Shouldn’t we get started then?
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You are confusing “gender” and “sex”.
Jenner was born a man and competed in decathlon as a man, not a woman (sex).
At some point, Jenner came to identify as a woman (gender).
They are not the same thing. Arguing that Jenner competed and won against men while being a woman is simply incorrect and indicates a basic misunderstanding of these concepts.
Sex is about biological attributes, gender is about social constructs.
Bruce Jenner competed and won as a man against other men.
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So get rid of the women’s category completely. It’s inclusive. Everyone can compete there.
Agreed. In general the anti-doping measures target plenty of performance enhancing that might improve the users quality of life outside of sport. To me it doesn’t really matter if the user’s goal is to improve their life outside of sport or improve their performance in sports. If it can be shown that its improving their sporting performance (even if its relative to transitioning between categories), I don’t see how it could be considered “fair”.
Going to run out on a long limb with this analogy; But imagine we came up with a drug that could 100% halt the aging process. You’re 30 in the prime of your fitness and start taking the drug for your general health. A majority of other people choose not to take the drug because they want live out their natural life. 20 years later you’re still in prime fitness, but plenty of other people chose not to take that pill that preserves their physical prowess indefinitely and are feeling the effects of aging. Are we going to then argue that the person taking the drug should be competing with the 50-60 year old age bracket full of people who are naturally 50-60 years old?
To me it seems like there’s enough evidence that transitioning males are still at an advantage and shouldn’t be allowed in a majority of women’s sports. The small size of the transitioning population isn’t really a relevant argument to me either because the performance gap between men and women is large enough that it opens up a huge population of males that could potentially be taking spots from biological women.
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First of all, thanks for contributing to the discussion, us men talk a lot about women when we should actually listen to athletes who are affected by these decisions.
Participation is definitely an issue. The lack of female players is a factor in the outcome gap in chess. The study mentioned in this article suggests that male and female chess players have roughly the same distribution of talent, but because there are way fewer female players, it is just exceedingly less likely that you’ll find a female Magnus Carlsen or Hikaru Nakamura.
Women’s sports have a much harder time to attract money, which makes it harder to have structures that are on par with what male athletes have access to. You see this in many cycling races, the fields are very small and often dominated by a few athletes. (E. g. the only woman in our cycling team who competes is really good. According to a team mate, before turning to cycling, she ran a 3-hour marathon as an amateur. But she only enters hill climb TTs, because she doesn’t like road races.)
Agreed. We are talking a lot about hypotheticals, and I’d like to take a try-it-and-see-what-happens approach. We can still change the rules of the sport as we understand what the real challenges are.
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HRT and plastic surgery does not change biological sex, nor is it required to change your gender.
The M->F transgendered athletes currently competing are biological men competing against biological women. That is why it is unfair.
I agree, Jenner is a biological man and competed against biological males. However, according to the transgender argument, Jenner is and was always a woman (self-identified gender).
Currently, the rules are that if you are a self-identified woman who is a biological male, if you take HRT you can compete against biological women. This is and always will be unfair.
I believe you may have misunderstood my previous post. If not, we will have to agree to disagree.
We are taking the ‘try and see’. And transgender women despite being a vanishingly small portion of the population keep showing up at the highest levels of competition.
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What do I think? Pleasantly surprised in how he presented the topic. I think its a great way to start talking about this in the way he defined the polarizing forces of fairness and inclusion. Maybe as we learn more those forces of discussion change. Seem appropriate now.
I think like most things humans are involved in there’s going to be a pendulum swinging back and forth on all these policies. Until hopefully one day some equilibrium is found that is satisfactory to all.
Are they? I think the only big cases I remember are not about transgender athletes, but intersex athletes who identify as female. And is the number of cases out of proportion?
Regurgitating of Russ Tucker’s Science of Sport
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There was Rachel McKinnon/Veronica Ivy winning masters world champs multiple times. Laurel Hubbard was the presumptive favorite for the olympics. Fallon Fox in MMA.
I honestly don’t know of any ‘mediocre’ transgender women in elite sport.
I wrote this in response to another trans people in sport discussion on facebook, and I think it sits here as well:
I would like to engage in this discussion, and hopefully we can keep it free of spiteful language. For context, I am currently on the fence on this issue, trending more towards exclusion than inclusion for trans women. In every other aspect of my life, I am for the inclusion of trans people.
The reason I am still on the fence, and what I think we should all think about, is that there are a multitude of advantages and disadvantages in sport. Here are a few that come to mind immediately:
- Physiology. A vast majority of successful sprinters are black. This is due to physiological differences from genetic expression. We deem this as fair, because it’s natural. But then, so is being transgender.
Basketball and high jump does not correct for height. MMA does not correct for muscle mass. The 100m sprint isn’t handicapped for fast and slow twitch muscle.
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Wealth. This gets played down, but is a massive differentiator with sports. Are we going to restrict participation in biathlon from birth to ensure that everyone can afford the skis, kit and the gun? There are many sports that fall outside the purely physical where wealth plays an enormous role.
