ed, that’s not a position the former coach’s right-wing allies have embraced over the years. Instead, she notes, they mostly sat idly by while women and girls were “playing on borderline dangerous fields or at inferior gym facilities, and getting short shrift on everything from funding to media coverage.”

Indeed, as Colasurdo explained (and Hatchell’s statements help make clear), the anti-trans athlete frenzy is ultimately more about a combination of paternalistically “protecting” the “weaker” sex and the unhealthy obsessions of our modern “winning is everything” culture, than it is about equality and opportunity for women.

In short, while one might be able to conceive of rare circumstances in which some kind of limitation might be appropriate, in the vast majority of cases, the best course when it comes to trans athletes is to let all kids play, and to leave the details to sports-governing authorities that have long since worked out rules and procedures in this realm.

Allowing those who deny long and well-established psychological and medical practices, and even the very existence of transgender people, to craft restrictive, one-size-fits-all state laws (and making league with such forces) is not about supporting equal opportunity. It’s about harmfully turning back the societal clock.