The good news is that the Washington Post, defying the inevitable cries that the paper is “transphobic”, is calling for a “respectful debate on trans women in sports”. This is, of course, because of the increasing number of biological men who identify as women (I prefer that jawbreaker to “trans women” because the latter plays into the misleading mantra that “trans women are women”), and because men who have gone through male puberty before transitioning have an inherent physical advantage over biological women. Even the UN now agrees on that, and gives data below on how many women have lost sports medals to transitioned biological men. I will, however, use “trans women” as shorthand in this article.
Just to see a major op-ed (by the editorial board!) defy the gender activists, who have censored all debate on this important ethical issue, makes me pleased. Read the article by clicking on the headline below or find it archived here.
You’ll note that the tone of the article is carefully monitored to ensure that a) the paper calls for “respectful” debate, when in fact what we need is just debate, and I haven’t seen any people discussing the issue being disrespectful to trans women; and b) although the op-ed doesn’t take sides, it cites accumulating data documenting the athletic advantage of trans women over biological women. There are enough data now, as we see below, to call for reform of sports regulations, so the debate is provisionally settled at present, though of course it’s about facts and those facts—and the resultant prescriptions—may change. For example, I don’t think there are any data showing that trans women outperform natal women in equestrian sports, though I can’t be sure: if men outperform women in horse sports, that means that even there different rules must be made. One thing is for sure: if there is a sport in which natal men do not outperform natal women, then by all mean let trans women compete with natal women. In such sports everybody can compete against everyone else.
But I digress: here are some excerpts from the op-ed. I have put other references below. Note the paper cited in the second paragraph; you may want to have a look. Also see the papers I cite below.
Trans people deserve to be treated with dignity, and the law should protect them from discrimination in areas such as employment and housing. But the realities of human biology raise legitimate questions about any notion that trans women should always and everywhere be treated exactly like cisgender women.
In athletic competition, male puberty confers significant advantages. While those biological differences vary by skill and sport, a 2023 paper by medical researchers in the United States and Italy noted that “it is well established that the best males always outperform the best females when the sport relies on muscle power, muscle endurance, or aerobic power.” The hormone therapy that many trans women take reduces some of those advantages over time, but research into how much those advantages can be mitigated, and over what time frame, is still ongoing. Other advantages, such as height, are fixed by the end of puberty. This poses obvious fairness and safety questions.
Note that the question is not just one of fairness—of transitioned biological men having unfair advantages competing against cis women—but of safety. A strong, muscular transitioned man could well injure a woman rugby player. This is why the English Rugby Football Union banned trans women from competing in women’s rugby. More from the WaPo article:
The public needs more and better research to make those decisions. But unless the data show that transitioning can fully erase the effects of male puberty, the country will also need a frank and open debate about the trade-offs between inclusion on the one hand and safety and fairness on the other.
And yet too often, efforts have been made to avoid or prevent discussion of those trade-offs by labeling debate inherently transphobic. This is not how a healthy democracy makes decisions.
Note too that gender activists ignore the palpable safety risk and of course the unfairness to biological women, saying that “trans women are women”, which means that trans women should have every right and privilege enjoyed by biological women. Well, I’d agree with that if by “right” one means “moral and legal right”, but I’ve always thought that there are some exceptions to the “rights” of trans women. Sport participation against biological women is one, of course. But trans women shouldn’t be allowed willy-nilly to be rape counselors advising unwilling women, monitors of shelters for battered or abused women, or inmates in jails holding biological women. Beyond that, I can’t think of many exceptions.
More from the article; notice that the public clearly recognizes the unfairness of having trans women in women’s sports:
A 2023 Gallup poll showed that almost 70 percent of Americans think sports participation should follow birth sex, not gender identity. Pressuring Democratic politicians to side with the minority, without giving sufficient space to the other side’s argument, is a recipe for irresolution and resentment.
The Democratic bit comes from the recent demonizing of Representative Seth Moulton (D, MA) for saying this: ““Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. … I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
For that Moulton was called a transphobe by Democrats, who should be more thoughtful, and Moulton’s campaign manager resigned. This is simple wokeness: performative virtue-signaling that defies the known facts. Of course the paper isn’t going to say that, but ends its piece this way:
We cannot predict whose argument will prevail. We can only say that no one — and certainly no political party — is entitled to win this debate by default.
Well, I would have put it more strongly, but I’ll take it.
A recent UN report (!) on violence against women and girls (pdf here) documents the possibility of violence and actually gives numbers for the medals lost by biological women to trans women.
Here are some data; the bolding is mine:
Policies implemented by international federations and national governing bodies, along with national legislation in some countries, allow males who identify as women to compete in female sports categories.28 In other cases, this practice is not explicitly prohibited and is thus tolerated in practice. The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males. According to information received, by 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports.
Note that one of the arguments for allowing trans women to compete against biological women is that there are so few of the former that it doesn’t matter. But even one medal taken away from a biological women is unfair, and I don’t see why there should be a threshold below which mixed competition is okay. Further, 890 medals in 29 sports is not a small figure!
Below the report notes that suppression of testosterone in trans women will not equalize the athletic potential of trans women and biological women. Testosterone levels used to be the criterion for Olympic participation of trans women or women with disorders of sex development, but the Olympics recently punted, saying that each sport must set its own criteria (again, my bolding):
Male athletes have specific attributes considered advantageous in certain sports, such as strength and testosterone levels that are higher than those of the average range for females, even before puberty, thereby resulting in the loss of fair opportunity. Some sports federations mandate testosterone suppression for athletes in order to qualify for female categories in elite sports. However, pharmaceutical testosterone suppression for genetically male athletes – irrespective of how they identify – will not eliminate the set of comparative performance advantages they have already acquired.This approach may not only harm the health of the athlete concerned, but it also fails to achieve its stated objective. Therefore, the testosterone levels deemed acceptable by any sporting body are, at best, not evidence-based, arbitraryand asymmetrically favour males.
Here are three recommendations from from the UN report (again, bolding is mine). These are conclusions, so are based on data. While more data are needed, what we have now is sufficient to actually make policy instead of simply calling for “more debate.” Of course more data will always be useful, but we have sufficient data to make provisional policy.
