Mick Hartley

A celebration of the glorious athletic achievements of transgender athletes, at Wired:

Transgender athletes are having a moment. At all levels of sport, they’re stepping onto the podium and into the headlines. New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard won two gold medals at the Pacific Games, and college senior CeCé Telfer became the NCAA Division II national champion in the 400-meter run. Another senior, June Eastwood, has been instrumental to her cross-country team’s success. At the high school level, Terry Miller won the girls’ 200-meter dash at Connecticut’s state open championship track meet.

These recent performances are inherently praiseworthy—shining examples of what humans can accomplish with training and effort.

Well, shining examples of what biological men can achieve when they compete against smaller, less muscular women. The issue of trans-men – women who identify as men – doesn't seem to have shaken up the world of athletics to quite the same degree.

These issues have come to a head in Connecticut, where a conservative Christian group called Alliance Defending Freedom has filed a legal complaint on behalf of three high school athletes who are seeking to bar transgender girls from competing in the girls category. In Connecticut, as in more than a dozen other states, high school athletes are allowed to compete in the category that matches their gender identity. According to ADF legal counsel Christiana Holcomb, two transgender athletes—Miller and another runner, Andraya Yearwood—“have amassed 15 different state championship titles that were once held by nine different girls across the state.” The US Department of Education’s office for civil rights is now investigating the group’s complaint.

Isn't it always these conservative Christians and the like? – trying to hold back the tide of gender progressivism. 

But yes, there is an acknowledgement that there will be concerns about fairness.

So which approach is most fair? “Fair is a very subjective word,” says Joanna Harper, a transgender woman, distance runner, and researcher who served on the IOC committee that developed that organization’s current rules. It boils down to whom you’re trying to be fair to, Harper says. “To billions of typical women who cannot compete with men at high levels of sport?” Or “a very repressed minority in transgender people who only want to enjoy the same things that everybody else does, including participation in sports?”

They can of course enjoy the same things that everybody else does and participate in sport, these transgender people: by competing against other members of their biological sex. But then they don't do as well. Which is no fun at all. And it's only those silly "typical women" that they're beating, so really…who cares?

How best to proceed, then? 

Some advantages, such as their bigger bone structure, greater lung capacity, and larger heart size remain, says Alison Heather, a physiologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Testosterone also promotes muscle memory—an ability to regain muscle mass after a period of detraining—by increasing the number of nuclei in muscles, and these added nuclei don’t go away. So transgender women have a heightened ability to build strength even after they transition, Heather says.

One way to address these issues, Heather and her colleagues wrote in an essay published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, would be to create a handicap system that uses an algorithm to account for physiological parameters such as testosterone, hemoglobin levels, height, and endurance capacity, as well as social factors like gender identity and socioeconomic status. “Such an algorithm would be analogous to the divisions in the Paralympics, and may also include paralympians,” they write. Instead of two divisions, male and female, there would be multiple ones and “athletes would be placed into a division which best mitigates unfair physical and social parameters.” The algorithm would need to be sport-specific, and Heather and her colleagues acknowledge that producing it would be a difficult task.

This is surely the future. Different divisions need to be introduced – hundreds perhaps – to allow for all of the many genders that have now been identified. Yes, it would be a difficult task, and athletics competitions would of necessity take considerably longer – indeed one Olympics would need to start pretty much as soon as the previous one's finished – but it's a small price to pay for gender inclusivity.