I’m writing this blog post from a chalet in Meribel, France, being on the last day of a skiing holiday with a number of work colleagues. I thought having spent the week trying (and failing) to get myself down a hill with any degree of grace and elegance I would write something about trans people in sports. I was hoping for this blog to be a story of success, but alas skiing can, it seems, quite safely be added to the list of sports for which I am absolutely and completely hopeless. I have spent the entire week aggravated at myself at being unable to pick it up and this has translated into me frankly being grumpy the entire week. The boys on the trip are quite happy to throw themselves down a slope and are ambivalent as to whether they crash and hurt themselves, telling their stories of losing control like badges of honour. There is no doubt at all that I am built differently as the moment I built up any speed at all I panicked. Whereas they wanted to challenge themselves, and do difficult runs with bragging rights, I was quite happy to do peaceful gentle runs. My attitude to the participation of sport is very different from theirs. My competitive streak is certainly lessened considerably.
In a number of Olympic Sports the winner is determined by something objectively verifiable (the first runner to reach the tape, the first swimmer to touch the wall, the highest jump, the longest throw etc). However, in many other sports there is an element of subjectivity to success and you have a panel of Judges. In some sports, such as figure skating and diving, they use a trimmed mean method where the highest and lowest scores (or set of scores) are excluded and the remainder used for calculating the score.
I often think of this as a good lesson for many political issues, trim off the extreme views on either side and the answer often lies somewhere in the middle. I say this because Martina Navratilova got herself into some social media bother the other week with the following tweet:
Obviously both sides of the debate went wild with many LGBT advocates calling Ms Navratilova transphobic and all the names under the sun. The right, on the other hand, used this to further trans-bigotry and exclusion.
Now, I will start by saying that I have the utmost respect for Ms Navratilova. She was a fantastic sportswomen who also played the game in the right spirit. She has been an amazing LGBT advocate over the years. Allegations of transphobia are a nonsense, not least because she employed openly trans Renee Richards as her coach at a time when being trans meant being much more of an outcast than it is today.
Most of all, I respect her because she not only deleted the tweet, but she didn’t pretend that it hadn’t existed, but openly acknowledged the tweet and promised to educate herself. https://www.outsports.com/2018/12/21/18151025/martina-navratilova-trans-athletes-twitter
Her comments were misjudged, and the concentration on the penis is clearly nonsense. To the best of my knowledge the only super power in having a penis is the superpower to use the trough style urinals at festivals as opposed to the faecal matter smeared portacabins of doom I saw at the last festival I went to. Clearly the question as to when a transwomen can, and should, compete in female sports is not concentrated on the penis, but the circumstances of when a transwomen can, and should, be able to compete in female sports is a valid question, and one which in my view Ms Navratilova should be able to opine.
It is also a question which has its roots much further back than one might think, and it is only now that the visibility of transpeople increases exponentially that the question becomes of the moment once again.
So to properly look at the issue of transwomen in sport we go right back to the early years of the Olympic movement.
The Early Years and Female Equality
No women at all competed in the first Olympics in 1896. The founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was opposed to any women competing
In 1900 in Paris, women could only compete in individual events in tennis and golf, with 2.2% of all competitors being female. Archery was added in 1904, and slowly events were added for women. They did not compete in athletics until the games of 1928. In that year the 800m race was controversial, with many women reported as being exhausted or unable to complete the race, which resulted in the 800m being dropped for the games until 1960. It unfortunately led to a number of people being concerned about women being able to compete at all in more strenuous events, leading to a differential between many male and female events which took generations to iron out.
In 1968 women were allowed to complete against men in shooting events. In 1984 synchronised swimming was added only for women, shooting got its own female categories, and female cycling appeared for the first time. In 1991 the IOC made it mandatory for all sports wishing to apply for the Olympics to have recognition for female competitors.
Finally in 2012, with boxing being added to the female programme, and baseball being dropped, for the first time ever women participated in every sport at the Summer Olympics, if not necessary the same events within those sports (eg Men do the Decathlon at the Olympics, Women the Heptathlon). There remain various other sports where differences apply even within the rules (eg. Football, where women have no restrictions, whereas men must be under the age of 23 save for three players) and there remains 39 events not open to women.
There remain differences in treatment as well (eg. Japan’s football teams, where the women were sent to the 2012 in economy class, whereas the men were sent business class). There are differences in earnings and prize money, and certainly in media interest and coverage in female sports.