(b) Ensure that female categories in organized sport are exclusively accessible to persons whose biological sex is female. In cases where the sex of an athlete is unknown or uncertain, a dignified, swift, non-invasive and accurate sex screening method (such as a cheek swab) or, where necessary for exceptional reasons, genetic testing should be applied to confirm the athlete’s sex. In non-professional sports spaces, the original birth certificates for verification may be appropriate. In some exceptional circumstances, such tests may need to be followed up by more complex tests;
(c) Refrain from subjecting anyone to invasive sex screening or forcing a person to lower testosterone levels to compete in any category;
(d) Ensure the inclusive participation of all persons wishing to play sports, through the creation of open categories for those persons who do not wish
(d) Ensure the inclusive participation of all persons wishing to play sports, through the creation of open categories for those persons who do not wish to compete in the category of their biological sex, or convert the male category into an open category. . .
The last recommendation is one I agree with and have made before. I have written many times on this issue (see here and especially the papers I cite here).
Finally, here is a new editorial in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports. There are many authors, including developmental biologist and geneticist Emma Hilton, a colleague of Matthew’s at the University of Manchester. It’s a short piece (less than two pages); click to read.
Here’s a summary of their recommendations:
During press conferences at the 2024 Olympic Games, theInternational Olympic Committee (IOC) invited solutions to address eligibility for women’s sport. We take this opportunity to propose our solution, which includes: (a) recognizing that female sport that excludes all male advantage is necessary for female inclusion; (b) recognizing that exclusion from female sport should be based on the presence of any male development, rather than current testosterone levels, (c) not privileging legal“passport” sex or gender identity for inclusion into female sport; and (d) accepting that sport must have means of testing eligibility to fulfill the category purpose.
They recommend as an initial test a simple cheek swab that can determine the sex-chromosome constitution of women. If that shows deviations from the regular XX genotype, they then recommend “comprehensive follow-up in the rare cases that require extra consideration, with emphasis on the duty of care to every athlete. . . “.
I’m glad that the Washington Post brought this into the open, and with the approbation of its entire editorial board. Nobody involved in the discussions above is a “transphobe” who wants to deny men who identify as women legal or moral rights. But it’s time we admit openly that those rights are not unlimited—that the mantra “trans women are women” is not only biologically inaccurate, but also that the inaccuracy places a few limits on the rights of trans women.
At the WaPo article on trans women (ie men) in women’s sports, many reader comments are evading the issue by saying it’s unimportant and hardly affects anyone so why do voters even care?
The problem is the voters evidently DO care. There was a great of publicity over Lia Thomas the male swimmer who was mediocre competing with men but a champion competing with women.
It’s just not fair to women. Even liberal women who would never vote for Trump agree.
Voters apparently think so too.
The only reason Trump voters “care” about this issue is because they see it as just one more example of the wokeness of the left. They think, correctly, that there are a host of other issues that deserve more attention but the “progressives” are obsessed with minor problems that very few people care about. From their perspective, it just shows that the progressives are out of touch with the concerns of the average American.
I agree with them even though I consider myself a progressive/socialist and would never vote for Trump. It seems to me that WaPo and the left should be trying to deal with much more serious issues such as income disparity, education, healthcare, war, guns, and racism.
Leave this issue to the athletes and the sports associations. I’m pretty sure they are capable of solving it themselves without the rest of us putting pressure on them to behave “correctly.”
Sorry, Larry, but the scientists and philosophers should get involved too. Your “whataboutism” is irrelevant here: the WaPo has published tons of articles on the stuff you describe above. How can you resolve this without knowing the scientific data? And, in fact, the athletes and sports associations have been UNABLE to resolve the problem simply because they lack scientific data.
And, by the way, the WaPo is certainly not pro-Trump, and if you’re implying I’m a “Trump voter,” you’re dead wrong.
As a scientist, you should know better.
Jerry, you know full well that I’m not accusing you or WaPo of supporting Trump.
You should also know that I agree with your views on sex and gender. And just for the record, I think it’s wrong for biological males to compete against women in most sports.
The point of my comment is similar to the point that Bill Maher was making. We need to stop spending so much time and effort on DEI and transgender issues. Not only is it a distraction, it turns many people against us.
The fact that you and your supporters are so eager to attack me for “whataboutism” is a sign that you aren’t learning anything from the results of the last election.
Okay, that’s enough. You don’t seem to know that we are supposed to be civil here, and you keep insulting people. In fact, Bill Maher has done exactly what I did, which was to repeatedly call out the Left for wokeness. In fact, it was in part the insistence of the Biden administration that transwomen are women and should participate in women’s sports that helped propel the Democrats to defeat.
Frankly, I don’t think you know what you are talking about. Maher’s recent news bit was on how gender activism helped sink the Democrats–precisely the same kind of stuff I’m pushing back against here.
Now please do not EVER tell me that I need to be posting about other stuff. If you don’t like what I write about, and think that I need to deal with more important topics, you are free to go elsewhere. You clearly haven’t read the Roolz (see rule 6 here).
RE:
Larry, DEI and transgender issues are not distractions. DEI means hiring quotas by ethnicity/race and sex (at least) + enforcing a woke ideological monoculture. These are not popular stances in the American electorate. That’s a matter of fact – just study the opinion polls on these issues. If the Democratic Party wants to be electorally successful over the medium term it has to divest from these ideas. That will cost it the support of radical trans activists and possibly a large slice of woke voters. But woke voters are only about 6% of the US electorate and only about 12% of the supporters of the Democratic Party.
The notion that transgender issues only concern a small number of people is bizarrely wrong.
I recommend you read this book to see how wrong you are with this opinion:
On DEI, I recommend reading the work by Ruy Teixeira (he has a substack The Liberal Patriot, reading it is free; his book Where Have All The Democrats Gone, co-authored with John Judis, published last year, is also highly relevant here) and the book We Have Never Been Woke by the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi (published by Princeton University Press, last month).
I agree with Peter: it’s not enough for centre-left parties to just stop talking about “trans” (or defunding the police or Hamas atrocities or systemic racism), pretend that it was never an important issue (and that GLAAD and the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign were never driving the policy bus), and pivot to talking about inflation and immigration. Political leaders need to loudly reject genderism as an ideology and as a basis for policy.
And sorry for overcommenting 🙁
Well I’m a woman who is not involved in sports but I think it’s unfair that biological men are in women’s sports.
