The Tea on "Women's Sports"
trans sports bans are not rooted in science and protect no one (cw transphobia)
Last week, the Court of Arbitration for Sport dismissed a lawsuit from NCAA champion Lia Thomas, keeping in place a blanket ban on trans women from competing as women in events hosted by World Aquatics - the global governing body for swimming. As a result, Thomas remains ineligible for this weekend’s USA Swimming Olympic Trials and the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris.
Thomas rose to notoriety in March 2022 when she won the NCAA Championship in the women’s 500m freestyle, becoming the first openly trans athlete to win an NCAA Division I Championship. To compete, she met the NCAA’s eligibility criteria for trans athletes which required at least one year of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) - she had been on HRT for 34 months, i.e. nearly 3 years. In winning the race, Thomas finished over 9 seconds behind the NCAA record in the event (set in 2017 by Katie Ledecky). Three months later, World Aquatics announced a ban on trans women who “experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 or before age 12.”
Thomas is one of the most high-profile trans athletes navigating exclusion from sports consistent with their gender identity, but the uproar is not new. In 2019, Cecé Telfer won the NCAA Division III championship in the women’s 400m hurdles, becoming the first openly trans athlete to win an individual NCAA championship. Her win garnered the attention of Donald Trump, Jr. who tweeted his transphobic thoughts. Since then, trans sports bans have gained traction in both elite sports and state legislatures.
As with the recent bans on affirming health care, trans youth are bearing the brunt of this legislative assault. According to estimates from the Williams Institute, more than 1 in 3 trans youth live in states that prohibit participation in sports aligned with their gender. These laws target trans students broadly, but the rhetoric of this moral panic fixates on trans women/transfemmes. Protecting “women’s sports” has become a rhetorical vehicle for politicians to disguise discrimination against trans folks regardless of gender presentation.
The creepy transphobia lies underneath a thin veil of biological arguments. Opponents of the inclusion of trans athletes suggest that there are innate and immutable physiological differences between people based on sex assigned at birth and that these differences confer advantages to trans athletes. That hypothesis is testable, so let’s dive into the research on athletic performance to see if it holds up.
Spoiler alert: it does not.
the actual science of athleticism and transition
For starters, there is no evidence that trans athletes have an athletic advantage before the onset of puberty. In fact, a 2017 study suggests that gender differences in athletic performance emerge around age 13. This is rather intuitive since sex hormones circulate in low concentrations before the onset of puberty. Therefore, bans on trans athletes participating as their gender identity before puberty are simply hateful and gratuitous.
Admittedly, the evidence gets more muddled when considering athletes who transition after puberty. Given that political arguments fixate on transfemmes, I will focus on the transmisogynist strain of biological reasoning against trans inclusion in sports: A testosterone-driven puberty results in irreversible changes to the body’s physiology which confer an athletic advantage.1
This is true for some measures such as bone length and height. The skeletal system remains plastic at adolescent ages, and high levels of testosterone during puberty contribute to longer average bone length (and height) in cis men compared to cis women. Importantly, however, sports leagues don’t have height limits, and height naturally varies. Players can’t control their height, but they can make the most of it - just ask Brittney Griner or Jonquel Jones.
Additionally, athleticism is a lot more than just height. It encompasses strength, heart function, lung capacity, and so many additional physiological factors. And these factors do change when trans folks begin HRT. In fact, there are many studies that examine the effects of HRT (especially testosterone suppression) on trans athletes’ performance.
In these studies, researchers typically compare trans women’s athletic performance to that of cis men. Once these data are tabulated, the measurements are then compared to analogous calculations from cis women from other studies. Studies designed in this way generally conclude that trans women maintain a “male advantage” even after testosterone suppression through HRT. However, this research design is shoddy at best.
These studies have a glaring and serious methodological flaw: The trans and cis women being compared were not subjected to the same research environment. It raises serious doubts about the credibility of the findings - particularly if you hope to draw conclusions around the “fairness” of transfeminine inclusion in women’s sports.
Further, this design reflects the transphobic approaches of the scientific community in assuming that the most salient comparison in performance is between cis men and trans women. Importantly, these two groups do not exhibit equivalent athleticism even before trans women begin HRT. Trans women pre-HRT have less muscle mass, bone density, and strength than cis men.2 Thus, the truly ideal study would be fully cross-sectional in that researchers would directly measure and compare athletic performance in cis men, cis women, trans men, and trans women.
Fortunately for us, last month such a study was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. All participants in this study were athletes, and the trans participants had been on HRT for an average of ~5 years. Researchers measured a panel of physiologic measurements pertaining to various proxies of athleticism including fat mass, fat-free mass (which includes muscle mass), bone density, lung function, hand grip, lower body strength, and cardiovascular function.
Using this design, researchers found largely negligible differences between cis and trans athletes. Trans women had lower lung capacities and lower body strength compared to cis women. Trans women had greater grip strength than cis women but the advantage disappears after accounting for hand size.3 Trans men had lower lung capacity, non-fat body mass, and grip strength than cis men. This advantage for cis men also disappears after accounting for hand size. Overall, this groundbreaking study finds that there is no “trans advantage” in a variety of physiologic measures of athleticism.