Clearly, even now there remains a disparity, and a good number of sports women do continue to undertake admirable work to close that gap.
The Historical Need for Gender Distinction and Gender Testing
You don’t need me to tell you that in many (but not all) sports, particularly those involving speed or strength, even a second tier male will have a good shot at beating a world-class female. Take, for example, the 100m sprint at the last Olympics, Elaine Thompson of Jamaica won in a time of 10.71 seconds, a very quick time which only four women ever have beaten. Of the men, 65 of the 69 men who raced and completed the men’s 100m heats beat that time (with one further man equalling 10.71).
Even in the early years, there was suspicion that men would cheat by posing as women so as to compete against less strong or fast competitors. In Berlin 1936, US Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage requested a system to examine female athletes. He was concerned in particular about a Czech athlete, Zdenek Koubek and Mary Weston who he considered had masculine traits. As an aside, both later had surgery and changed their gender to men.
In 1950 the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federation) started sex verification tests (with a Dutch Athlete, Ms Foekja Dillema the first to be banned for life – not because she failed the test but because she refused to undertake one. On death she was found to have a y chromosome. She was not x/y but likely had a chromosome abnormality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foekje_Dillema). These tests, in the early years, included on occasion requiring women to parade in front of doctors naked, and there are reports of internal gynaecological examinations.
In 1968 chromosome testing was introduced, looking for the Y-chromosome. As early as the mid-70s this was known by medical professionals as being technically unreliable, and also had a tendency to raise false positives, often because women with a Y-chromosome would have androgen insensitivity, meaning that their body could not respond to testosterone, meaning that they would be born and assigned as female, and would grow as female and have no testosterone advantage at all. There are also XX-males who have a portion of the testicular determining gene (SRY) on the X chromosome who not only would pass the test but would have an advantage. At the risk of another tangent, whenever someone talks about “oh men are XY, women are XX, gender is biological and immutable, transwomen aren’t women because of chromosomes etc etc” tell to put this in their pipe and smoke it. Also ask them when their last chromosome test was as it may not be what they think. Oh the irony!
To the best of my knowledge the tests never caught a cheat but only ruined lives, either temporarily or permanently. Never mind the invasion of privacy of the earlier tests, women would publicly be outed and shamed. Take Ms Patino, a Spanish hurdler, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_José_Mart%C3%ADnez-Patiño) who lost a scholarship, her athletic residency and her fiancé as a result of a test which showed she had a Y-Chromosome, despite being androgen insensitive.
In the early 90s the IOC started instead to look for the SRY sex determining locus on the Y-Chromosome. In the 1996 games, of 3387 female athletes, all of whom were screened, 8 had positive test results, all were given counselling and ultimately found to have no advantage. That was the last time that chromosome testing took place.
We move on now to Caster Semenya, who burst onto the scene in 2009 with amazing times. There is not enough space in this blog to go into everything that went wrong with how the IOC and the media dealt with. Essentially testosterone testing was intended to identify cases where testosterone is elevated above an arbitrary level. The IOC introduced Regulations on Female Hyperandrogenism which stated “Nothing in these Regulations is intended to make any determination of sex. Instead, these Regulations are designed to identify circumstances in which a particular athlete will not be eligible (by reason of hormonal characteristics) to participate in 2012 OG Competitions in the female category. In the event that the athlete has been declared ineligible to compete in the female category, the athlete may be eligible to compete as a male athlete, if the athlete qualifies for the male event of the sport”.
There are reports, from 2013, of four athletes in developing countries being subject to partial clitoridectomies and sterilization on being found to have an intersex condition.
The Regulations on Hyperandrogenism continued until the case of Dutee Chand v. Athletics Federation of India (AFI) & The International Association of Athletics Federations, in the Court of Arbitration for Sport, decided in July 2015, wherein the ruling found that there was insufficient evidence that testosterone actually increased sporting athletic performance. However, further studies suggested that there was such an advantage https://www.iaaf.org/news/press-release/hyperandrogenism-research.
The IAAF introduced a new rule on Hyperandrogenism which was due to come into force in November 2018, which would have resulted in Ms Semenya and others having to take medication to bring their natural testosterone down. It remains unclear the extent to which this will remain unchallenged in practice. I am aware that the South African Athletics body did lodge a complaint with CAS. However, this is very much a live issue.