I’ve never been a feminist but your answer strikes me as unfeeling towards women.
Whataboutism, as exemplified by Laurence Moran’s comment here, has become the standard derailing tactic. Besides the hysterical reaction that to even want to discuss the demands of radical trans activists is tantamount to denying the existence of transidentified people (to genocide, in the parlance of our time). Nobody is denying the existence of transidentifying people. Mostly, people deny that a) anybody can change their sex, b) oppose the redefinition of sex (remember that sex is oh so multidimensional, but “brain sex” trumps all?), and c) oppose the replacement of sex by gender identity in public policy.
The whataboutism strategy consists in this claim:
This argument that most of us have no dog in this fight, no skin in the game, is wrong.
Remember what the radical trans agenda is? 1. Redefine sex as gender identity, or, alternatively, replace sex by gender identity. That would mean all remaining female-only spaces would disappear (changing rooms, toilets, hospital wards, prison wards, women’s sport). 2. Criminalize talk about biological sex. That means, if you refer to a transidentifying man (that is, a trans woman) as a man, that would be hate speech.
Is this an agenda that only affects a small number of people?
It’s obvious that the answer is: No!
And now you understand how the trans right struggle is very different from the gay rights struggle. For discrimination against gays to stop, only hardcore religious believers had to take it on the chin (which is why a major decline in religiosity was necessary for homophobia to become unacceptable). But for the radical trans agenda to be realized, women, lesbians and children have to take it on the chin (and hence religion is not the only stumbling block for this agenda). (And, a minor matter, we also all have to reconceptualize ourselves. I’m no longer just a man, but a cis man.)
And this major difference between the gay rights and trans right campaign explains why the trans rights campaign has unfolded differently, and will not succeed.
Well put, the last point in particular.
+1
We can’t actually do anything about those other “more serious issues” you think the Washington Post should be focussing on. They are intractable collective-action problems, “problems” that are really just facts of life, and problems (like racism) where the solution (“anti-racism”) is worse than the problem.
Trans athletes in women’s sport is a tractable problem that affects many women athletes who train for decades to get good at something only to have it thrown away if a male athlete who claims to be female* comes out of the woodwork. Physiologically there is a straightforward answer: “No. Segregate by sex.” But to do this means we have to deny the claim from a male athlete, who says he is a trans female, that the sex rule illegally discriminated against “her” on gender identity. This is the chink the activists stick their crowbar into to pry off the armour of sex protection. “I’m a woman. Why can’t I play?” “Because you’re a trans woman.” “See you in Court, bigot!”
Even if the sports federations decide they shall segregate by sex, they can’t make this stick if the trans activists thwart it using human/civil rights provisions protecting gender identity. That’s why it’s more than just an internal sport decision. The federations have shown they can’t be trusted to behave correctly because they get bullied by that tiny “insignificant” minority of trans activists threatening lawfare. Scientists, philosophers, legislators, and all the rest of us have a role and a stake in solving this soluble problem. (In this case it’s just a matter of correcting an error the legislators made, acting in haste.)
—————————
* It’s not just men who sincerely believe they are trans. It’s every mediocre male never-wozzer who registers “in the gender he feels most comfortable in.” It ain’t gonna be “male.”
+ 1
I’m not a Trump voter (or an American). I “care” about this issue because it requires me to accept – and in many situations to positively affirm – something that isn’t true. The sports issue is just one instance of the general problem. The males at my university who have adopted feminine names and perform a public burlesque of feminine stereotypes during the work day are not women. The awkward theatre kids in our graduate program who are obviously female but with severe haircuts & weird pronouns are not some third sex. Referring to those folks as “she” and “xir” is in the narrow sense just a trivial annoyance, but it has a broad corrosive effect on morale because we’re all scientists who are supposed to value what’s true. “Trans” is not true: it’s (to a first approximation) mental illness, or a sexual fetish (in autogynephiles), or a social contagion inflicted on autistic gay kids. I don’t think that’s something to be left to the sports organizations to sort out, like trimming the leaves off a toxic hedge. I think it needs to be shown to be profoundly false and pulled out of the garden by the roots.
Trenchantly put, Mike.
And the only way to do that is for legislatures to repeal language in their civil/human rights laws that makes gender identity a protected ground against discrimination. Not only does it enshrine something that doesn’t exist, it takes away rights against discrimination from women and gives them to men if gender expression is considered to trump sex. A Minister of Education should be able bar teachers from teaching gender ideology without having to defend a civil rights complaint from trans activists in the teachers union. Genderwang is, as Sastra says, a hydra that insinuates everywhere, not just into sport. The only way to kill it is to cut off all its heads at their common neck they all spring from, which is the human/civil rights laws.
The only Canadian politician who has said would do this is Maxime Bernier, currently well outside the Overton window (but he did call it right on immigration, at least 5 years before it stopped being a third rail — touch it and die! He correctly nailed it that immigration by itself cannot re-right our inverted demographic pyramid and restore a sustainable dependency ratio, the stated rationale for mass immigration.)
I think in the election, something that really moved the needle in favor of Trump was that most Americans have children, many have daughters, many of those daughters participate(d) in girls’ sports.
More immediate than the obscure and insane aspects of genderwang which don’t touch the average person’s life. Your girl’s volleyball team and the lipstick-on- beard “trans girl” on that team matters personally to many voters.
D.A.
NYC
David, don’t forget schools socially transitioning confused children behind the backs of their parents. It’s happening in blue states. That is simply unacceptable to most parents. It is justified with two arguments.
1. Allegedly, children have privacy rights vis-à-vis their own parents. That’s not true. I have been a parent for 21 years. I had never heard of such rights until this argument appeared in the trans debate. And that’s because no such rights exist.
2. Supposedly, social transitioning at school is no different than joining the school’s chess club (which parents don’t need to know about). False, again. Joining the chess club does not raise the probability of later wanting to medically transition by means of puberty blockers, cross-ex hormones, and surgeries to modify secondary sex characteristics.
“Allegedly, children have privacy rights vis-à-vis their own parents. That’s not true. I have been a parent for 21 years. I had never heard of such rights until this argument appeared in the trans debate.”
You must not be aware that your children’s physician is able to withhold information from you if they think you don’t need to know. This has been in place for decades.
