Prof. Michael F. Kenney asks a good question: “What should I tell my grandkids?” who have concerns that transgender girls will excel in sports and take away opportunities for athletic scholarships. I also have young grandchildren, and I know what I’d say: the world can be a scary place at times for lots of reasons. Let’s just be sure we don’t waste our worry on things that aren’t really dangerous.

Gender affirming medical procedures, including surgeries that remove reproductive organs and thus the hormones they produce, have been practiced for over a hundred years. In all this time, no evidence has emerged that male-to-female gender affirmation surgery has led to unfairness in girls’ sports or access to college scholarships. If these were real risks, surely we’d have some documentation by now.

An article from 2019 in the online journal Science of Sport is clear that there isn’t even enough data to either confirm or deny that transgender girls and women have significant advantages over other girls and women. The author concludes the section written for the lay reader: “What I’d love to see is the performance comparison from hundreds of athletes, at a range of levels, before and after they transition…. Ideally, you’d do this in a controlled manner, where you are reassured that training and other life factors… are not driving the changes more than lowering the testosterone. But this may be impossible, hence the need for hundreds if not thousands of data points….”

Untold damage has been done by banning one group or another from any number of activities based not on reality, but fear about what might happen if. … In fact, there was ferocious resistance to Title IX, which mandates that girls be given the same opportunities to participate in sports as boys. The basic argument was a familiar one: ensuring equal access for girls will irreparably harm the boys who already have access. “They” will ruin things for “us.” I think most of us now agree that’s not what happened, but it took years of lost opportunities and costly court cases to get to this point.

As more information is gathered, let’s make sure we don’t make the mistake of excluding and marginalizing transgender girls based on unsubstantiated beliefs about the risks they might pose. This is the message I’ll be sending to the Education Commissioner, and I hope many others will join me.

Jean Lewandowski is a resident of Nashua.