Last week, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll reported that a majority of Americans oppose transgender women and girls competing against other women and girls in high school, college, and in professional sports. At least 18 states have passed legislation to this effect, and more are in the works.

And yet, less than 1% of Americans identify as transgender, and the number of cases in which the participation of transgender athletes has raised concerns is extremely low. Almost every story – and there have been many – begins and ends with a single example, that of Lia Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who competed for three years on the men’s team with modest success. , then won a national championship after transitioning. and join the women’s team.

Citing Thomas’ success, critics say transgender female athletes in general have an unfair advantage in terms of height, muscle mass, bone density, and heart and lung capacity. This week, FINA (the International Swimming Federation) banned trans athletes who have experienced male puberty from competing in its women’s events, instead offering a third (“open”) category that will allow them to compete. Transgender advocates respond that trans athletes have the right to compete on a team that matches their gender identity. They consider FINA’s policy to be “discriminatory, harmful, unscientific” and “the result of a moral panic over Lia Thomas”.

The debate over transgender athletes illustrates a larger problem that affects all aspects of American culture, society, and politics: drawing partisan conclusions based on isolated incidents taken out of context.

Colleges and universities should do more to teach us how to slow down “fast thinking”.

No matter how one views cases like Lia Thomas, context is important. According to one estimate, “out of 200,000 women playing varsity sports at any given time, approximately 50 are transgender”. And participation is by no means automatic. The NCAA guidelines, consistent with the Olympic framework, follow a “sport-by-sport approach,” intended to preserve “opportunity for transgender student-athletes while balancing fairness, inclusion, and safety for all who compete”. Asking, as the Washington Post-University of Maryland poll did, whether or not “transgender women and girls should be allowed to compete” on women’s teams contributes to the misleading narrative that trans athletes inevitably constitute unfair competition. and threaten the viability of women. sports.

The tendency to generalize occurs on a wide range of issues across the political spectrum. Racism, for example, remains a serious problem on college campuses, as it is in society at large. But treating higher education institutions — among the most progressive in the country — as if they were bastions of systemic racism, “complicit, in countless ways, in the reproduction of white supremacy,” as a petition from 2020 addressed to Cornell University administrators, may only deepen partisan differences and hamper the development of effective policy responses.

In a recent survey, a majority of undergraduates say it’s okay to yell at loudspeakers to keep them from talking on campus. When such events occur, as they did earlier this year at Yale Law School and the University of California, Hastings, they are widely publicized and often treated as evidence of a freedom crisis. Expression on College Campuses. But as Lee Bollinger, the former president of Columbia University, observed, “we must be careful in drawing conclusions based on a handful of sensationalized incidents on campus.” Instances in which a speaker is actually shouted out are, in fact, extremely rare.

So are the occasions when a speaker is uninvited for political reasons. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which maintains a “campus disinvite database,” identified just ten such cases in 2021 among thousands of invitations to speak issued last year. . While one denial of free speech is one denial too many, and there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the state of free speech on college campuses, generalizing from cases unrepresentative obscures what is really happening in higher education, reinforces partisan divides on and off campus, and complicates efforts to identify ways in which a culture of free speech and open inquiry can be fostered.

In today’s highly polarized political environment, it’s no surprise that fanatics on the left and right seek to exploit isolated incidents and sometimes see events through a distorting lens, as two DCI defenders recently did. when they falsely accused a black DJ of wearing black face.

The problem is exacerbated, of course, by social media, which “locks people in thought bubbles, rewards hyperbole and outrage, and does not support nuanced academic reasoning,” as the task force notes. of the Bipartisan Policy Center on Campus Free Expression in the context of campus free speech. If a swastika appears on a hall of residence bulletin board, does that indicate endemic anti-Semitism on campus? Does a reference to racial bias in a math textbook indicate that critical race theory is going crazy?

Higher education institutions have a special obligation to resist the temptation to jump to conclusions and recommend solutions without adequate consideration, even when many members of the academic community demand an immediate response.

Administrators and faculty should lay the groundwork for slowing down quick thinking in and out of the classroom, during orientations and convocations, and in communications with alumni and parents of first-graders. cycle, before heated controversies arose. When they do, college and university officials should condemn offensive language and behavior, but have the courage – and it will take – to distinguish between incidents that are not representative of those that indicate a systemic problem, and to base policies and responses on a careful assessment of all available evidence, even if it takes time.

Who knows: this approach could also appeal to politicians and the voters who elect them.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Isaac Kramnick) of Cornell: A History, 1940-2015.

David Wippman is the president of Hamilton College.