Lou Holtz Is Scared to Debate Me About Trans Athletes
I’d like to know where Lou Holtz is right now. What he said about trans athletes—what he said about trans athletes, I cannot believe.
In October 2024, the greatest and biggest hubbub in college sports wasn’t about the Oregon Ducks beating Ohio State by using football’s funniest loophole. It wasn’t about preseason coverage of the upcoming basketball season. Somehow it wasn’t even the House v. NCAA settlement gaining preliminary approval, which cleared the way for schools to begin revenue sharing with players as early as the 2025-2026 season.
No, the greatest and biggest hubbub was about the San Jose State Spartans women’s volleyball team.
This is peculiar for many reasons. The first reason being, with all due respect to those who play it, no one cares about collegiate volleyball. In 2023, regular-season games averaged 116,000 viewers on ESPN platforms. Women’s basketball games, by comparison, draw an average of 476,000 across ESPN platforms.
The fixation was jump started when it was reported San Jose State had a transwoman on its roster. A number of teams subsequently forfeited rather than play the Spartans. Reasons cited typically included competitive balance which was weird because the Spartans who were not especially good. They ranked 130th out of 346 programs per the sports’s advanced metrics, making them roughly the equivalent of Tulane in men’s basketball. Perfectly respectable but about as far from a Lovecraftian nightmare as you can get.
After the fifth forfeiture, legendary Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz tweeted:
I can’t even believe we're even debating whether biological men, identifying as women, should be allowed to compete in women's sports! What happened to the country I love—a nation that was always rooted in fairness?
So I tweeted in response: “debate me, Lou Holtz.” He did not write me back because he is too scared to debate me.
I wrote that six months ago and then tabled writing anything further. I think it is Weird with a capital-W that anyone is mad about trans athletes in women’s sports but it is difficult for me to feel passionate about this belief because I’m baffled anyone wants to argue about it.
Trans athletes should be allowed to compete in whatever sport they want. There is no reason they shouldn’t, none that stand up to even the smallest level of scrutiny. The counterarguments are so bad and weird that I have a hard time engaging with them. It’s like if a homeless man walked up to me and started shouting, “WEST VIRGINIA!” There’s no intelligent response to that.
The recent 42-minute long Last Week Tonight with John Oliver segment on trans athletes and the right wing harassment of them intrigued me because of its length. Previous features on ICE detentions, the death penalty, and the Israel-Hamas War respectively ran 24 minutes, 28 minutes, and 32 minutes. I wasn’t convinced there was 42 minutes worth of content. It would seem a Tim Walz-style “it’s weird you care so much about this but not about giving people food” would suffice.
To my surprise, I wouldn’t cut a minute of the Last Week Tonight piece. Like most features on the show, it is very well argued and researched. It’s a passionate defense of trans athletes of all ages and an incisive takedown of the conservative grifters and bullies masquerading as feminist activists.
If I were to offer criticism of the segment, it would be that it lacks cultural analysis. It does not do an especially great job of highlighting the stakes of including trans athletes in women’s sports as imagined by the right wing, and it does not do an especially great job of contemplating the implications of those imagined stakes.
I say that because watching the segment made me realize what so many of the women athletes pushing for a ban have in common is that they compete in individual sports (also they dye their hair blonde). Indeed, what made the San Jose State volleyball controversy interesting to me was that, as far as I could recall, it was the first dispute about trans athletes in a team sport played the Division I level.
When you listen to these solo athletes argue for a ban of trans athletes, what becomes clear is that their chief complaint is they did not obtain the cultural prestige they thought they could. There is no real material component to this at all. It all boils down to “I personally did not get the thing I wanted and we should all be very upset by the fact that I personally did not get the thing I wanted.”
But self-aggrandizement is not something that should instigate public policy changes, and it’s not what sports is about. Sports is about trying your best for the teammate beside you and to make proud the spectators rooting for you. It is about becoming something more than just yourself, win or lose.
Having that experience, understanding that you are not the most important person on the planet and are in fact just one part of a much larger whole, is crucial to the maintenance of a good and functional society.
A culture where millions of deeply narcissistic individuals compete with one another for no purpose other than to prove how cool they are is not a recipe for a functional society. None of its subjects will rise above, they will only pull one another down like crabs in a bucket.
So, in the interest of preventing this, I have a modest proposal. Let’s not ban trans athletes from women’s sports. Let’s ban all individual sports. They are antisocial, corrosive, and the only people who like them are the people who play in them. No more track and field. No more swim meets. No more competitive ping-pong.
Instead, everybody should have to play a team sport, and preferably one they are extremely bad at so they experience ego death.
Look at me. I was bad at every team sport I tried and I score so low on narcissism tests that when I told a therapist I was afraid I might be a narcissist she just laughed at me.