There are no natural or neutral eligibility rules for girls’ sports. All rules say something about who and what society values. Courts and policymakers will ultimately need to decide how eligibility rules should or must be drawn. In answering these questions, they will need to decide what the social goal of sex-segregated sports is, and which eligibility rules best serve this end. This book started from the premise that transgender and cisgender girls are entitled to equal concern and respect. It then offered a pragmatic and workable framework for optimizing individual and group benefits of sports for both transgender and cisgender girls.

This chapter identifies three distinct benefits of organized sports. Basic benefits are the physical and emotional benefits of sports that flow to all participants. Special benefits are the tangible and intangible rewards that flow only to the winners. Group benefits are the self-esteem and social-status benefits that nonparticipants receive from seeing a member of their group celebrated. The chapter argues that at the recreational and early childhood levels, the values governing the basic benefits of sports should drive eligibility rules and transgender girls should be included. At the elite level of varsity high school and college sports, the values governing special and group benefits should drive eligibility rules and transgender girls should be included, except where transgender athletes dominate the winner’s circle.

In 1962, John F. Kennedy proposed withholding for taxes on dividends and interest to close the large gap between dividends and interest paid and reported. Despite the familiarity with wage withholding, the proposal encountered an enormous wave of public opposition, generating one of the most significant letter-writing campaign ever mounted. Congress relented and stripped the dividend and interest withholding provision from the bill in favor of new information reporting requirements. Why did dividend and interest withholding generate such a populist revolt? In part, the populism on this issue was manufactured by the business community. Banks and corporations mobilized their depositors and investors to contact their congressmen to protest the proposal. This is only part of the story, however. The industry-led campaign struck a chord with taxpayers who had become disaffected by the special tax preferences and shelters enjoyed by high bracket taxpayers. They viewed omitting dividends and interest as their form of self-help, while others were indignant that Congress would attack tax evasion by going after them before solving high-end tax evasion first.

In their book, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman lamented the retreat of the United States’ tax system from its heyday between the 1930s and 1970s when it was, in their words, “perhaps the most progressive in world history.”1 As seen in Figure I.1, the top rate shot up from 25 percent after World War I to more than 60 percent in the early 1930s and settled at the astronomically high rate of 91 percent for over a decade between 1951 and 1963. That turned out to be the high point for the top marginal rate. Over the next several decades the rate dropped to 70 percent, then 50 percent, and finally a low of 28 percent in the late 1980s. Although it has crept up since then, the top rate has never approached anything close to what it was at mid-century, remaining below 40 percent for the last four decades.

This chapter describes and assesses the arguments for transgender girls’ inclusion in girls’ sports that have dominated left-leaning public and political discourse. At core, the arguments focus on the subjective and objective harms of misgendering. The chapter describes and critiques subjective pain arguments as too indeterminate empirically and normatively to provide a basis for inclusion. The chapter next examines objective claims about human flourishing and hierarchies of oppression revealing their underlying assumptions and perhaps unintended consequences.

In the 1950s, as one columnist recently pointed out, “the wealthiest people in the U.S. were not corporate executives … Rather, they were entertainers.”2 In 1958, for example, when Arthur B. Homer, the president of Bethlehem Steel, was making $623,336, Frank Sinatra made nearly $4 million.3 Given this reality, when entertainers got together to talk amongst themselves in mid-century America, “the U.S. tax laws [were] deeply involved.”4 It should not be surprising, therefore, that when it came to tax dodging during this period, entertainers were on the cutting edge.