Sports exist on a fine line between escapism and brutal, bodily reality. When something punctures that fantasy, and the human systems sports are entrenched in bleed through, it can be jarring. But sometimes it’s necessary.

The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), of which Point Park is a member, announced Sept. 26 that it would not hold its cross country championships in Charlotte, N.C, as scheduled. The NAIA moved the event in response to North Carolina’s House Bill 2.

House Bill 2 (HB2), which was passed in March to reverse a Charlotte ordinance protecting transgender people who use bathrooms based on their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth, made it illegal for cities in North Carolina to expand on the state’s existing laws “regulating workplace discrimination, use of public accommodations…and other business issues,” according to a March 26 article in the Charlotte Observer.

The national headquarters of the ACLU described HB2 as the “most extreme anti-LGBT measure in the country.” North Carolina doesn’t protect LGBT people from discrimination, and cities there are now powerless to enact any anti-discrimination legislation of their own.

Two NAIA school presidents have publicly stated their disagreement with the organization’s decision to relocate the championships. College of the Ozarks president Jerry Davis described it as “political correctness gone berserk,” and said athletes are being used as “political pawns.”

“How can we claim to be an organization that supports women if our leadership is so willing to deny female athletes the right to have their own bathrooms, showers, toilet and lavatory?” said Oklahoma Wesleyan president Everett Piper.

So Piper doesn’t believe trans women are women, maybe not even human beings, and Davis probably agrees, but instead chooses to couch his bigotry in the vague but threatening-sounding specter of “political correctness.”

This is a deeply silly argument. In 2016, it is not radical to suggest that people should not be fired because they are gay. It is slightly more radical to suggest that transgender people should be able to use whatever bathroom they choose, but that is the fault of 2016 and not of transgender people.

Before the NAIA announced its plans to move its cross country championships, the NCAA and NBA (as well as entertainers such as Bruce Springsteen) canceled events in North Carolina in protest of the law. Disgust at HB2 is comfortingly mainstream; it’s not fear or political correctness or anything else “gone berserk.”

Advocating as an organization that people who are queer should not have their government endorse fear of and discrimination against them is not a concession to the PC Police, but rather an acknowledgment that people should not have their humanity stripped from them on the basis of their queerness.

The other aspect of Davis’s argument, that athletes are being used as “political pawns” is also silly, but it is more interesting. The obvious counterargument here that Davis fails to consider is that gay or trans athletes might feel like political pawns if they are forced to go to and patronize a state whose government is openly hostile to them.

Davis failed to consider that because, for a surprising number of people, once an athlete is an athlete, they are nothing else. An athlete is not gay, or trans, or black, or female; an athlete is a body. A body does not have thoughts and certainly does not express dissatisfaction at the state of the world. A body exists solidly in the larger-than-life world of sports, where the real, painful world cannot encroach. A body who deals in ideas and protests is disruptive, and should be punished and hated.

There is an exception to this, of course, and that is the body who exists in The Past. Muhammad Ali, for instance, died earlier this year after a lifetime of using his prominence as an athlete to champion civil rights and antiwar movements. Ali’s actions were not vilified when he died because his protests took place in The Past, that nebulous time when things were worse, before we fixed everything. Now we live in The Present, and everything is fine, and anyone who doesn’t think so is ungrateful to everyone in The Past who worked so hard to make everything fine. Protests are obsolete and petulant, because everything is so fine now that there should be no more complaining.

The Present is not fine, not even close, not for everyone.

In 2014, while “overall violence against LGBT people went down by 32 percent, crimes against transgender people rose by 13 percent,” according to the Human Rights Campaign. So the NAIA and other organizations refuse to give their business to a state whose laws amplify the kind of fear that incites violence against trans people.

“Of all of the unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black men, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population,” according to a July 11 Washington Post article. So Colin Kaepernick takes a knee during the national anthem to protest state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings rooted in racism.

So every player on the WNBA’s Indiana Fever takes a knee. So US Women’s National Soccer Team player Megan Rapinoe also takes a knee, saying that as a gay woman, she too has felt that she “hasn’t had [her] liberties protected.”

Sports and politics, which some people seem to prefer kept separate, keep colliding into each other. It’s almost as if it is impossible to isolate anything with such precision that the world at large will never intrude on it, because even existing in a world with injustices is an inevitably political act.

It’s almost as if sports cannot be divorced from politics because sports are comprised of human beings – human beings with identities and lived experiences, and also a platform. Athletes have the power to start conversations, and they shouldn’t be reprimanded for using that power for causes they think are worth fighting for.

It might be uncomfortable to be jolted out of escapist entertainment because an athlete wants to get a point across, but a protest that’s comfortable for everyone is also by definition ineffective.

Athletes don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in the same world as the rest of us, one that’s flawed and broken and deeply human. When we accept that athletes are humans, we accept they have ideas and identities just as valuable as their bodies.

When we acknowledge there is work to be done to make the world – the entirety of it, which includes sports – better, we allow ourselves the opportunity to do the work.

That’s why athletes like Colin Kaepernick deserve nothing but respect. That’s why the NAIA, in acknowledging its athletes are first and foremost human beings, made the right choice.