Mick Hartley

Today's the day we finally get to see male weightlifter Lauren Hubbard competing in the women's weightlifting event at the Olympics – something we can be sure that the BBC will cover, with due deference to their Stonewall diversity champions role, as a wonderfully brave and positive development. Indeed they're already setting the tone: Laurel Hubbard: The reluctant history-maker at the centre of sport's transgender debate.

James Kirkup at the Spectator:

Hubbard, as you surely know, was born male and grew up to become a competitive weightlifter. At the age of 33, the athlete then transitioned and became a trans woman. And because the International Olympic Committee effectively signs up to the mantra of trans rights – 'Trans women are women' – Hubbard can duly compete in the women’s contest in Tokyo.

To a lot of people, the prospect of a male-born weightlifter competing with biological women calls to mind a line from George Orwell:

'One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.'

Most people don't care too much about the trans issue. It's often assumed by those not involved in the debate that to say "trans women are women" is really only being kind and polite, without appreciating the threat to women's only spaces that entails, and the importance of preserving an awareness of the biological reality of sex. But with sport, people do care. Fairness in sport is a concept everyone can grasp.

'Trans women are women' sounds blandly innocuous to many people, who can happily repeat it thinking they’re just being kind and tolerant, and without reflecting on the implications of that assertion. Then Laurel Hubbard appears on the screen, and the true meaning of 'trans women are women' starts to become apparent.

Is it fair for male-born people to compete in sporting events against female-born people? The question arouses strong feelings: a lot of people have very clear views about sport and fairness. The idea of fair competition in sport, of playing the game honestly and fairly, are wired into many cultures, not least Britain’s.

So some people will look at Hubbard competing against biological women and conclude that this cannot be fair. They argue that the simple facts of male biology mean that a person who has gone through male puberty will, on average, be stronger and faster than a person who has gone through female puberty.

Most readers are, I expect, familiar with the arguments against allowing trans women such as Laurel Hubbard to compete in women’s events, so I won’t rehearse them here.

I’m more interested in the case for inclusion, in the points made by people who think that Hubbard and other trans women should be in women’s sport. Because I think a close look at the evidence and arguments here reveals something interesting, and familiar….

Because gender transition, in its current form, is a relatively recent phenomenon, it is argued, we simply don’t have enough good evidence on the physical implications of hormone-suppressant therapy. […]

Cue the familiar arguments that we need more research, and it's too early to say definitely one way or the other.

Let’s consider this situation in the most general terms. Here is a complex and contested issue involving two groups of people: male-born trans women, and biological women. A decision must be made about whether to grant something to the first group which could have a negative impact on the second group. The evidence on which that decision might be based is contested and unclear. The decision is taken to accommodate the male-born group, despite the possibility that this will be harmful to the female-born group.

Is it fair for trans women such as Laurel Hubbard to compete against biological women? I won’t bother to give my answer. Instead I will say that the decision to allow such a thing to happen is entirely consistent with other applications of a 'trans women are women' approach to questions of policy and practice, where time after time, the interests of male-born people are assigned greater importance than the interests of female-born people.

True – but I think Kirkup is being too generous here to the "inclusive" arguments. Clearly, for the proponents of inclusion, the proof that male athletes have an inbuilt advantage, whatever their current testosterone level, will never be good enough. Because individuals vary, and because there will always be some women who are better at a given sport than some men, the argument can always be made that this is just another part of diversity, like some people having bigger feet or being taller. But it's disingenuous. In fact we know perfectly well that it's unfair. It's not really a complex issue at all. It's as plain as day.

Janice Turner, in the Times at the weekend, was very clear:

Samoa has a name for boys who prefer “feminine” clothing, games and roles: “fa’afafine”, meaning “in the manner of a woman”. Allotted traditionally female crafts and household duties, this “third gender” was revered for combining nurture with physical strength. In modern Samoa, there’s no stigma if your son is a fa’afafine: they are warmly accepted, even celebrated.