Whilst fully accepting that testosterone injections would be cheating, I am less convinced that a naturally occurring advantage of high testosterone does need to be policed. In much the same way as Usain’s Bolt’s abnormal turnover rate for such a tall man should not be policed, or that a 7 foot tall man is not to be told that he cannot play basketball because he is too tall. Michael Phelps’ unusually long arms were not chopped off to make them shorter. By very definition at the very elite levels of sport competitors may well have genetic advantages that the rest of the competitors could only dream of.
Trans-Women in Sport
The reason why it is important to look at the history of women in sport is because since women first appeared at the Olympics in 1900, we are 119 years later and still arguing about who gets to compete as a woman. Trans-women seeking to argue that they should be able to compete in women’s sport are seeking to assimilate themselves in what is already a shifting and unstable membership.
The most high profile athlete was the aforementioned Ms Richards, who was a decent enough tennis as a male, but transitioned to female and, it is fair to say, made her way higher up the rankings than she would have done as a man. She was at one stage banned from playing but a Court case in 1977 found that “This person is now a female” and that requiring Richards to pass the gender test was “grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and a violation of her rights.” It was perhaps important that the judge said that she was persuaded by the evidence of doctors who said that Richards’s physique “fit within the female norm.” She was 6 foot 2, but that is hardly abnormal in elite sport.
However, Ms Richards does suggest that perhaps it is not an even playing field when transwomen are in elite sport (https://slate.com/culture/2012/10/jewish-jocks-and-renee-richards-the-life-of-the-transsexual-tennis-legend.html) wherein she states that “Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me”.
In 2003, as trans-visibility increased, the IOC drew up new guidelines for trans-women (for obvious reasons there is no concern in the other direction). At first this was a three stage test:
- The person must have undergone sex reassignment surgery;
- They must legally be their new sex;
- They must have undergone hormonal treatment over a suitable period, determined as two years
These were modified, firstly because requiring surgery as a necessity in otherwise healthy individuals would be inconsistent with notions of human rights, and secondly because different countries had different rules on the legality of new genders. The new guidelines require that trans woman athletes declare their gender and not change that assertion for four years, and demonstrate a testosterone level of less than 10 nanomoles/litre for at least one year prior to competition. This appears to be reduced to 5 nanomoles/litre in line with the most recent guidance for cis-women (Not that I’m an athlete, but my most recent blood test levels were 1.1 nmol/l as a comparison).
In the last year or so there has been an explosion in trans sporting stories, from the first Trans-women becoming world champion (https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/rachel-mckinnon-becomes-first-transgender-woman-win-track-world-title-397473), to a trans-woman suing for participation in Women’s American Football (https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/12/22/transgender-football-player-prevails-in-lawsuit) to the trans sprinter winning a girls meet (https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2017/june/against-the-girls-he-easily-came-in-first-male-trans-sprinter-wins-girls-track-meet) to the transgender weightlifter due to compete at the Commonwealth Games (https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/apr/09/transgender-weightlifter-laurel-hubbards-eligibility-under-scrutiny).
There is certainly a discussion to be had as to how and when trans-women should partake in female sport. And in part we should again use the trimmed mean approach, by removing the extremes on either side. We remove the “trans-women should not play sports at all” and the “trans-women should be able to play any sport they wish without restriction and without anything but an assertion of being trans”.
Now to put my cards on the table here, I have very little sporting prowess or advantage from being born male. I’m 172cm (I was measured at 174cm years ago, I’ve shrunk 2cm is seems), I have a proud record of having never won an arm wrestle. I could not do ten reps of the shoulder press with no added weight to it the last time I tried. I, and I suspect many other transwomen, have actively avoided anything to build muscles because I didn’t want to bulk up. As I said at the outset of this blog, my competitive streak is much less (although I cannot in reality comment on whether the hormonal treatment has affected that or not).
The thing is, not every transperson can make these claims. And it is surely naïve to suggest that being born male does not provide a huge and unfair advantage in some sports for some people. I cannot see an easy answer to this question, and I certainly cannot see a one size fits all solution. Surely this is going to depend on the individual sports and perhaps even the individual person. If their being born male gives them personally an unfair advantage, then surely, in my view, fair play must prevail.
For me, now, sat in this chalet, writing this blog, I’m going to continue to try and work out this skiing malarkey. I might be a truly terrible skier. I might be grumpy as a result. I might be really bad at being bad at something. But I am definitely not a quitter. And until then I’ll just enjoy this view:
Shoes and Briefs 
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