The Real Nuance and Fake Concern Around Trans Sports Participation

Questions around transgender women’s participation in women’s sports aren’t being suppressed by anyone. They’re also not being asked in smart or interesting ways by those who claim to care about them.

by Evan Urquhart

The performance of reasonableness is not the same thing as looking at the facts and genuinely coming to an informed and reasonable position. The gap between cosplaying as a moderate and moderation seems particularly wide in the mainstream discussion about trans issues, and questions of transgender women’s participation in sports all the more so. Case in point, this weekend Lance Armstrong, the disgraced former cyclist best known for his central place in the Tour de France’s doping scandal, attempted to portray himself on Twitter as an objective interrogator of questions around fairness and trans inclusion in women’s sports, and announced a conversation with anti-trans quisling Caitlyn Jenner.

screenshot from Twitter

For this Armstrong was roundly mocked online. The hypocrisy of attempting to weigh in on questions about fairness when, in his own career, he repeatedly rejected fairness to gain an advantge was too much even for trans-skeptical audiences. Armstrong wasn’t labeled a bigot or a transphobe for asking, he was labeled a cheater who had no standing to discuss fairness.

But “questions” about trans people’s (usually trans women’s) participation in sports are being posed by other cisgender men, men who are more capable of wrapping themselves in the mantle of objectivity. On Sunday, in the New York Times opinion section, conservative evangelical writer David French expressed his opinion that trans women’s participation is a threat to women’s sports. Because French is not a notorious sports cheat, his authority to speak on this as a cisgender man is unlikely to be questioned. It should be, though, not because asking questions about transgender women’s participation in sports makes one a bigot, but because his column, like so many on this issue, ignores some basic factual matters that ought to underpin every discussion of what is genuinely a somewhat nuanced and complicated matter.

Contrary to popular belief, trans people haven’t shied away from tough questions around athletic participation. Nor has the trans community called people bigots willy-nilly for engaging with them in good faith. Understanding how trans people think and talk about athletic issues should be useful to any cisgender person entering the conversation fresh, because we’ve been talking about this calmly, and even disagreeing on it, for many years already. Trans people hold a variety of nuanced, well-reasoned positions, and disagreements between the camps are cordial, for the most part.

While there are a few trans people, such as Caitlyn Jenner, who argue that trans people should avoid competing in sports with others of their gender, most trans people start from the same starting place: If trans women and girls can compete with other women fairly, then they should be allowed to do so.

The anti-trans side does not share this starting point, and French’s NYT column, while very politely worded, is no exception. French’s starting point is that transgender women are men, and everything else proceeds from that assumption. By doing this he bypasses years of the scientific efforts to examine whether hormone therapy (and specifically testosterone suppression) brings trans women’s athletic performance into the range of other women athletes. Instead, French compares cisgender women’s performance with cisgender men’s performance and concludes it is therefore unfair to allow trans women to compete with other women. French ignores the simple, provable fact that trans women’s performance by all accounts no longer fits a cis male profile after testosterone suppression. It’s unclear if French hasn’t bothered to investigate the subject deeply enough, or if he ignores this basic science because it complicates the issue to acknowledge facts that don’t support his pre-chosen conclusion.

screenshot from the New York Times

If we acknowledge the reality that trans women do not fit a cis male athletic profile after undergoing hormone therapy, that doesn’t prove trans women have no advantage over cis women. After all, they could still fall somewhere between cis men and cis women and have a disadvantage against men and an advantage against women. So I don’t mean to suggest that the issue is completely settled just from observing testosterone suppression’s effects on trans women’s biology. However, it at least makes room for the possibility that trans women who have medically transitioned might be able to compete fairly with other women, which French does not acknowledge. This is intellectually dishonest.

Multiple factors including the length of time on testosterone suppression and the particular sport in question are likely to play a role in when and whether trans women can compete on an equal basis. The full picture is very complex and there’s loads more to be investigated, but what we know currently has led to the status quo at the elite level, which has slightly different standards in different sports, but generally requires trans women to have been on testosterone suppression for some set amount of time (often around 2 years) and to undergo testing to ensure their testosterone levels don’t exceed some pre-determined maximum.

In the trans community, the most common way of thinking about athletic participation takes this as a baseline. Many trans people, including me, think scientific investigation should be used to ensure that cis women aren’t being unfairly disadvantaged in high level competition, and testing regimes for trans women are an acceptable way of ensuring fairness. Most trans people also think restrictions in the forms of time requirements for hormone therapy and testing regimens should be fitted to the level of the competition: Younger children, pre-puberty should have no restrictions whatsoever. In environments where there’s a wide skill range and very low stakes, like most high school athletics, inclusion can and should remain the priority, perhaps with slightly more guardrails to prevent bad-faith jokesters from abusing the system. However, as the stakes get higher requirements can increase to preserve fairness, with the strictest measures being reserved for elite professonal and Olympic competition.

While this describes the majority of trans people’s thinking, there’s a strong minority in the community who believe increased awareness of diversity in gender is a chance to re-think the way athletic competition functions, who it serves, and whether it should continue as it has been. A case has begun to be made for more co-ed sports, with a version of this discussion even making it to the Atlantic. Because I’m in the first camp I turned to Sydney Bauer, a transgender journalist based in Atlanta who covers sports, politics and major events through the lens of identity and gender, to explain the thinking behind it further:

The way people talk about sport and the idea that there should be a “debate” about trans people in sports just shows how fundamentally broken our sport structure is. Ultimately it comes down to this debate is a stand in for how people view trans people on society at large.

We organize sports the way we do because of an event in the 1870s modeled off the ancient Olympics that was the inspiration for the International Olympic Committee. That event was only for men, so the modern Olympics were for men. When women tried creating their own organization, the IOC started slowly adding women’s events separately to prevent their event from having competition. That’s why we organize sports with men’s and women’s events not because it’s the “natural” way it should be.

So, that’s why it’s very frustrating no one discusses how we can find a bottom-up approach to sports that prioritizes access to sports for everyone and de-emphasizes moving up the ladder to elite sports. In a hypothetical world administrators could find ways to categorize different sports, not through gender but a combination of factors that could lead to fairer categories but also more categories so everyone feels they’ve got a shot at fair competition around them. But we don’t explore that because the way sports are organized right now make too much money. It would take effort and a lot of imagination but people default to men’s events and women’s events, which puts gender nonconformity outside these boxes and at risk for showing there is in fact a possibility for fun and fair competition outside the gender binary.

In addition to the two main views I’ve outlined, there are also some trans people who point out that all athletic competition rests on innate natural advantages of some athletes over others. In this view, trans women whose hormone balance includes higher-than-average testosterone due to their individual health needs or personal preferences may have an advantage, but they’re women and should be allowed to use that advantage the same way tall women athletes have an unfair advantage over short ones or all naturally co-ordinated people have an unfair advantage over me, personally. At the other extreme, there are trans people who don’t think trans people should participate in sports as their true selves, usually for reasons of political expedience.

The trans community is not afraid of these conversations, and in fact we welcome others to enter into them fully and fairly. To do so requires setting aside the false claim that trans women’s athletic performance is identical to cis men’s, and engaging with the science that says otherwise. We don’t expect everyone to share the same views, and people who are skeptical of trans inclusion will almost certainly not accept that the science is settled. However, if everyone were at least willing to engage with the reality that testosterone suppression changes athletic performance, and to agree that trans women’s inclusion would be desired if fairness could be preserved, the conversations around trans inclusion in sports that flowed could be humane, respectful, and based in facts rather than prejudice.