Guess who ends up with nowhere to sit when we play musical chairs with language?

OK, I’m not quite done with Megan Rapinoe and her crack about being “sorry” that “your kid’s high school volleyball team just isn’t that important.”

That’s because it’s yet another case of the disappearing girls, this time involving a neat move I’d like to call ‘musical chairs.’

In Rapinoe’s world, trans-identified boys become "girls" who have a right to compete in girls' sports. Meanwhile, actual girls become "kids" (no special characteristics) who need to suck it up and who are being disadvantaged by their sex in a way that's now lost language.

This is how women and children lose protections, too.

Gender clinicians like Johanna Olson-Kennedy prefer to talk about gender-questioning three-year-olds as "people." And they are people, just like girls are kids. But when we talk about three-year-olds as just any “people” and girls as just any “kids,” important information is getting lost, with consequences.

When we talk about "people," we think "adults." We think autonomy.

When we talk about "toddlers," we think: tiny human who needs a huge amount of care and guidance and cannot be trusted to cross an empty street, much less start down a medical pathway.

There's a reason Olson-Kennedy talks about "people" when she's referring to toddlers. Like I said in my recent piece over at UnHerd, the ideas that underpin her medical practice sound as ridiculous as they are when translated from "people know who they are" to "toddlers know who they are."

When we talk about "kids," broadly, but we mean girls, specifically, we're leaving out information about whose rights are affected by the policies we push and what that means and what context we need to take into account.

In this case, we're pushing a subset of "kids" (girls) out of sports to facilitate the inclusion of "girls" (boys) in girls' sports.

Missing context: Girls and boys are different in ways that really matter when it comes to athletic competition. Girls' sports leagues are a recent achievement to enable girls to compete freely and fairly and—depending on the sport—safely.