This is for Ontario, where I live, but the same applies in the US.
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I think the reason Trump voters focus on the trans issue is because it is a synecdoche that exemplifies and symbolizes what they see as a broader disconnect from reality on the part of the left. We can argue about abortion, DEI, open or closed borders, and other issues till the cows come home. But anybody who mindlessly chants “Transwomen are women” or that “men can get pregnant” or “sex is not binary” (at least for 99.99% of us) is unambiguously proclaiming to the world that ideology trumps reality. Winston Smith was famously forced to say that “two and two is five” because Big Brother says so. Too many lefties, who don’t actually believe a word of it, feel forced to say “transwomen are women” because ideology says so.
+1
Michael, now 2 + 2 = Unicorn, in the words of Times [London, England] columnist Hadley Freeman.
Unfortunately the issue has been thrust into the faces of everyone with kids in public schools. So it’s a problem. My 11yo girl just got blown up on the soccer field last week boy a large boy who was out there playing girls soccer with no explanation. The collision would’ve been a non-event with any other player, but she traveled several yards in the air after challenging for a loose ball. In 3rd grade her teacher led 1/2 the class through the process of declaring a non-binary sexual orientation and with many declaring a trans identity. They spent weeks discussing the “Don’t Say Gay” FLA legislation in a distorted way while falling behind in math. We live in Seattle.
I loved my time living in Seattle. Late 80s, grunge, coffee, graduate school. That’s now a galaxy far, far away.
I’m sorry for what happened (and is happening) to your daughter and her classmates.
Transgender ideology affects all women. The same argument that supports men in women’s sports (i.e., “trans women are women”) supports men in women’s rape shelters, prison housing, and elsewhere.
Ultimately it erodes women’s civil rights, because it renders the category “women” polyphyletic.
This is not a trivial issue.
Well, somebody has been studying evolutionary biology here. I had to look this up – polyphyletic. Never heard this before.
🎯
+2 >This is not a trivial issue.
>Leave this issue to the athletes and the sports associations. I’m pretty sure they are capable of solving it themselves without the rest of us putting pressure on them to behave “correctly.”
The sports associations ignored the concerns of the female athletes, because women are supposed to be a “good sports” and put up with anything. The girls and woman were told to shut up and don’t say anything negative about it.
Men should feel “pressured” to take a stance to support women and their own daughters.
“Unfair Play: The Battle for Women’s Sport” by Sharron Davies is an excellent book covering the whole matter thoroughly. It starts with the sordid mess of Soviet-bloc women athletes doped with testosterone, then follows the history of various attempts to define and detect sex eligibility for sports. It covers the scientific aspects, including the underlying biology and the studies that have been done on male competitive advantage. But for me, the most eye-opening parts were various statistics on just how large the male advantage is based on actual sports records. To pick just one random example from the highlights I made in my Kindle edition:
“Whichever angle you take when looking at any chart of male advantage over females in sports like swimming and athletics, there’s no escaping the obvious. And remember that, as we saw on the chart from Chapter 5, swimming, with an 11 per cent average speed advantage of men over women, is at the lower end of the big performance gap between the sexes across a wide range of sports. Here’s what that gulf means: more than 10,000 male performances over 800 metres freestyle are faster than Katie Ledecky’s stunning world record of 8:04.79, and more than 10,000 male swims are faster than Missy Franklin’s pioneering 200 metres backstroke effort in 2012.154”
Davies, Sharron; Lord, Craig. Unfair Play: The Battle For Women’s Sport ‘Thrillingly Fearless’ THE TIMES (pp. 108-109). Forum. Kindle Edition.
Thanks for the book suggestion. Ordered it.
I agree. I have read this book (and I recommend it too.). Davies and Lord draw on (and this is a lot shorter than the book):
This scientific paper, freely available online, is the most cited on the topic of inclusion of biological males in female sport across academic publications and is in the top one per cent of all papers of all time, outperforming Covid and climate-change papers. (info from British campaign group Sex Matters, headed by Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce)
One thing that the book by Davies and Lord drove home forcefully for me is that in sport fairness is everything (besides physical safety of the athletes). If it’s not fair, sport competition becomes uninteresting. That’s why the book starts with, if I remember correctly, more than one chapter on sport doping. (Davies, a former elite-level swimmer, won Olympic silver at the Moscow 1980 Olympic Games, beaten only by a doped East German swimmer.)
I think that book is one of the references in my earlier post but I’m not sure and am too lazy to look it up. Anyway, it’s essential.
Absolutely – a fantastic read.
Sharron Davies lost out on a gold Olympic medal to testosterone-doped East German Petra Schneider at the 1980 Moscow games. Schneider has since offered Davies her medal; the offer was declined, because it is for the International Olympic Committee to sort out – something that it has steadfastly refused to do. (Davies’ father, who was also her coach, had her silver medal gold plated, instead.)
Having been personally affected by cheats enabled by exogenous testosterone, Davies is determined to stop a similar scandal unfolding for a new generation of female athletes – this time featuring trans-identifying men with natural testosterone-based advantages.
If we agree that performance enhancing drugs should be banned from athletic competition, why are performance depressing treatments acceptable? Doesn’t it follow that undertaking these therapies is evidence that a trans-athlete is in reality a biological athlete?
Rick, there is the question whether performance depressing treatments are medically advisable. But from the point of view of sports, these treatments do not create a fair playing field. That is what the science tells us. You can’t undo the effects of male puberty. In other words, being a woman is not a testosterone level (which can be lowered). There’s much more to it.
Your question whether “undertaking these therapies is evidence that a trans-athlete is in reality a biological athlete” is a good one.
Per the website hecheated.org
More than 3,157 stolen victories, 5,292 top 3 finishes in 9,700 total events by 715 males in female competitions, including 27 in the last month alone in the US, in distance running, cycling, volleyball, rowing, fencing and disc golf.
And here’s another site that tracks the numbers: shewon.org/
I haven’t confirmed the reliability of the data.