A fa’afafine, Jaiyah Saelua, was the first transgender footballer to play in a World Cup qualifying game. She was centre back for the American Samoan national team: the men’s team. Samoans understand that changing gender does not affect a person’s immutable biological sex.

Samoa enjoys few sporting glories but it excels at weightlifting. Feagaiga Stowers, just 20, a child sexual abuse survivor who started lifting while living in a domestic violence shelter, won gold at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. She looked a cert for the 2019 Pacific Games too, but instead the podium was topped by 41-year-old trans woman Laurel Hubbard. Bumped to second place, Stowers and team mate Iuniarra Sipaia, who took bronze, hung their heads in dismay.

Back in Samoa, the response was more baffled than furious. The prime minister asked how it could be fair that this New Zealand fa’afafine was competing against women. The question will echo across the world on Monday when Hubbard competes in the Olympic women’s 87kg-plus weightlifting. Stowers and team mates aren’t even there. Covid risk is the official reason. But given that all other qualifying Samoans are in Tokyo, there’s speculation the female lifters are protesting at the injustice of their event.

Reviewing Helen Joyce’s recent book Trans, my colleague David Aaronovitch remarked that her tone was too angry. But when I think about Stowers battling such odds, or Roviel Detenamo, only 18, a lifter from even poorer Nauru, denied her first Olympics because Hubbard took her qualifying slot, I’m filled with white-hot rage. What else are women supposed to feel? Pioneer athletes fought for decades to win official recognition for our sports. Women’s weightlifting wasn’t even an Olympic event until 2000. Now, as our hard-won competitions are opened up, our places, scholarships and medals claimed by male-born competitors with physical advantages clear to any child, must we applaud politely this “progress”?

Men like the International Olympic Committee’s medical and science director Dr Richard Budgett have no skin in this game. “Everyone agrees that trans women are women,” he said this week, “a lot of aspects of physiology and anatomy and the mental side contribute to elite performance.” That tired old sophistry: being male in a female sport is no more unfair than Michael Phelps having flipper-sized feet. Why then, replied sports scientist Ross Tucker, has no woman ever come within 10 per cent of the best 1,000 males?

How has Hubbard even qualified for the Olympics? At 43, she is 20 years older than the field. As a teenage boy, she was a junior champion, then a mediocre adult — until, aged 35, she transitioned and entered the women’s league. Men half Hubbard’s 20-stone bulk can lift bigger weights. Yet she counts among the strongest women in the world.

Until 2015 trans women had to undergo gender reassignment surgery to compete in female Olympic sports. But LGBT activists argued that since 80 per cent retain male genitalia, this was forced sterilisation. Behind closed doors, a meeting attended mainly by trans activists, with no input from women’s sporting bodies, devised a new metric for fairness: testosterone.

Now the IOC rules state that any male who wants to punch female boxers or run the women’s 100 metres must simply get their testosterone below 10 nanomoles per litre for a year. The normal testosterone range for women, including elite athletes? It’s 0.12-1.78 nmol/L. So even when applying this one paltry measure of fairness — the level of rocket-fuel male hormone — they didn’t try for parity. Five to ten times the female norm was just fine. And what if a woman athlete used drugs to raise her testosterone to 10nmol/L? She’d be disqualified for doping.

Anyway, lowering testosterone was not chosen as an entry requirement because it’s fair but because it’s achievable. Whereas the advantages of male puberty are irreversible. Just listing them — height, weight, muscle bulk, lower body fat, hips that aren’t designed for childbirth and thus give a stronger gait — makes me livid. All that energy women athletes such as Sharron Davies and Martina Navratilova must expend restating something as clear-cut as the laws of gravity, that the Earth is round, only to be damned as bigots.

Update: the fat bastard failed to record one successful lift, so he's out. But he made his point, and kept a woman out of the competition. See Graham Linehan.