Trans Exclusion Promotes a Belief in Women’s Inferiority

Doriane Coleman wrote in the Atlantic that Katie Ledecky, Megan Rapinoe, and Angel Reese could never have been stars if sports weren’t segregated.

by Evan Urquhart

In the Atlantic today an article on transgender women’s participation in sports by Doriane Coleman opens by claiming that all women athletes have depended on sex-segregation to elevate their inferior-grade of athletic achievement. This ahistorical supposition, stated as if no one could find anything to object to in it, lays bare the misogyny at the heart of every trans-exclusionary argument.

Coleman’s piece is primarily concerned with a proposed regulation by the Biden administration that would allow schools to limit the partcipation of transgender athletes if they could show that such restrictions were backed by evidence and had a legitimate purpose. (She claims to support Biden’s regulation, but toward the end this is complicated by her objection to Biden allowing schools not to discriminate if they don’t want to. Her real view seems to be that trans athletes should be restricted by law from competitive sports past puberty, with no exceptions.)

If Coleman is doing this for the sake of women, what’s her view on exceptional women athletes? In the first paragraph, she says we would never even know their names if athletic programs weren’t sex-segregated.

screenshot from the Atlantic

This is a bold claim. Coleman believes that every woman who has become a star athlete would be nothing if men and women in sports were treated equally. It’s a widely held belief among transphobes, who view women’s inferiority as a biological weakness that can never be overcome, only made allowances for. Rather than seeing women as inherently equal to men and held back by generation upon generation of sexism and exploitation, this view of women places them permanently below men due to biology, necessitating special protections from the natural dominance and danger men embody. Women in this worldview are hothouse flowers, beautiful but vulnerable.

Coleman credits a decision in 1975 for the accomplishments of women in athletics, which she repeatedly stresses are not as good as the accomplishments of male athletes. In 1975, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was clarified to ensure that sports would never be de-segregated. According to Coleman, without the decision to tie equal funding for women in sports to sex-segregation resulted woman could never have excelled in athletic competition.

screenshot from the Atlantic

The obvious question, that Coleman nexplicably fails to ask is this: What if, in 1975, schools had been forced to provide “equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexes” and were also banned from operating seperate-sex sports teams?

Of course, to answer that is as impossible as saying Megan Rapinoe and Katie Ledecky wouldn’t have been stars without sex-segregation. And, while differences in funding, respect, and competition almost certainly hold women’s achievements back, this essay is not arguing that testosterone plays no role in the development of muscle or that this has no implications for athletic achievement. However, even in our male-dominated sports environment there are hints that women’s bodies are naturally better at some physical tasks than others. Women have higher pain tolerance, and may have more endurance. Even today there are sports where cis women equal or out-compete cis men such as target shooing, archery, horseback riding, and ultra-endurance competitions. In gymnastics small, muscular, limber bodies have the edge over taller, broader ones. A similar state of affairs obtains in figure skating.

Sports culture as we know it has been shaped by the belief that men’s bodies are superior to women’s, so it can be difficult to place yourself outside that frame and ask whether women’s seemingly lesser accomplishments are a result of male’s natural physical dominance, or of their social dominance which selects sports men have an advantage in and privileges them. By carving out sports as one place where seperate-but-equal would rule the day, the 1975 congress made sure we’d never find out what would happen if this social dominance was questioned. Far from protecting women, congress was protecting the belief in male superiority from the possibility that, if women were ever given full equality, male dominance in athletics might falter.

Coleman wants you to believe that if women had recieved full protection from discrimination in 1975, no woman would ever have been a star athlete. This is a failure of imagination on her part. Sexism is what shaped the desire to prevent women from having full equality in athletics with no restrictions, and it continues to shape the beliefs of people who think female bodies are inherently inferior to male ones just because the sports landscape has selected for male excellence at the expense of women. Trans women in sports threatens the assumption that women benefit from segregation and that, at heart, is why it has become such a hot-button topic.