Imagine being told there exists something that can reduce your risk of getting dementia by 20–30%, can help with alleviating feelings of depression and anxiety, will raise the likelihood of you getting better grades if studying, and will improve your overall self-esteem — all without medical intervention — and now imagine, in the next breath, being told that you cannot participate in this potentially lifesaving treatment because of who you say you are. This is the unfortunate reality facing most of the transgender population who wish to engage in either amateur or professional sports across the globe.
The rationale that fuels these bills being put forward is one of ignorance or outright hatred of the transgender population. Trans girls and women are regularly viewed as ‘men in dresses’ who hold an unfair advantage in female sporting categories. The fact that the bills are almost exclusively targeting those who were assigned male at birth (AMAB) and who now identify as female is telling. Running underneath this sporting fairness façade is the chauvinistic belief that there is simply an immutable difference between men and women and that men are simply better, overall, at sporting performance.
Since women were granted access to compete in competitive sport in the 20th century, those who either were deemed to have too masculine of a physique or whose performance was on par with their male counterparts were disqualified from competition as deviants of the gender order. Some female athletes have even had to go through genital inspections and chromosome testing in order to prove that they are what they say they are.
Caster Semenya is a South African cis-gendered women and an Olympic champion, winning the 800m track race in 2012 and 2016. She will not get a chance to retake her title in this year’s Olympic Games, as she is currently barred by the World Athletics governing body from competition after refusing to lower her naturally high testosterone levels. Because of these incredibly restrictive regulations even cis women with differences of sexual development (DSD), such as Semenya, are refused access to competition unless they take prescribed medication to make them fall in line with the bigoted standards of sport governing bodies. This regulation of naturally occurring testosterone levels in female athletes is rooted in anti-Black feminism and Black transmisogyny.
In fact, many activists posit that such anti-transgender athletics bans are partially driven by racism. These bills reflect a long-standing racist belief that Black women’s bodies are ‘too masculine’. Tennis legend Serena Williams maybe best personifies this struggle, having faced such accusations almost her entire career. Williams wrote an open letter to her mother, thanking her for her support all these years amid the personal attacks on her body.
The high-profile cases of Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, two Black transgender high school girls competing in girls’ track teams in Connecticut, made headlines in 2020 when three white cis-gender girls took part in a lawsuit against them. Despite previously beating Yearwood and Miller, the three girls argued that transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports competitions violates protections against gender-based discrimination. Just over a year later, the lawsuit was dismissed by the judge.
Putting aside the blatant ethical issues around refusing a sub-section of the population to participate in certain activities for one moment, the idea of ‘sporting fairness’ is incredibly dubious at best — sport is, and will never be, a level-playing field. Those with ‘better’ suited genes to the particular activity they are taking part in will always have the advantage. If a cyclist in the Tour de France is born with genes that produce more erythropoietin (EPO) than yours is able to, they will win no matter how hard you train. The same holds true for anyone with aspirations of playing in the NBA — if you are born into a body that is of average height or shorter, well, good luck.
What many who call for and who implement these anti-trans sporting legislations fail to take into account is the natural variance of alethic ability within the transgender population. As Dr. Vinny Chulani, Director of the Phoenix Children’s Hospital Adolescent Medicine Program, states in an interview on the website Them: ‘There are so many characteristics that contribute to excellence in sports. And the same attributes don’t always carry over from one sport to the next. You need different skills for golfing than you need for archery, basketball, soccer, or gymnastics.
‘Plus, there’s not really any sound body of evidence that speaks to the advantage that testosterone confers. When you take a look at some of the studies that have been done on transgender females in terms of their athletic ability, it overlaps with the range that you would find in cisgender women. There is no body of evidence to suggest that there is an advantage.’
Many researchers within sociocultural fields of study actually reason that social factors cause a bigger discrepancy between two peoples performance advantages rather than the effects of, say, testosterone. Some examples of these social factors can include: discriminations (in the form of a coach not dedicating as much time to female teams, or, even, parental discriminations — a father may be more likely to take his son out to play football, rather than his daughter); disparate resource allocations between male and female sporting teams; and a long history of barring women from certain sports that were viewed as ‘too masculine’, such as rugby, which may have a knock on effect leaving some women feeling worried about how they will be perceived if they express a desire to play.