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Place of birth. Should every child that shows athletic promise be brought to the same elevation ASAP to ensure that those training in Kenya do not have an advantage? Should we restrict the access of Aussie kids to the ocean, because it’s unfair to future swimmers from Nepal?
Now, if you’ve made it this far, please know that I am fully aware that the above examples are full of hyperbole. But they also show that sport is, and has always been, full of inequities.
Sport holds itself up as a bastion of “fairness”, but is very rarely that. Rampant unchecked doping in all sports (yes, not just cycling), match fixing, you name it. Unfairness abounds in sport.
So even though testosterone is honestly a shitty marker for deeming when it is fair for a trans woman to compete, why are we making such a strong stance on this inequity, but stay comfortably silent on all others? Maybe it’s because we know that on the horizon, world records in certain sports may be dominated by trans women. If that happens, then we can re-assess. But for now, trans women in high level sport are exceedingly rare, they are rarely dominant, and the policing of this issue by many groups is a proxy for transphobic behaviour. Notably, the website that currently lists the full names, transition date and location of trans athletes all the way down to amateur sport. That is disgusting and completely inappropriate.
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An individual can identify however they want it doesn’t change their natural biological make-up the T levels would still do what they are going to do when left unchecked.
Not to mention the research that has shown the effects of a cis woman’s menstrual cycle has on their training. This is something a Transgender Female would not have to deal with.
My question was different: taking the prevalence of transgenderism into account, can we quantify the advantage transgender athletes have in a given sport?
How many transwomen in sports do you know? I doubt we have sufficiently many to quantify anything with statistical certainty. Just to be clear: I am not denying that male physiology gives transwomen an advantage in some sports. But we have that issue in so many ways in many sports. Le Mans race cars are carefully regulated not to allow car makers to maximize the potential of their cars, but to have them compete on an as level as possible playing field. Epo and training at altitude do similar things, yet one is banned and the other is allowed. Etc. Is being intersex an unfair advantage? Is having an “unnaturally high” testosterone level an unfair advantage. These aren’t simple question with simple answers, I think.
Our first instinct shouldn’t be to ban athletes that fall outside the norm, including, but not limited to transgender athletes. We ought to find out how big their actual advantage is and decide whether we can reimagine the sport in some ways to include them.
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Emily Bridges in the UK might turn out to be an interesting case study.
She was in the team GB talent development squad when identifying as a male and was very successful at youth level. I think she has the hope/intention to compete as a woman after transitioning.
British cycling, whilst promoting inclusivity, have stopped short of saying that she will be eligible for selection.
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I don’t know enough to have a definite opinion here, but I do think there’s a potential for a lot of bias in how we perceive this.
Most of us aren’t particularly aware of ‘mediocre’ athletes in elite sport, transgender or otherwise, particularly when it comes to sports we’re less involved in or where there’s less of a personal stake (athletes from your country etc.) Just speaking for myself here, but I have no idea who’s competing middle of the pack in most sports outside of the ones I follow consistently, much less their history or hormone status.
As others have noticed, we’re also more likely to hear about or form an opinion on these athletes as their presence become more impactful on others- largely in proportion to how highly they place or the amount of press they receive. (Hence why you see athletes expressing more opinions in sports like lifting or track cycling, and why people aren’t concerned about FTM athletes.)
Finally, the media loves controversy and has little stake in covering performances that people are less likely to have strong opinions on, as well as the potential to disproportionately cover highly political or controversial topics which typically drive more engagement from the general public.
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Just to riff on this thought: Oscar Pistorius competed in the 2012 Olympics (≠ Paralympics) where he placed 16th in a field of 51. This is an amazing feat for an able-bodied athlete already. However, imagine the controversy if he had been, say, in the top 5 or even got a medal. I think you would have heard an outcry that he took someone’s medal away, because of the obvious advantages his prostheses gave him. The obvious disadvantage of having no lower legs and the fact that he put in hours and hours of training would probably be de-emphasized.
If all we judge this is on the outcome, I think many sports would have to be revisited. Because there are sports (e. g. motor sports) where rules are changed and selectively applied not to let someone or a team develop their strengths to the maximum, but to keep the competition interesting. Just imagine what cycling would look like if we had weight classes. Or if we insisted that team work in road cycling was forbidden.
This is what happens when we try to assume gender is a binary biological construct.
No matter where you stand on this, it’s pretty freaking obvious that trying to cram humanity into two categories doesn’t work.
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My point is that transgender people represent 0.5% of the population. I think it would be fair to say ‘elite athletes’ make up a similarly small, or even smaller, portion of the population. The prevalence of such a small cohort in such a small cohort should be a point of interest.
But is there a prevalence? All I see are a few isolated examples, and that there are more non-transgender (female) athletes who are excluded from competition for either having too high testosterone levels or having e. g. an XXY chromosome. But I’d argue these two cases are separate.
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