Athletes are pushing back against permitting trans competitors like Lia Thomas. What’s fair?
A record-smashing college swimmer is playing a big part in forcing sports into a reckoning about fairness, writes Rosie DiManno.
When Lia Thomas won the 1,650-yard freestyle swimming event in Akron last month, she finished 38 seconds faster than her nearest opponent.
She also beat the 500-yard freestyle field by 14 seconds.
Those are astonishing statistics. They’re also an abomination for women’s sports.
The 22-year-old transgender athlete is competing in her first season as a female. Thomas had previously competed for two seasons as a male for the University of Pennsylvania. Then she underwent more than two years of hormone therapy and joined the women’s team, where she is crushing Ivy League and NCAA records.
It is not pretty. More crucially, it is not fair.
To say so is to invite an avalanche of transphobia accusations. So be it. What’s becoming increasingly obvious is that the entirely commendable objective of promoting gender inclusion in sports is destroying fair play and erasing females. Face it, this is a thorny issue only for males transitioned to females. There’s no competitive advantage the other way.
The trans lobby is powerful, wielding far more influence than might be expected of a demographic roughly pegged at 0.3 per cent of the population. And good for them, in most of daily living. They’ve been historically persecuted, subjected to disproportionate levels of violence, shamed and isolated. Inclusivity is a noble pursuit. But it shouldn’t inflict discord, misery and — worst of all, in the narrow reality of sports —grant an unfair advantage over cisgender females.
But discredit has been heaped on the handful of athletes and former athletes who’ve been brave enough to say so. Few are willing to be overtly drawn into the roiling controversy.
Caitlyn Jenner, who, as Bruce Jenner won Olympic decathlete gold in 1976 at Montreal and is now one of the world’s highest-profile trans people, waded in last week. “We need to protect women’s sports,” she argued. She said, of Thomas: “She was born a biological boy, she was raised as a biological boy. Her cardiovascular system is bigger, her respiratory system is bigger, her hands are bigger, she can swim faster. That’s a known.”
Except, on such a fraught issue, where societal and cultural arguments trump sports imperatives, mainstream athletes have been sidelined.
“All of this woke world that we are living in right now is not working,” Jenner added. “I feel sorry for the other athletes that are out there, especially at Penn, or anybody (Thomas) is competing against because in the woke world you have to say, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is great.’ No, it’s not.”
Jenner will be ignored, likely dismissed as a reactionary for having known Republican politics.
Olympic swimming legend Michael Phelps, who has become an advocate for mental health, recently said the same thing, telling CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that he does not believe Thomas has competed fairly. “I think this brings us back to the organizing committees, because it has to be a level playing field. That’s something we all need. Because that’s what sports is. For me, I don’t know where this is going to go.”
Olympic swimming champion Nancy Hogshead-Makar broke the ice by last month declaring there was “nothing fair” about NCAA rules allowing Thomas to swim on the women’s team. “Thomas is proving that the advocates who assured the NCAA and their member schools that male puberty could be rolled back in a single year after consistent hormone treatment were wrong,” Hogshead-Makar wrote in a column for the (U.K.) Daily Mail. “The rules should follow the evidence, and in this case it is clear: Thomas should not be in head-to-head competition with biological females.”
U.S. Hall of Fame swimming coach Dave Salo decried transgender athletes competing in female divisions as “an assault on women’s sports” and the NCAA rules that permit it — year-long therapeutic suppression of testosterone — “compromises all the work that has been done by women athletes.”
Tennis goddesses Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova have slammed the NCAA rules as well.
They may have skin in the game but, hey, they’re just athletes.
To be honest, I change my mind about this practically day to day. My view cleaves to: How can we do the least wrong thing? Because, in trying to navigate this dilemma, attempting mightily to reconcile biology and fairness while supporting trans inclusion in sports, nobody is happy. It’s complicated.
Under new guidelines approved by the NCAA last week, transgender participation for every sport will be determined by the policy for that sport’s national governing body. Where there is no national governing body, the sport’s international federation’s policy will apply. (Thomas has been approved for the NCAA champions this March in the women’s 200-, 500- and 1,650-yard freestyle.) In a word, they punted.
The NCAA simultaneously updated its transgender policy, voting in support of a sport-by-sport approach, aligning with the U.S. Olympic Committee. This, it is posited, will preserve opportunity for transgender athletes while balancing fairness, inclusion and safety for all competitors.
As if.
It’s difficult to reproach sports federations which are trying very hard to reach equitable consensus on so contentious a matter. In November, the International Olympic Committee released a revised policy document aimed at making the Games more inclusive for transgender athletes and athletes with sex variations, eg. intersex. The new framework of 10 principles builds on two years of consultation, ostensibly introducing a more evidence-based approach to eligibility, yet it also puts tremendous emphasis on “self-identification” and places human rights at the centre.
The policy explicitly stresses that athletes shouldn’t be excluded solely on the basis of their transgender identity or sex variations, moving away from reliance on testosterone suppression as a one-size-fits-all measure of eligibility.
Yet a group of medical experts just last week criticized the IOC framework, claiming it ignores the science and focuses on inclusion. In the position paper, scientists linked to the International Federation of Sports Medicine and the European Federation of Sports Medicine warn the policy could lead to unfair competition. “The new IOC framework mainly focuses on a particular human rights perspective, and the scientific, biological or medical aspects are not considered,” said the 38 experts and scientists who signed the document — including two members of the IOC’s own Medical and Scientific Commission.
They warn that the guidelines could lead to athletes “self-identifying” into the gender category of their choice.
The science, in fact — and it’s a developing area of knowledge — supports what athletes instinctively know to be true: Testosterone suppression doesn’t undo the biological and physiological advantages — in bone mass, in blood circulation, lower body fat, more resistant connective tissue, larger hearts and lungs and more — that males enjoy from puberty.
These are key factors particularly in strength and power sports.
When the Olympics open on February 4, a record number (for the Winter Games) of openly LGBT will compete, according to the LGBT+ news site Outsports — at least a dozen. One is American pairs skater Timothy LeDuc, the first openly non-binary Winter Olympian.
LeDuc identifies as neither male nor female. Which is fine, all power to them. But what if, come the day, a binary figure skater wishes to assume the “female” role in a pair or any other mixed sport?
“Blades of Glory” was a 2007 Hollywood comedy that made ha-ha of that exact premise, inconceivable at the time.
It’s not so funny or inconceivable anymore.
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