I want to venture into the complicated issue of transgender athletes competing against cis-gender women and possibly some other related topics. But before I do that, I want to carve out a position so that the reader will not misunderstand where I’m coming from.

First of all, I believe that we should all be tolerant and accepting of LGBTQ (and variations on that theme) people. I have a nephew who used to be a niece. I have a nephew who has a husband. My brother Austin was gay and died of AIDS back when that was still a death sentence. My mother, a life-long Catholic, was able to accept his orientation and corresponded with his partner until that young man also lost his fight against AIDS, and I honor the memory of her loving acceptance of him. People who have gender identity or gender orientation issues are often struggling with understanding and accepting their own identity, and they don’t need some opinionated asshole telling them how to live. So, if anything I write in the following discussion comes across as hostile to the LGBTQ community, I urge you to read it again and try to separate anti-LGBTQ sentiment from the nuance of how do we deal with non-binary people in the binary world of athletic competition.

Second, the crux of the controversy is that being male provides an athlete with advantages over female athletes. I looked at an open access article (Dec 2020) entitled “Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage” and it discussed the advantages that men enjoy. Some of those advantages are the ones we would all think of when asked how men are different from women in sports. Men are bigger and stronger. Being taller and broader gives them longer levers to work with. They have generally a better power to weight ratio. There were other advantages of which I was unaware – “superior cardiovascular and respiratory function, with larger blood and heart volumes, higher hemoglobin concentration, greater cross-sectional area of the trachea and lower oxygen cost of respiration.” So, should I err in what follows and ever use the term “superior” or anything like that, I want all female readers to understand that we’re talking purely about the accident of physiology here. One cannot sensibly discuss the issue without acknowledging that there is a reason why males don’t commonly compete against females in the Olympics.

The issue of fair competition in sports became a big issue in the United States in March of 2022 when Lia Thomas, a trans-female (started life as a male) won the NCAA first division championship in the 500m free-style swimming race. Ron DeSantis, that beacon of enlightened thought who governs Florida, signed a proclamation declaring that the runner-up was really the winner. According to an article in the UK publication The Independent, “Her right to compete in women’s races, and sometimes her gender itself, has been attacked by sports stars, politicians, activists, her competitors, and even some of her teammates’ parents, as well as protesters at the NCAA championship last week, who argued that her time living as a man gives her an unfair advantage.”

World Aquatics, formerly known as FINA, the governing body for swimming at the international level, evidently agreed with those who opposed Lia Thomas’s victory. In June of 2022, they passed a rule that “requires trans women athletes to have completed sex reassignment (transition) by the age of 12 to be eligible to compete in traditional women’s categories. If trans women have experienced puberty as a male, FINA has decided these athletes may have an advantage.”

World Athletics, the governing body for track and field competition, followed the World Aquatics lead in March of 2023, when they “banned transgender women from competing in elite female competitions if they have gone through male puberty, the sport’s governing body said on Thursday. The council also voted to tighten restrictions on athletes with Differences in Sex Development (DSD), cutting the maximum amount of plasma testosterone for athletes in half, to 2.5 nanomoles per litre from five.”

With that move to tighten restrictions on natural testosterone levels, World Athletics has ventured into the minefield of what defines an athlete as a female. Caster Semenya, a woman born with female genitalia has never had, never needed, sex re-assignment surgery and she identifies as a female. But she was born with “an intersex condition called 46,XY differences in sex development that causes male and female traits and a testosterone level higher than the typical female range”. So, although she is not a trans-gender female athlete, she is a woman with the some of the advantages that come with a high natural testosterone level. For years she dominated the women’s 800m track race. Prior to the 2023 World Athletics decision, their rules had a bizarre stipulation that put testosterone restrictions on women competing in races for distances between 400 meters to 1 mile. As Semenya noted bitterly, that ruling treated her as a female if she ran the 100 or 200 meter sprints, a male if she ran the 400 to 1500 meter middle distance events, and a female if she ran in the 5000 or 10000 meter events. Absolutely illogical.

There is a little more logic to the World Aquatics and World Athletics latest positions. Although the issue is not without controversy, the growing body of science seems to indicate that the male advantage, which is present and measurable in pre-pubescent children, is greatly augmented by the surge in testosterone which comes with puberty. Furthermore, suppression of testosterone level in an adult transgender female does not eliminate the physical advantages that have been conferred upon an athlete by going through puberty as a male. Testosterone suppression will cause reductions in muscle mass and other metrics such as grip strength, but there is “a retained physical advantage even after 8 years of testosterone suppression.”

Sebastien Coe, the President of World Athletics says the decision defends the “overarching need to protect the female category”. And really that’s what this controversy is all about – defending the female category in sport. The problem is, the fact that we have two categories, male and female, defines the world of sport as a binary world. Fair competition within the female category requires a good understanding of the sharp definition of what that category includes. 

Unfortunately, it isn’t a truly binary world. We’re coming to understand that physically, emotionally, psychologically, gender isn’t binary, it’s a spectrum. And how the hell do we decide where, within that spectrum, the female category begins and ends?

