This is a silly debate. I fume over the fact I’ve been obliged in various venues to treat this debate as two-sided and gravely important. Regulations against trans women mainly affect professional athletes getting paid well for following their passion, which is fairly superfluous to the needs of anyone else. There are few openly trans athletes in general, even fewer are winning anything, and a lot of trans women don’t possess natural advantages. Plenty of bodies assigned male at birth are still weak and scrawny alongside plenty of strong and powerful cis female ahtletes. Opportunistic politicians and media figures cynically scaremonger about trans women. Unfortunately, this and bathrooms dominate discussion about trans people. Our unique experiences, needs, and what we want to share and talk about are all sidelined for this. So, fine, I’ll tackle it. I’m not happy about that fact, though.
Some trans athletes are significantly different from many cis athletes. A good example of where we would regulate against trans and cis women competing is when the risk of damage from putting a cis female boxer in the ring against a very strong trans woman, even if they're both experienced and skilled, is ruled to be unacceptably high.
However, the way “we” (cis people) look at it is all wrong. I never see concern for trans kids fitting in at school sports and trans sportspeople getting to excel. Notice how nobody ever talks about how trans men taking testosterone could have an unfair advantage in women's sports, which would happen if you forced people to compete under sex assigned at birth. Unless regulators went even further and capped their testosterone too. By the way, cis people have proven frighteningly willing to accept the idea of regulating our testosterone. That forces athletes who want HRT to choose between their job and life dream, or literally getting to go through puberty and feel comfortable in their own bodies. More importantly, nobody talks about how trans men may be disadvantaged competing against cis men. Good outcomes only seem to matter for cis people.
I don't know why it is that I shouldn't be proud if a trans woman was born with incredible strength for a woman and excels in a competition. We got a bad enough draw from nature. There is already something special about leveraging your uniqueness to succeed. To make a blessing of your curse is truly amazing. When a cis woman wins, she's rightly praised, without ever being accused of hurting whoever comes in second and third place. That’s the nature of athletic competition. You subject yourself to being measured against other people, and if they’re better at it than you, they win. You don’t try to get them banned. You try to beat them next time, and you learn to console yourself with your achievements short of winning. Personal bests are not hurt one bit by how the champion does.
Trans athletes also put heaps of effort into practicing. I’m quite concerned about the idea that we shouldn’t recognise hard work, and that, if you put the effort in, you shouldn’t receive rewards for that. On the one hand, natural advantages may appear to make a trans woman able to practice less than a cis woman. If you get complacent like that, though, you’re likely to be beaten by a dedicated cis athlete who just put in more hours than you, and you’ll deserve it because they worked harder than you. On the other hand, if you start out stronger as a trans woman, then you’re likelier to put in more effort to practice, because it’s easier for you to practice, so you’re more likely to find the will to go that extra set or get up on a bad day to hit the gym. That’s a flatly good thing with no downsides.
Too frequently, debates around trans people are centered around cis feelings and wants. That's really bad when a lot of cis people don't understand us well or know much about us. Even more so when they think they do, yet don't. (This is depressingly common.) Lots of cis people don't like the stereotypical image of us, and are unable to comprehend how we fit into norms that don't exist with us in mind. I’m a woman over 6 feet tall with broad shoulders. That’s a dissonant idea for many people. If you start out afraid of the unknown and add on the rhetoric against trans people, it’s easy to get scared about regular people like me, even in a field as harmless and adorably human as playing sporting games against each other.
Michael Phelps is genetically quite different from most human beings. His success was applauded, because how he got there did not challenge social norms. However, plenty of cis people recoil at the sight of many trans women. The ways we physically differ do challenge norms about what a woman is like. Why are we dragging social judgements into sport where they don’t belong? Your pronouns or name don’t affect your ability. Why do we want to restrain people from reaching their full potential? How is it competition anymore if we take down anyone doing too well? I don't get it.