Another good data source:
Doriane Lambelet Coleman and Wickliffe Shreve: Comparing Athletic Performances: The Best Elite Women To Boys And Men. circa 2018 (no date on title page, latest literature reference is 2018)
https://web.law.duke.edu/sites/default/files/centers/sportslaw/comparingathleticperformances.pdf
we compared the top women’s results to the boys’ and men’s results across multiple standard track and field events, just for the single year 2017.
on p.3, table 4: World’s Best Woman vs Number of Men and Boys Outperforming Her, in 2017
Boys vs Women ( https://boysvswomen.com/#/ ) highlights that high school boys in the US regularly give sporting performances that break the Olympic records set by the world’s best female athletes.
I fear for the safety of cisgender women if trans women were allowed to compete in rugby union. Rugby is a brutal contact sport where raw power and bone-crunching collisions win matches.
It’s already pretty dangerous enough for biological men. There are a number of cases making the news about ex England international players with serious neurological conditions.
I’m a rugby fan but I can see the sport being killed off even without the transgender issue
I am a native South African steeped in the Springbok rugby experience.
The beauty of rugby is that (in the case of the Springboks) you have these 8 brutes as forwards softening the opposition and then they set the platform for the speedsters in the backline to weave their magic against the defensive line. Some of the backline players are diminutive. Cheslin Kolbe’s metrics are 1.72 m (height) and 75Kg (weight). A mini pocket rocket who has just been nominated 2024 player of the year.
Smaller physique for diminutive speedsters in the backline does not mean that transgender women should be allowed to compete against biological women in rugby. That would be a license to kill.
Too late:
https://www.rebelnews.com/former_ex_scottish_international_rugby_player_speaks_out_against_transanity_infecting_the_sport
(Canada again. Of course. Sigh….)
For more background on this story, including efforts by the male player to silence the intrepid reporter, nose around on the Rebel News site. They’re not everyone’s cup of tea but the news outlets that are everyone’s cup of tea won’t touch this stuff.
Trans Rights Activists have to hold the line and insist that trans-identified males belong in women’s sports because once the claim that Trans Women are Women is broken in any aspect, the entire edifice comes tumbling down. Either they’re women,or they’re not. Either they get to be on a girls’ team with their natural advantages intact like “any other girl,” or they don’t belong in the women’s rooms and shelters either.
Thus the term “transphobe” means “anyone who refuses to accept that Trans Women Are Women.” What we see as indicative of a phobia isn’t what they see as indicative of a phobia. The bar is really low.
Sports are gender ideology’s Achilles heel because, unlike with women’s prisons and rape counseling centers, spectators gather in large groups, watch intently, and expect careful notes to be made public. The unfairness is obvious.
It’s one thing for activists to tell a group of gullible 4 year olds that “you can’t tell who’s a boy or girl just by looking at them — it’s about what’s in their heart.” Try telling that to grown adults who are about to watch the girls and women they’ve been rooting for for years get crushed because “no, she’s just a girl like the all others.” The heart — and eyes — know better.
Gaslighting works best when things aren’t bright and out in the open. It also works when people are unsure of themselves. The more people piping up with “that’s a boy,” the more others are emboldened to acknowledge the obvious.
Also interesting:
Jonathan Kay: College Volleyball’s Spartan Meltdown. Quillette, Nov 1, 2024
In a scathing Title IX Complaint obtained by Quillette, a San José State University women’s volleyball coach explains how her school’s aggressively enforced transgender-inclusion policy created a toxic environment for female athletes.
https://archive.ph/QeLAN
Megyn Kelly: First Person: Female College Athlete Speaks Out About and Sues NCAA Over Biological Male On Her Team. Oct 13, 2024, on YouTube (can’t provide link, because more than one link in comment = comment goes in junk folder)
Megyn Kelly is joined by Brooke Slusser, San Jose State volleyball player who is suing the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] after finding out a biological male is on her team, to talk about how she ended up on the same women’s volleyball team as a male player, how she was never told about him when she transferred to the school, being forced to live with and room with while traveling the male player, what it’s like to play on the same team as a male athlete, the unfair physical advantages this player has, her decision to speak out about it and join a lawsuit against the NCAA, the reaction she’s gotten from coaches and her teammates, her discussion with the biological male after she went public, the bravery of other schools refusing to play her school, getting death threats over her position, and more.
“The heart — and eyes — know better.”
Exactly. This is an issue about which we don’t need to appeal to peer-reviewed studies to make a general rule. Save the science for the hard cases. In general, men are males, women are females, and the latter shouldn’t athletically compete against (or room with, shower with, dress in front of, etc.) the former unless they choose to do so. This has been well accepted—and practiced—long before science was even in its infancy.
I think that leaders in some organizations want to appeal to the authority of science so that they can disavow responsibility for making decisions: “I’m with you, really, I am, but the science says . . ..” They have an eye more on their neighbors, colleagues, and other of their social circles than they do on the benefit of the girls and women over whom they have charge. The trans activists are persistent, seemingly indefatigable. But it is ultimately the failures of our leadership class that allowed any of the Woke nonsense to establish a foothold in our institutions. Even if Wokeness dies of its own weight, we need to assess why it is that so many of our “leaders” are so astoundingly weak.
Civil rights lawsuits are ruinous, Doug. Look what civil juries have done to Donald Trump. Boards of organizations will not look kindly on executives who embroil them in expensive litigation sometimes brought by the federal government with its infinite resources…and which may cost them their federal funding! It is far more sensible and consistent with the organization’s goals — survival as an organization meeting its payroll — to go along with threatening activists and not rile them up further.
And here we are.
People will wake up when a female boxer is killed by a skull-crushing blow from a biological male who transitioned. We’re a compassionate people. We need to have this conversation now.
The general public may take note, but even the mainstream gender ideologues would likely just pivot to providing examples of women hurt in the ring by other women while blandly claiming “it’s the same thing.” Waiting for a horrible thing which is going to wake up the woke is starting to feel like waiting for a horrible thing which is going to turn Trump voters away from Trump.
“Ah — surely now this has got to do it!” Sadly, no.
Or (mea culpa) like waiting for the first large global-heating-attributable “natural” disasters to wake people up. Oops.
I’ll be interested to see if there is any backlash resulting from this editorial.
There is an issue right now in the UK because a 17-year-old girl with suspected autism has been given a six-month-suspension because she had been unsettled by the presence of a trans opponent with a beard and had asked about the person’s eligibility. She was apparently concerned for her safety. She was grilled for 30 minutes and reduced to tears, and then found ‘guilty’. A group of people have been protesting her treatment.
