Michael Phelps won 28 Olympic medals, the most of any Olympic athlete in any sport ever. How? Willpower, training and a distinct genetic advantage. Phelps’s wingspan is three inches longer than his height, giving him propulsion way beyond the norm. Combined with an abnormally long upper body, short lower body, and size 14 feet, he was built for speed in the pool.
And there’s more: for no particular reason, Phelps’ body produces half the lactic acid of an average swimmer, vastly improving his resistance to fatigue and hastening recovery time between swims.
Yet nobody has ever suggested that Phelps should be excluded from competition, handicapped or restricted to a special category where he could only compete against other athletes weirdly augmented by the genetic lottery.
Neither has anyone advocated that runners with African heritage should not be allowed to run, or should start a few metres behind their non-Black co-competitors, because, let’s face it, they almost always win. To suggest such a thing would be offensively racist, obviously.
We are comfortable with these exceptions to the most fundamental principle of sport: a level playing field. Higher, stronger, faster — we accept these as being influenced not just by who is most deserving of victory but also, and often largely, by genetic advantage.
The percentage of contracted players in the professional National Rugby League men’s competition with Pasifika origin or heritage was reported as 48% in 2018 and rising. Why? They’re built for it. At junior level, both rugby union and rugby league have been managing the size disparity by shifting towards grading by weight rather than age, but at adult level it’s just accepted that Pasifika players are blessed by natural ability.
International rugby league has just followed FINA, the international ruling body for swimming, in ruling that its women’s competitions are now closed to female athletes who transitioned from male to female after the age of 12. The practical effect is to exclude trans women altogether — a blanket ban.
Predictably, the shouty debate over trans athletes’ inclusion, or “save women’s sport” if you prefer, has turned up several notches to deafening. Everyone has an opinion, wielding their shaky or non-existent grasp of “the science” one way or the other. FINA, for its part, has declared that it is squarely following the science, which it clearly is not.
Biology is not straightforward. The Sydney Morning Herald reported a leading Australian endocrinologist, Ada Cheung, making this simple point: “We actually don’t know if there’s a biological advantage for trans women over cisgender women because the science is not clear … no research has really been done into trans female swimmers or any elite athletes that are transgender. The jury is out.”
FINA was driven by the moral panic over American trans swimmer Lia Thomas’ recent win in a national college championship. No such panic over Katie Ledecky, who two days ago won her fourth 1500-metre freestyle world championship, finishing more than 14 seconds ahead of the runner-up. She holds all of the ten fastest 1500-metre times ever, and she would easily make the qualifying mark for the US men’s Olympic team.
Australian swimmer Cate Campbell, who participated in the FINA decision, argues that it strikes the right balance between inclusion and fairness, “the cornerstones of sport”. It clearly doesn’t; it rejects inclusion altogether, and only respects fairness if you accept one fundamental but entirely contestable notion: that gender is binary.
Sport is built on an assumption: that we are each a man or a woman, from birth. We accept every “natural” deviation from the level playing field that that dichotomy supposedly guarantees, from Phelps’ wingspan to Simone Biles’ abnormal flexibility. What we don’t accept, can’t accept, is that the divide is not clean.
It’s a conversation we just don’t want to have. It is uncomfortable, awkward, and challenges extremely basic assumptions that underpin human history and theology. It is anti-biblical, anti-what pretty much every religion teaches.
We have clues to solutions that would not require us to pretend that the people who don’t fit within the binary gender divide don’t exist, or to deny them the same civil rights we assume for everyone else. Little kids of all genders running around a rugby field, based on their size and nothing else, offer such a clue.
If we could free ourselves from the fixed mindset that gender is immutable and one or the other, which is what the science in all its ambiguity actually tells us to do, then we could begin thinking about the whole issue in entirely different terms.
I know that won’t happen, because too much is invested (in every way) in the maintenance of the gender divide — and it is way too hard to contemplate anything else. So we are doomed to continue an argument with no resolution, whether we approach it with the tools of testosterone, estrogen and genital inspections, or the irreconcilable principles of inclusion and exclusion (which is what we mean when we say “fairness”).
It’s mindless and pointless and it hurts the most vulnerable members of our society. But, on with the show.
The only consistent conclusion from your framing of the debate is to abolish all categories within sports: no sex categories, or gender ones, or categories by age, able bodied-ness or weight. I mean, the boundaries between child & teen & adult are not uniform across all individuals, nor those between able-bodied and disabled. So just have a sport, with those in the top and professional leagues those who are fastest, strongest, most enduring. Below them, adult women and teenage boys on the same teams (https://boysvswomen.com/#/) for example; and old men and teenage girls on the same teams too? So fair.
But you will find the second biggest defenders of womens’ and girls’ sport to be males with Synthetic Sex Identities, like transwoman. Because for some reason, the core demands of “trans rights” are not actually inclusiveness: they are to take what women & girls have for themselves (single sex spaces, services & sports) off of them.
they have weight divisions in boxing etc – why not in other sports?
Or ban sports competition altogether. I’ve long been a fan of Michael Bradley’s thinking, but in this case I don’t get it. There are of course outliers in sport. Ledecky in the 1500m, and yet she would be lapped in the men’s event. In what context would it seem reasonable to ban her from a women’s event because those with the advantage(?) of trans gender are banned. We don’t allow the parents to run in school sports carnivals. This is a complex argument. We must be careful to not open ourselves up to the misogynist wing of the lunatic fringe. Anti women’s progress in sport, and trans .. they’ll have a field day with this. Respect women in sport, respect trans’ rights, respect the science, and we’ll see where it lands.