Three, the cis backlash to trans women in sports is the result of sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. "Woman" has consistently been defined as someone who mainly has estrogen, who is relatively short and weak compared to men. "Man" has consistently been defined by someone who mainly has testosterone, and is relatively tall and strong. These definitions tend to fit cis people, and tend to break down for trans people. Hence, when bodies like the Olympics came up with "male" and "female" athletic categories, they really meant "cis male" and "cis female", because those were the only people thought to exist by the mainstream in those days.
That creates a dilemma for trans people. Our bodies may not fit in anywhere - I'm bound to be weaker than a lot of men and stronger than most women. Yet they have defined a category by "women", which fits us perfectly, just as much as cis women, yet is based on an arbitrary social distinction, rather than "athletes with x level of testerone", or "athletes who have x strength".
Many people on the other side of this debate want to see competitive races for people of all genders, where there is not much of a gap between first and second, or second and third. If you think there is a need to forestall potential uncompetitiveness and preempt the deflation of sporting drama, there is a solution. That is to regulate professional sport so everyone competes against those whose physical abilities and skills compare; by definition, the most relevant competitive metric. The solution is not to exclude trans women.
I don't think redesigning the categories is needed any time soon. Trans women are barely a presence in professional sports, let alone winning anything. Kids' sports is way more low-stakes, and the main goal isn’t competition, it’s to ensure they get exercise and have a social bonding activity. That only makes it more important that everyone, especially trans kids who are likelier to face social exclusion, is included. The way to prescribe a future fix for edge cases is not to define trans women as men, trans men as women, and non-binary people as whatever gender a doc assigned them at birth, based on physical sex.
Intersex people are born with a combination of sex characteristics, such as a uterus and XY chromosomes; their gender may or may not align with that. Like trans men and non-binary people, they are overlooked. Even cis intersex people are hurt by the twisted logic applied to trans people. Castor Semenya is an amazingly successful athlete, and as someone with family ties to South Africa, I am enormously proud that she represents our country with her sweat and tears. Her success is in part because she is blessed with high testosterone levels for a cis woman due to being intersex. She’s also astounding in part because of all the hard work she has put in, which we ought to credit.
Yet regulators have tried to handicap her, such as messing up her natural hormone balance through taking blockers. That is a disturbing level of interference in both her professional ability to live her dream, as well as in her bodily autonomy as a woman. This particularly throws up red flags because there is a pattern of women of colour being treated as men because they don’t meet norms that began for white women. Two examples are TERFs targeting cis female Chinese athletes, and conspiracy theories that Michelle Obama is a transgender woman. This is the sort of racist and demeaning spillover you get when you drag your politics about social norms into sport. This is one place where Rob Muldoon's beseechment would have fit in perfectly.
I’d like to conclude on more of a personal note. I started sports by playing rugby, because of social norms in small NZ towns, despite growing increasingly frustrated and uncomfortable with it over the next six years. I tried hockey when I was eleven and have loved it ever since. My body isn’t made for it - I’m tall and have to bend a lot, and, generally, I’m clumsy and ill at ease with my physique. Still, I got to play all the way through, which I’m grateful for - a lot of schoolkids don’t, thanks to resource constraints, and it makes me despair to see that barriers like that get much less discussion than trans people in sports. My unique school circumstances meant I played with a team of guys, against guys, and that was fine by me. It isn’t for most trans girls. To throw a girl in on a team full of boys will likely make her uncomfortable, dysphoric, and isolated.
If there is one thing we can take away from this dumpster fire of a “debate”, it’s that we want schoolkids to feel wanted and welcome on their teams. The proliferation of social media, smartphones, and a sedentary culture mean rates of exercise are falling, and we shouldn’t arbitrarily contribute to that. Look out for trans kids, and ensure they're supported to play on the team that fits them. Don’t take that away from them. Let us make those memories of fitting in and having fun, where we belong: in sports, trying our best and having a good time.
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