Of course this is just one study, and ideally more research teams would use this design and report similar results. One caveat to the study above is the trans cohort’s wide variation of length of HRT treatment. It is possible HRT progressively alters physiology over years. The makeup of the cohort may be masking these differences which would be useful to understand when constructing policies around trans inclusion in athletics. Future studies could include a longitudinal component which would allow researchers to monitor changes in athletic performance over time within the same individual.
Unfortunately, the pace of research is slow, and studies on queer health are underfunded. And even when a project is funded, researchers often use flawed methods based on queerphobic assumptions. Indeed, this will be an area of research that continues to develop, but this new study is strong evidence for trans inclusion in athletics.
The point of these bans is discrimination because some people are just upset at witnessing trans excellence. There is simply no other explanation for enacting a blanket ban on trans participation in athletics. A more reasonable approach would be requiring trans athletes to receive HRT for a minimum period of time (much like the NCAA regulation that allowed Lia Thomas to compete).4 These rules would include trans athletes and recognize the extent to which HRT modifies the way our bodies function.
targeting trans people makes all athletes vulnerable
Ultimately, restrictions on trans athlete participation in sports reflect the outcome of political processes - at the state, federal, and international levels. Opponents of trans inclusion in sports must appeal to these governing bodies in order to institute a ban on trans athletes. This is a tactic common to anti-trans campaigners, especially transmisogynists as chronicled by historian Jules Gill-Peterson in A Short History of Transmisogyny. After enacting a trans sports ban, these political bodies become endowed with the power to gatekeep societal structures on the basis of gender presentation.
Even the mere perception of gender variation is sufficient for these organizations to pursue violating verification procedures. In the case of World Aquatics, all athletes are required to “certify their chromosomal sex… in order to be eligible for World Aquatics competitions.” These regulations also provide a remedy if there are any doubts raised about the eligibility of an athlete: “World Aquatics reserves the right to include a chromosomal sex screen in its anti-doping protocol to confirm such certification.”5
In the case of state-level bans on trans participation in athletics, state governments assume the responsibility to verify an athlete’s sex assigned at birth. Just this week, former president Donald Trump announced that cutting funding to schools who support their trans student-athletes is a day 1 priority should he win this year’s election. If this policy is enacted, the federal government would also have an interest in verifying the sex of minor students.
Verification procedures are unnecessary, invasive, and traumatic. In practice, a culture of questioning an athlete’s sex assigned at birth leads to disproportionate targeting of intersex athletes and athletes of color. In the last 15 years, South African runner Caster Semenya, Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, and Ugandan runner Annet Negesa have all been subjected to high-profile sex verification procedures after excelling in their sports. In this way, trans bans function to preserve a White, binary gender hegemony within social institutions. Concerns about “fairness” simply disguise a reactionary politics that expands state policing within the sphere of gender expression - regardless of whether an individual athlete identifies as trans. Like all moral panics, the concerted push to “protect women’s sports” is a hollow vehicle toward totalitarian ends.
trans joy in athletics
In spite of being the subject of political derision, trans athletes continue to chase excellence. Each athlete’s pursuit highlights the intersection of trans joy and the joy of sport. This joy is distinctive. After her 2019 history-making win, Cecé Telfer told sports journalist Karleigh Webb, “I don’t care if they boo. The more they boo, the faster I run.”
In her coverage for Outsports, Webb continues to uplift the stories of queer and trans athletes, at the college, professional, and Olympic levels. (Definite must reads ahead of the Paris Olympics!) One of her recent headlines (based on her experience as a trans woman playing in the Women’s Football Alliance) says it all: “2 trans athletes collided on a women’s football field, and women’s sports survived.”
Cecé Telfer is fighting to overcome a trans ban by World Athletics which governs track and field events. She chronicles her push in her autobiography, Make it Count: My Fight to Become the First Transgender Olympic Runner, which was released this week. Evident in excerpts of her book, her joy in track competition remains palpable:
Boom! The gun goes off. I’m out of the blocks. Bolting down the lane. The baton is tight in my grip. It’s just me and the track and my teammates. Adrenaline pumps through my system. All my thoughts dissipate, all my anxieties vanish. The only thing that matters at that moment: the finish line.
I tried to strip this argument of the overt transphobia of referring to trans women as “biological males.” You can read more about the flaws of this argument in a previous QSL post.
Researchers often try to explain away these differences as “transwomen actively refraining from building muscle and/or engaging in disordered eating or simply not being athletically inclined, perhaps influenced by feelings of an unwelcome presence in sporting arenas.” There is no direct evidence to support this conclusion.
This is a common finding in studies of transfeminine athletes. Even using mediocre research methods, advantages for trans women decrease significantly when factoring in height.
I want to recognize here that not all trans-identifying people take HRT. There are many barriers to access, so not every person who wants to start HRT is able to. Additionally, some trans folks don’t need HRT to feel comfortable in their bodies and in their gender identity. A policy that conditions trans sports participation on HRT is one possibility. Another (albeit more difficult) possibility is to collectively decenter gender within athletics. I find this idea very interesting and would love to hear your thoughts!
Transfeminine athletes who did not experience a testosterone-driven puberty (through the use of puberty blockers) are also required to provide proof of testosterone suppression.