Perhaps most importantly, there is also the important social factor of finance. Though those within sporting organisations such as FINA, swimming's governing body, like to talk about their commitment to promoting fairness in sports as a justification for banning transgender athletes, rarely is anything said about the bare-faced unfairness of financial barriers that get in the way of youth participating in sport. These barriers can block access to sporting clubs, spaces, equipment, and lessons, and cut off a lot of young people from having a fair shot at becoming professional athletes. What about them?
A 2019 study undertaken by the University of Bath found that 64% of children from the UK’s highest income households take part in sport. Compare this to the 46% of young people from families in the lowest income bracket who take part and you start to see this is a significant issue. To add to this bleak reality, a study by LSE Housing and Communities revealed that young people from disadvantaged areas will time and again quit playing sports after leaving school due to being unable to afford participation. Again, what about them?
When critically examined it becomes clear that the banning of trans athletes is not about simply promoting sporting fairness — rather it is just another way to police certain bodies out of society.
The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) released a scientific review of transgender women athletes, making a point to only included peer-reviewed articles or syntheses of academic literature (e.g., meta-analyses) in reputable academic journals. They found that impacts of sport inclusion policies (or lack thereof) played a significant and wide-reaching part in how trans people are included in wider areas of society. In other words, the strict and unjust regulation on trans bodies — castigating them as some sort of freak other — can play a detrimental role in how these people are treated by the wider world. The study’s authors concluded that all reasonable efforts should be made to make sport inclusive and accessible for transgender individuals.
Considering how sport can have an incredibly positive impact on the physical and mental health of transgender people (a group which already has a significantly heightened risk of suicide due to society’s treatment of them), potentially contributing to lifesaving opportunities, it is not reactionary to suggest that these institutions may have blood on their hands.
The study’s authors also pointed out that the data within these studies can often be methodologically flawed, as cis-males are typically used as a generalisation of trans women’s bodies. On average, trans women who are pre-testosterone suppression still have lower Lean Body Mass (LBM), Cross Section Area (CSA), and overall strength than cis males, indicating these types of studies are ignorant at best and transphobic at worst. Of the trans women who decide to go through bottom surgery, many will actually experience testosterone levels far below that of pre-menopausal cis women.
Trans-exclusionary organisations such as Women in Sport will be happy to express concern over the use of puberty blockers for young people (puberty blockers are safe and have been in use for decades) whilst also bemoaning about the inherent advantages testosterone offers, leaving trans people caught between a rock and a hard place. They don’t want adult trans-women to participate in sport alongside cis-gender women because they will have gone through male puberty, giving these people some physical indicators of strength that they believe cannot be changed, while also not wanting younger people to transition despite that being a sure-fire way for trans people to not end up with the attributes Women in Sport deem as unfair to cis-gendered women. Following this logic to its natural conclusion, what these organisations seem to want is for trans people to just stop existing.
Despite its vision being ‘No-one is excluded from the joy, fulfilment and lifelong benefits of sport’, Women in Sport has firmly rooted itself in cognitive dissonance. To make the situation more absurd, the organisation credits Billie Jean King as their inspiration. King, who beat Bobby Riggs in 1973 in tennis’ ‘Battle of the Sexes’, is a notable trans-inclusive voice who has went on record as saying: ‘I’m proud to support all transgender athletes who simply want the access and opportunity to compete in the sport they love. The global athletic community grows stronger when we welcome and champion all athletes — including LGBTQI+ athletes.’
Some sporting organisations keep their transphobia close to their chest, hiding it behind unscientific or unscrupulous facts and figures. Others, like Fair Play For Women, wear their trans hatred like a badge of honour, regularly using demeaning language towards trans women and creating transphobic memes, of which they have a dedicated page on their website for anyone who visits to use.
One claim Fair Play For Women has made is that ‘Here in the UK many sports clubs now allow males to compete as female if they can show a doctor’s note confirming that they have lowered testosterone into the “female range”. Others require no evidence or proof at all.’ Unsurprisingly, much like the aforementioned trans students with their doctor’s notes, they offer no evidence or proof to back up this wildly outlandish claim. They further demand national and international sporting bodies to suspend policies regarding the inclusion of transgender athletes in competition and use skewed research to back their narrow-minded beliefs.
Attacks on transgender athletes are fuelled, time and again, by discrimination and not evidence-based facts. These calls made by organisations who should know better are nothing more than a cruel effort to further stigmatize and demean a group that already has its back against the wall. Transgender youth are a small percentage of the overall population within schools and sporting clubs — claims that they will overwhelm women’s sports is simply a dog whistle for transphobia and a dangerous misunderstanding of trans women’s identities that is directly linked to their decreased safety in the wider world.
