It's not about women's sports
It's not about fairness or science either.
Last year on National Girls and Women in Sports Day, I was in San Francisco speaking to a group of high school students, parents, and coaches. I talked about how the day was meant to celebrate the power of sport to unlock the limitless potential of girls and women while continuing to push for equitable access to sports for all girls and women.
I talked about how lucky I was to be introduced to sports. My parents didn't necessarily prioritize organized sports but due to a policy at my school that everyone had to play a sport, I got involved in team sports.
How what I really loved about sports were the intangibles — the friendships with my teammates, the confidence gained, the sense of self-efficacy.
How amazing it's been to witness more girls take part in physical activity and sports and more women stay active longer.
And then this year. It felt the opposite of celebratory as the President signed an executive order barring transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports at all levels, including youth sports. (For those keeping track, this is his fourth executive order designed to attack the very existence of trans people.)
Then, the NCAA preemptively complied with the order. Then, World Athletics, the governing body for track and field, announced it was launching a new “consultation process” to determine eligibility conditions for the women’s category and new rules for transgender athletes and athletes with differences of sex development (basically bringing back sex testing). Not to mention the 20+ states that have enacted laws to ban transgender youth from participating on teams aligned with their gender identity or World Triathlon’s new policy that essentially bans trans women from competition.
I look at all of this and cannot wrap my head around how, on the one hand, we can talk about all the incredible and beautiful things that sports makes possible and, on the other hand, work so hard to actively take away people’s rights to play. We’re talking about denying kids and adults the right to play sports because it’s not “fair.”
I think about these trans kids who just want to play sports. I think about Sydney Bauer’s story for whom rowing literally saved her life. But, as she writes, “My desire to play sports deems me a threat because how dare I?”
All of this made it hard to get excited about Nike’s Super Bowl ad or the flag football ad because they felt so hypocritical.
Sports has become a zero sum game, especially at the youth level, where the youth sports industrial complex has us all convinced and obsessed with the idea of our kid deserves a college scholarship or a NIL deal or become an Olympian that we pit trans girls and women as threats.
What are we teaching our kids about fairness when fairness comes at the cost of someone’s humanity? Because that’s what the anti-trans legislation and policies are about — denying the humanity of trans people and pushing them out of society.
It’s not about saving women’s sports
Let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture:
12% of trans girls and 14% of trans boys play sports.
Of the more than 510,000 NCAA athletes, fewer than 10 are transgender. Less than 10.
Like all humans, trans athletes vary in their athletic ability.
If these efforts were really about saving or protecting women’s sports, we’d actually devote time, energy, and money to invest in the infrastructure that women’s sports needs. We’d pay athletes better so that they don’t have to work while also training to be an elite athlete. We’d rout out sexual harassers and abusers. We’ve invest in better clothing and gear for girls and women at all ages and levels of sport. We’d invest in more research so that we can keep athletes healthy and injury free. We’d pay journalists to cover women’s sports, and not just the fluff stories. We’d continue to invest in grassroots efforts to bring sports and physical activity to more girls and women, not fewer. We’d do so much more.
But as Rodger Sherman wrote:
“Over the past decade, it’s become clear that the women’s sports debate was merely an entry point to broader transphobic bigotry. It’s hard to get too upset about someone else’s gender identity. It doesn’t affect anybody else! Who cares? But then you wonder… “are trans women better at volleyball than cis women? Seems reasonable!” And every time a sensible people treated that question as a legitimate one, it gave the anti-trans movement cover, and allowed them to push the envelope a little bit farther.”
And in pushing the envelope, they’re also pushing the envelope in allowing all women and our bodies to be policed, using rhetoric to draw a bright line around who’s deemed acceptable as a woman — not too muscular, not too tall, not too strong, not too fast, but pretty enough. If you don’t fit the mold of what “feminine” or “woman” is supposed to look like, it calls into question your very existence and it puts every woman at risk. That last part in particular disproportionately impacts Black women, women of color, and nonbinary people in addition to trans women.
Trans people have always existed and they don’t dominate in any sport. Rather, these calls to “protect women’s sports” come at a time when women’s sports are booming not just financially but in stature, power, and influence. We’ve seen rhetoric and clamp down on women happen before in history when women start to get a foothold in sports and it’s seen as a threat to the status quo in sports (sports as a sanctuary built by and for men) and femininity.
(I highly recommend this podcast series from Rose Eveleth on the history of gender verification and sex testing in sports.)
IDK maybe we should keep men out of women’s sports as Lindsay Gibbs writes:
“In fact, right now, women’s sports are absolutely thriving. Plenty of men, inside and outside of women’s sports, are threatened by that success. Those are the men we need to keep out.”
What about the science?
A lot of the arguments cited in the anti-trans legislation and policies center on the rhetoric of “science” and “biological sex.” Most of us have been taught to think about sex as a binary attribute, largely determined by our so-called sex chromosomes. But the differences between female and male bodies entail more than just a pair of XX or XY chromosomes.
(Turns out the scientists who discovered the sex chromosomes at the turn of the 20th century didn’t want them to be called sex chromosomes at all. They thought it was an oversimplification that a single pair of chromosomes could control sex.)
It’s becoming clearer that what’s traditionally considered biological sex exists on a spectrum. There’s a lot of different factors that comes into play — genes, internal and external genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, hormones and one’s ability to respond to hormones — and there’s a lot of diversity in the actual physical expression of these characteristics.
I’ve talked about how little research exists on women in the sports science literature (approximately 6% of sports sciences studies focus on women and women make up 34% of research participants). When it comes to research on trans athletes, it’s minimal and studies are far from definitive.
The thing with science and scientific studies is that it’s also easy to cherry pick. I can find a study that says one thing about transgender women’s athletic performance and another that refutes it. When you consider that the pool of research participants and studies is limited, it means there’s a lot of noise in the data.
This 2024 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine demonstrates the complexity of assessing transgender athletes’ physiology and sports performance. While trans women athletes had greater handgrip strength (which is used as an indicator of overall muscle strength) compared to cisgender women, they were found to have decreased lung function, performed worse on countermovement jumps (a common test to measure power), and lower cardiovascular fitness.
Yet, rules around sports participation are based on physiological and biological criteria like hormone levels as if it is definitive and the only thing that matters.
Plus, the idea that you can boil a person’s essence down to their hormones, chromosomes, or genitalia is reductionist. We’re talking about real people and human beings. It prioritizes biology and genetics and strips people of their humanity. It limits our ability to exist as a whole person, to express ourselves fully.
We are more than just chromosomes and hormones. We are beautiful, messy human beings and we all deserve the right to play and to experience the joy and benefits that sports and physical activity affords — trans girls, trans women, everyone.
Links & Things
Just a couple because I’m tired.
This is why you should care about the cuts to indirect costs from NIH research grants.
If you want someone to walk you through calling your members of Congress, you need this. (It’s super simple and makes the whole process so much less intimidating.)
Thanks for being here. More soon.
Christine
Fantastic piece!
I love this article so much Christine. My thoughts lately: I'm 5'10" with very long legs, massive lung capacity, and a genetic pre-disposition for building muscle more easily than most of my fellow athletes. Should I step back from competition because I have an unfair advantage over the average person assigned female at birth? It's obviously not a real question, but it does make me wonder whether women's sports is now on the path towards an untenable and ultimately hellish scientific process of elimination. I truly feel for the handful of ciswomen athletes who have lost trophies to transwomen but reductive biological determinism has never, ever moved society in the direction of fairness.