Do you have a link to this incident, like a magazine or newspaper piece? Thanks.
https://archive.ph/cGlUT
I hope this link works.
Yes it does; thank you!
There was a demonstration outside the England men’s international match at the weekend, with another planned for the England women’s team’s match next month: https://archive.is/KFgXA
There are news items in the UK
https://www.gbnews.com/news/trans-row-protest-scheduled-england-ireland-female-footballer-banned
I think that argument is factually incorrect. The England and Wales census* identified that about 0.5% of people (one in two hundred) identified as a different gender to the one assigned at birth based on their observed sex.
Both Williams sisters played a set of tennis against the 200th ranked men’s player early in their careers. Both were beaten convincingly. If the ONS’s figure is correct, then there is potentially a trans woman in the top 200 male tennis players. If that person decided to identify as a woman and play on the women’s circuit, they would win everything.
Even if the percentage estimate is too high, there are sports where the disparity between men and women is higher than in tennis. There are also many sports, so the likelihood of a trans woman dominating at least one is pretty high.
* Note that the data is under dispute because the methodology of the question was suspect, but we’ll go with it.
“There are so few [trans women] that it doesn’t matter.” This is part of the Achilles heel that Sastra notes @ 6. If there are so few males who believe they are women, then excluding trans women from women’s sport (or other women’s spaces and opportunities) should be just a rounding error in the calculation of fairness at the population level. But for TRAs it’s mission-critical for all trans women to always be women in all circumstances – if not then the whole thing is shown to be a charade.
I am not sure whether your 0.5% of people identify as a different SEX to the one recognized (not ‘assigned’) at birth, but I really doubt that 1/200 athletes in women’s sports are really biological men. Or am I missing what your claim is?
Because Jeremyp didn’t answer back and the thread has been re-activated, here is what I think Jeremy meant.
Two hundred men in the world could beat the Williams sisters, according to Venus’s own estimate. One of those men (0.5%) inferring from a random sample is likely to be sincerely trans, assuming being trans and being good at tennis are orthogonal. That man, if he identified and registered as a woman, could beat the Williams sisters, the most powerful tennis women in history according to my understanding of the game….until that one transwoman came along and bested them.
Of course, any of those men, or all 200 of them, could choose to identify as women and beat the Williams sisters if their one goal in life was to win a tennis championship but they weren’t seeded high enough in that 200 to have a hope of winning a men’s title. So the sisters could be beaten by one transwoman, or by 200 transwomen*, depending on how self-identification was allowed and exploited.
————————
* including the winner of the men’s title. This actually happened in a state mountain-biking competition recently. The same guy won the men’s and the women’s races on the same day.
Even if there aren’t very many, it only takes one to set a record that no girl or woman can ever hope to beat, forever depriving them of that aspect of sport that is striving to break a record.
Re: the statement ” if there is a sport in which natal men do not outperform natal women, then by all mean let trans women compete with natal women.”
In that case, wouldn’t the argument be that there should not be separate men’s and women’s categories at all? As soon as one uses “self-identification” as the sole criterion for deciding who is eligible to participate in the “women’s” category, then I don’t see how one can justify having more than one sex-based category. In the example discussed of equestrian competitions, if males do not (on average and at the upper tail of the distribution extreme) outperform females, then that is not an argument for permitting trans women to compete in the women’s category, it’s an argument for only having one category — eh?
Yes, there shouldn’t be sex categories if men and women show no average differences.
That is exactly the case in Olympic equestrian sports – no separate sex categories. A brief and casual look at Olympic results appears to me to show that women slightly outperform men in dressage while men slightly outperform women in open jumping and 3-day eventing (dressage, cross country jumping, & show jumping over 3 consecutive days). To some extent this mirrors the representation of the sexes in each of these sports, with many women forgoing or giving up jumping when pregnant. While some have argued that these events should become sex segregated to improve men’s chances in dressage and women’s chances in jumping and eventing, and to increase the total number of equestrian events and competitors, I doubt that will happen. The equestrian events are incredibly expensive to put on and to participate in and in conjunction with animal rights objections to the sport, I suspect equestrian events may eventually be dropped from the Olympics. For the 2028 games the modern pentathlon will be dropping the equestrian portion and replacing it with an obstacle course.
In rodeo events there are often separate male and female events, but these events often do involve the strength of the human competitor. Barrel racing had traditionally been a women only sport but some men are now competing with the women in it.
In horse racing male and female jockeys compete together but only about 10% of jockeys are female. There are separate events for colts/stallions/geldings versus fillies/mares as well as separate age categories (I wish they’d just stop racing young horses). No one seems to have much difficulty distinguishing colts from fillies.
But those sports where males have no advantage over females qua being male, there are only a few. My guess it’s about 1% of all sports.
Perhaps, but I would like to know them, even to use as examples. I thought that archery and equestrian events were two areas, but I haven’t seen any data. Maybe the readers know some.
Males have no advantages over females in certain gymnastic events, such as the beam, where it’s an advantage to be small, light and gracile (and you don’t have to worry about squashing your balls if you fall astride the beam). The advantage is with women here. But for some unexplained reason, transwomen are not queuing up to compete in this event.
A likely example is corn hole. That seems silly to even bring up, but I do come across televised championship competitions for the sport and people seem serious about it. Oddly, males and females compete separately, but I can’t see how males would have an advantage.
I think that problem will look after itself without need for scientific study. A good rule of thumb is that if men are not banging on the doors to compete in a women’s sport, they know they don’t have an advantage in it. (Like Brandon’s balance beam example!) If they were mediocre also-rans in the men’s division, they won’t win against the women, either. No incentive, no problem.
P.S., I like sex-segregated categories at least for the sweaty, physical sports even where there is no sex advantage. The more categories, the more winners, the more podium appearances, the more fan interest, and the more commercial sponsorship opportunities for more winners. Part of being on a team is the bonding experience in the locker room, the shared nudity in a non-sexual setting, lewd sexual jokes out of the hearing of the opposite sex, going to the pub afterwards. I don’t think women should be forced to share this with male teammates, particularly with fully male-gendered heterosexual men as if the sex segregation was abandoned entirely and not just for the rare trans-identified men who happen along now and then. Put men in this situation and there will be ruinous sexual harassment claims from Day 1.