Trans men are men, trans women are women. Not difficult
Risible irrational rote repetition.
Really?
Sounds like alliteration to me.
I’ve been tempted to quote Inigo Montoya in response to them.
Yes, not difficult. A fine argument were it relevant.
You are very persistent in your denial of scientific evidence. Why not do a bit of research, Mr Warbeck, before displaying your lack of knowledge?
You describe Masters Swimming….
Yes, doing away with the categories altogether in competitive sport is the only way out of this morass. I have to laugh when people complain that elite women footballers earn less than elite men footballers. Well, they’re not as good, and their competition is of a lower standard.
I thinks it’s actual more about who’s watching and how easy is it to sell them something.
Irrelevant. Elite women athletes put in the same effort as their male counterparts. Power disparity should not be lightly brushed aside as a birthright.
Well you say “it’s the only way” but is it right for the vast majority to have to give way for a tiny but noisy minority ? I don’t think so.
Another nasty reference to a ‘tiny, noisy minority’. You’re almost certainly white, middle class, right wing and male. Guess what? In the not too distant future you will lose your hegemony and become part of a tiny, noisy minority. Is that what you’re afraid of?
My conclusion was to start identifying as Pasifika so opponents will give up the ball.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the decision, this is a specious argument. Neither Phelps nor Ledecky were trying to compete in a competition which was deliberately framed to exclude someone with their genetic advantages. This is the case with natal males in female events.
I agree. And the author of this article knows this, but he’s a lawyer….it’s what they do ?
He’s a good example for the sound reasoning of Dick the Butcher (Henry VI PtII, Act IV,scene 2).
Exactly. Someone losing out to Phelps knows that he was beaten by a better man, while someone losing out to Ledecky knows she was beaten by a better woman.
Ledecky was beaten by a better women on the day;
Cate Campbell.
Cate Campbell’s full speech to FINA
Bla bla bla, yeah, nah. Ultimately it IS all about winners, not losers- it’s COMPETITIVE ie SPECTATOR sport and isn’t that the problem? So “elitist”!
So the ‘fear’ is that allowing trans females to compete in women’s sport will stimulate a rush of males transitioning to gain a genetic advantage? What nonsense! Do you realise how this sort of prejudice harms transgender people? Or is it you don’t care?
whether or not that is the ‘fear’ is irrelevant. it is whether there is an advantage, which despite the framing of this article, there most definitely is.
Please explain “…this sort of prejudice..” on which you emote.
Did you mean ‘plain facts‘?
Here is the mechanism by which one transitions in Australia today:
Say these five words “I identify as a woman “
That’s it, you’re done.
There’s no evidence of what, if any, hormones the man who won the Yarra ranges women’s downhill skateboarding was on. Pretty sure it wasn’t tested anyway. The man who won the WA women’s longboarding says he’s on hormones, but who actually checks, and how much difference does it make anyway?
Gender Identities don’t play sport. Bodies play sport.
“Natal males”? What specious nonsense is this? Trans men are men, trans women are women. Anything else is bigotry writ large,
I take it that’s “natal” as distinct from “gauteng” and “limpopo”.
The Pretended doth protest too much.
Don’t bother arguing with them. Nasty little transphobes are legion on Crikey. They are pathetic relics of a bygone era. Hopefully they’ll start going away soon.
No not at all. Just sick of the extreme fringe element banging on about something the majority of the population don’t agree with or don’t care about. But by voicing either of these standpoint we are branded as “evil” transphobes ….like you just did.
No, it’s the ignorance and prejudice of comments such as these that annoy reasonable people. There are those who are perhaps more informed than you are, or actually know people who have the victim of this ignorance, rather than pontificating from a position of blissful ignorance. You’re not evil, just uninformed. The world is way more complex than you think.
As the scientist you clearly are, to make such a bold statement, what is your opinion, sorry your scientific conclusion, regarding intersex people, or those born with an extra chromosome? Or those babies who are born with genitalia that does not clearly relate to one sex or the other and have their gender decided by doctors who then perform surgery on them to support their decision but subsequently discover it was the wrong decision? Because gender is not just about genitalia; it’s also about your brain, which, if you yourself used it for learning stuff, might tell you that gender is not what you seem to think it is.
Anything else is bigotry writ even larger.
The other approach is to give up on elite sports altogether. Let’s face it: all it’s really about these days is the almighty dollar, regardless of gender. And an excuse for sports betting. Very little to do with normal folk, binary or otherwise.
In fact, pretty boring, all things considered.
Hear! Hear!
Money buys “favours” – sport included.
I still have yet to locate an instance of F2M transgender person competing in male only categories. Anyone? Anywhere?
Schuyler Miwon Hong Bailar, 2 May 1996 is an American swimmer, and the first openly transgender NCAA Division I swimmer. He is also the first publicly documented NCAA D1 transgender man to compete as a man in any sport.
Harvard University College Swimming team: Breaststroke, Individual Medley, Butterfly
Here is a Twitter thread by biologist Emma Hilton analysing the Phelps Gambit beloved of Biology Denialists.
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1374331296143581186?s=20&t=tsks8ulZZD641Ue3Ttwlrw
Dr Hilton mentioned in a recent podcast with Helen Staniland that she spent the early part of her career debating the biology denial of creationists. And decades later she has to now debate biology denialism again, from gender ideologues. Truly, anti-materialism and plain ignorance know not left or right – it’s available for all to use.