There are two mutually exclusive ideologies at play here. Opponents of the athletics bodies’ conclusions are trumpeting the need for inclusion. They are aghast at the notion that men in charge of sporting bodies are defining what it is to be a woman, when true inclusion would imply that a woman is someone who says they identify as a woman, and has undergone sex re-assignment therapy as required.  In the “inclusion” space, there are really very few limits to that definition.

By contrast, sporting bodies are concerned with defining fair competition. In some sports, size is used as a category defining metric, which is why there are weight-lifting and boxing, and judo and wrestling categories for people who aren’t nearly as big as the heavyweights. Should a transgender 120 lb woman be allowed to compete in judo against a 120 lb “natural” woman? Well, an analysis of Olympic weightlifting results shows that “even after adjustment for mass, biological males are significantly stronger (30%) than females, and that females who are 60% heavier than males do not overcome these strength deficits.” So, pound for pound, males are stronger and have an advantage. And although testosterone suppression reduces that advantage, it doesn’t come close to eliminating it, and so there would be a retained advantage for the transgender female athlete.

One of the concerns for sports bodies is the safety issue. The international rugby league has banned transgender females, and that makes sense in a full body contact sport like rugby. Those same concerns would apply to all the “combat” sports.

Athletics bodies seem to be converging on the idea of an “open” division for athletes who don’t meet the limitations imposed upon the women’s division such as the “sex reassignment before age twelve and a low testosterone level” guidance provided by World Athletics. I don’t believe the open division will satisfy the “inclusion” demands of the LGBTQ community because however you shape it, being in the open division still says that you’re not a woman – or at best you’re a woman but you’re “different”. But I’m not sure what the heck else they do.

The notion of assigning a category for those who want to compete but must do so as a “different” athlete has worked before. It works for para-olympians, and for the special Olympics. It acknowledges that people born with no hands or with Down’s syndrome are still people worthy of respect and it provides a venue for them to compete. Doing the same thing for females who don’t fit in the middle of the bell curve for gender makes sense to me.

If you think about it, an open division for trans-gender males might also make sense. That would accommodate the formerly female athlete who lives as a male. They would not have any advantage entering into the male athletics world – in fact they would be at a significant disadvantage from not going through puberty as a male and gaining the size, strength and body conformation advantages that are conferred by the adolescent testosterone surge. So, an open division might serve that community well, and I sense that it would not meet with the scorn that the open division for females would.

Those who argue for inclusion over fair competition argue that the trans athlete “invasion” of women’s sport is grossly exaggerated. Trans athletes are not winning a large percentage of women’s events, and they are not setting records that no “real woman” could expect to achieve. And they’re right. But that doesn’t matter. The blurring of lines allows for unfair competition now and it might become worse in the future.

Does this argument matter? I believe it does for three reasons.

The first reason is that when I watch a sporting event, I want it to be a fair competition. I think it is one of the defining characteristics of sport – that the best competitions arise when the opponents are fairly and evenly matched. Back when East Germany was winning a disproportionate share of swimming medals, we all knew that it was because they were over-dosing on steroids, and it cast a shadow over their performances and over the whole sport. And while I sympathize with Caster Semenya’s position (I was born a woman and my high testorerone is a totally natural advantage, so I’m not cheating) my gut-level reaction is that she doesn’t belong in the females’ competition. She (they?) needs a different place to compete.

The second reason is that there is money involved. Especially in the United States, an Olympic gold medal can be worth a fortune in endorsements. A gold medal for a trans athlete is likely worth nothing, because nobody is lining up to get endorsements from a trans athlete. That may be unfair, but it’s the way it is. A silver medal? Probably not worth nearly so much for endorsements, and the knowledge that the pink and blonde Barbie athlete would have had a gold if not for that muscular trans athlete who won the event, will not translate into an endorsement contract. There is, I believe, a case that cis-gender, normal testosterone, women could be deprived of substantial earnings by the failure to maintain a well-defined category of women’s events.

The third and most important reason I think it’s important is that the argument is largely, in some circles at least, driven by red-neck, right-wing, God-driven, fundamentalist Christian anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Those who are fighting for inclusion in the sporting world are fighting for inclusion generally. And those who are opposing trans athletes are opposed to trans-gender people on any account. I think it’s important to discuss this issue on a logical basis and get some of that divisive, emotional content out of it. And honestly, if we can take the transgender athletics issue off the table, we can blunt the hate speech from the anti-LGBTQ wing. There will be one less issue for the haters to feast on.

When I started this article, I didn’t know what I would conclude. If anything, I expected to line up on the side of inclusion. But I cannot. I think that thinking of gender differences as a spectrum is important in the acceptance and tolerance of the LGBTQ community. Some people don’t fit the binary male/female definitions, and that’s ok. But if that’s ok, then it implies that there are some people who are definitely female, and some people who are definitely male, and some people who lie somewhere on the spectrum in between. And what we need to do in the sporting world is to carve out places for those who are in between.