” (I prefer that jawbreaker to “trans women” because the latter plays into the misleading mantra that “trans women are women”),”
——
As always, Helen Joyce is useful here. She says whenever you see “trans –“, substitute “fake –” So a “trans-woman” is a “fake woman”.
Much confusion can be avoided by this linguistic hack.
She also says “The only people who use “cis” are gender activists or those who are afraid of gender activists.”
Helen is a hero of mine. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
I go by another recommendation from Helen Joyce: a trans woman is a trans-identifying male (and a trans kid is a trans-identifying child) . Of course, this is deemed disrespectful or worse. But when the issue is whether sex is relevant we can’t not talk about sex.
+1
Trans rights does not mean exclusive rights. Fairness in sport is on the whole true but, currupt ideology, morals, despotic coaches, managers and administrator are also, rare but in sport.
No one whines that Usain Bolt was a power house given his “unfair” advantages of physique, training, natural ability. Because it was fair competition, sport is about being a fair and honest competition, trans women athletes are failing that paramount rule of sport.
I’ve always favoured an open category for trans athletes.
I’m not sure what you mean by “open” or how it solves the problem. Can you explain?
I don’t see the need for an separate category for just trans athletes. It’s pointless. You’re then rewarding mediocre men for their accomplishments. No females by birth would ever win. It also then creates an extremely small group of participants. For example, in swimming, you then get Lia Thomas and maybe one or two more guys who automatically would be awarded NCAA medals and accolades due to the extremely small entrant pool at the same level as those athletes in the male and female categories who beat out thousands of competitors to take the top honors. That’s not fair.
On the other hand, if you’re talking allowing transwomen compete against all comers, i.e., in open competition, then that’s simple – they can already enter in the men’s competition. That’s open for them.
In this case, the difficulty is with transmen (i.e., women) who take meds to elevate their testosterone as they’re in no-man’s land. I’m not sure if they can compete in the men’s category (and even if they were, they wouldn’t be competitive), and they would be banned from the women’s category due to their doping like the East German women were. But if you had a separate category for trans men and trans women, then they would lose to the trans women (i.e., men) consistently.
Transmen seem to have recognized and accepted the problem. When they’re not on hormones they somehow manage to overcome their crippling dysphoria and choose the women’s divisions over the men’s. But as soon as they transition, they usually drop out.
As you point out, they’re guaranteed to lose to men and they either have the moral sensitivity or self-awareness to not make a public fuss by nevertheless demanding to still stay in with the other women.
Not just unfair. In baseball there is a rule that says the umpire will call a player out for making a travesty of the game. (The example I read in one of those “What’s the call?” features was a batter who refuses to take his base on Ball Four, demanding another pitch that he hopes to hit and drive in a run.)
Maybe that’s why there are no trans male baseball (fastball) players playing the women’s game, so far as I know. As soon as one stepped up to the plate to face a female defence he’d be called out. That’s what a trans division with two or three competitors, all mediocre, would be. A travesty. It would be like the old joke of how Pravda reported a friendly foot face between the American and Soviet ambassadors to the U.N. “The hero of the proletariat came in second. The running-dog capitalist finished second-last.”
(The Oakland Athletics were bragging about making history by signing a “transwoman” to their farm system last winter. But this is a man playing the men’s game. Big whoop.)
I agree it is a vague short on detail comment. (Understatement of the year ) My aim was mainly to suggest some sort of competition for trans athletes. How that comes about is not something I’ve seriously considered, but the present situation is not sustainable and to give TA a competition it seems worth persuing by a TA sporting body/organisation. However, it would mean the TA themselves recognise the unfairness, that includes trans men against biological men. If the two groups compete against each other it would legitimize all the sacrifices training and perhaps nullify the ideology. All said and done in the case of womens’ sports in particular, it is exactly what’s happening now. I’ll leave it there.
Good for WaPo. Agree saying we need debate is disingenuous since there is so much evidence now available. Still this is a giant leap forward for this paper to call for discussion.
My gut instinct was men competing against women was wrong. I have done a lot of reading to determine if my gut was bigoted/ ignorant or correct. Most non-scientists are not going to read and study. They are going with their gut: it isn’t fair. Fairness seems to be both biological as well as cultural. So telling people that men in women’s sport is acceptable and required is a losing proposition. I am a liberal who supports trans civil rights. That doesn’t mean every demand must be met.
I am convinced that people should not be able to legally change their sex, as that causes too many problems with keeping biological men out of women’s spaces such as sport and prisons. It also creates odd statistics: transwomen who commit violent crimes are counted as women, because they legally changed their sex. So the rate of women raping women could potentially go up. We need an alternate solution.
Unfortunately for the liberal-minded, seekers of new civil rights don’t agree that not all their demands must be met. Would Martin Luther King have been satisfied with desegregated lunch counters and movie theatres, and been OK with Gov. George Wallace drawing the line at Alabama’s medical school because admitting Negroes would reduce opportunities for white students? King in fact wanted hiring quotas, too, and got them (at least in colleges if not in construction jobs.)
You won’t get your “alternate solution” just from trans activists being reasonable and accepting limits on their demands. (They will note that you seem to be inventing limits as you go, whatever you think is unfair, not just sports.) All these limits are non-negotiable for them. You have to find a way to thwart them that will stand up in Court against their efforts to have your sensible limits struck down.
https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/some-democrats-are-looking-to-moderate [their position on trans issues]
Eliza quotes Erin Reed:
Sports are the foot in the door, the asterisk they offer on our gender identity.
Once you give that up, they then sell you on adding that asterisk to kids…
To birth certificates, because you have to enforce the sports laws.
To bathrooms, which are like locker rooms right?
As a coda, I should point out that the state of Alabama does not include gender identity as a prohibited ground of discrimination in its civil rights laws. That means it is free to place your reasonable limits on “trans rights” without fear that it will be sued at the state level by trans rights activists. (Alabama has, of course, also banned the provision of gender-affirming care to minors and this is being litigated in the federal court system.)
Since federal law includes gender identity as sex discrimination, and federal law overrides state law, I am not certain what states can do. Certainly the next federal administration is not going to have an expansive view of trans rights under the Civil rights act and Title IX.
I realize that my view that there must be limits on trans rights is unacceptable to trans activists. We must join them in believing that they are whatever sex they claim to be, and all rights must follow. This extreme position can’t guide policy.
If there is a reason to have sex included on birth certificates, then it must be grounded in reality, not in individual’s feelings. If it is legal for people to claim they are something they are not about this issue, it says something about our culture’s view about existence. It is that post-modern idea that there is no objective reality. The ramifications of that are destructive to society. They extend beyond the impact on women and children, as much as that impassions me.
We must find a way to establish that everyone has the right not to be discriminated against to secure their civil rights, including that biological males may live as if they were women. But they are not women, so limits will be set on their encroachment on women’s spaces as apply to all men.
But why should we join them in believing something that isn’t true? That they are women when they are not. How is that a civil right that they should be able to get the state to enforce on us non-believers? Allowing them to believe whatever they like is in the spirit of the state leaving people alone as much as possible, OK. But how does “allowing biological males to live as women” not allow them to populate all women’s spaces and, say, avail themselves of corporate attempts to fast-track women into leadership positions or get government loans for women-owned businesses?
Allowing them to live as women except where we say they can’t is no right at all. It’s merely an indulgence, noblesse oblige maybe. The most they would gain is that if one was beaten up during a sex transaction, the state might deign to add a hate enhancement if the assailant beat the guy up because he was trans. But it would still be illegal to assault people no matter what they were.
Civil rights laws aren’t meant to end all discrimination. They only prohibit discrimination on listed enumerated grounds. The hand-to-hand fighting in trans activism is to get gender expression and identity added to the existing list….or to prevent it being removed. The prize in getting your group added to the list of grounds is the state-backed power it gives you over individuals who don’t share that special ground. I can fire a worker for being insufferably narcissistic and authority-defiant. If personality disorder is made a protected ground, I can’t, and that gives people with personality disorders power over me.
This piece looks at the difference, as brought out in New York’s Prop 1, between tolerating someone’s belief that he is the sex he isn’t, and accepting that transwomen are women. Perhaps the needle can be threaded. We’ll see.
https://badfacts.substack.com/p/hooters-bratzilla-and-new-yorks-highest
I hope you understood when I wrote “we must believe” I was referring to the extreme trans view which I don’t support. Their civil rights include not to be discriminated against in employment and housing, for example. It doesn’t extend to demanding what people believe, and the post modern crazy that follows.
I did misinterpret your “We must believe . . .” I apologize and thank you for clarifying. 🔑 ->🥂
It’s a nice advantage in a debate if you can begin by creating basic new facts that have to be honored by everyone – like that a trans woman is 100% woman or that there are numerous sexes – so that non compliance can be ID’ed as erasure or hate as the case may be.
Curt, one of the most bizarre features of the trans debate is the refusal, by trans activists, to debate their demands. When has this ever worked? This is completely different from the gay rights struggle. Gay rights campaigners didn’t refuse to debate their demands. Radical trans activists refuse debate because their arguments are unpersuasive. So they are left with tactics like intimidation, cancellation, violence and death threats (think of JK Rowling, for instance).
But the trend is clear: The more people learn about the demands of radical trans activists, the more opposition there is to these demands. And sooner or later politicians can’t ignore this opposition anymore. The opposition is now sufficiently organized in the UK and the US (not yet in places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand).
Commenting as someone who has ridden and bred horses for more than 20 years.
Within equestrian sports (a wide set of disciplines) it’s generally perceived that there is no male/female performance difference.
At Olympic and 4 /5 star eventing levels, as many women win as do men.
This is in part due to the many confounding performance factors that are hard to isolate e.g. the need to form a partnership with the horse, the vast differences in intra-horse performance, and the highly emotional nature of horses (they can read your body language better than any other animal as soon as they see you).
In equestrian sports, what about individuals who were assigned to the human species at birth but feel that they really are equine. Would limiting the presence of self-ID centaurs in these sports be, uhhh, non-progressive?
I 98-99% agree. However, I disagree slightly.
Post-op MTF transexuals should (in my opinion) be allowed in “women’s” bathrooms, shelters and prisons. They should not (in my opinion) be allowed in “women’s” sports. In my opinion, rape counseling centers should make their own decisions. I personally favor letting post-op MTF transexuals into rape counseling centers. Other folks disagree (strongly).
Given that most MTF transexuals don’t choose surgery, the rules for them should be considerably more restrictive.
One of the criticisms of the idea that “post op” transexuals/transgender should be treated under more lenient standards than males who aren’t is that doing this will undoubtably encourage more men to voluntarily undergo risky and damaging surgeries.
My understanding is that what’s cutesy-called “bottom surgery” involves cutting the penis open, turning it inside out, making a deep incision, and somehow stuffing it in there. Despite what many are told, this is not almost indistinguishable from a female vagina. Complications are standard, maintenance is daily and lifelong, sexual capacities are diminished, and regret (as you might imagine) is a living hell.
I think it’s a bad idea to make laws, rules, and regulations that make this a desirable option for people in the grip of an obsession.
One of the (highly valid) criticisms of ‘bottom surgery’ is that complications are common. My personal view of this was influenced by Dave Chappelle. He stated (roughly) that you can’t doubt the sincerity of people who will go as far as ‘bottom surgery’.
A minor note in this context, is that Chess and Math competitions are divided by sex. Why? This topic is discussed over in Quillette. See “Why Do Men Dominate Chess? – FIDE’s new policy governing who can compete in women’s categories highlights the persistent sex imbalance at the game’s elite levels.”
In the article and the comments, there are my justifications regarding why men who call themselves women shouldn’t compete in sports with women, including a lot of logical and scientific data. What is the best case from a science-based perspective for allowing men who identify as women to compete in women’s sports? Is there any?
This post – from the British Journal of Sports Medicine, no less – tried to find some.
https://x.com/BJSM_BMJ/status/1854863486129476058
The podcast linked in my next comment below (#20) finds the arguments laughably weak.
Ross Tucker, a leading researcher in the field of sports science, recently discussed the advantages of “transwomen” in women’s sports – and the stance of the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) – on his podcast. (Interestingly, Tucker was cited in the concluding statements of both sides when the case of Caster Semenya was heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).) https://shows.acast.com/realscienceofsport/episodes/is-the-credibility-of-sports-sciences-most-respected-journal