A Modest Idea for the Inclusion of Trans People in Sports

It's all about a middle ground

I know this is a prickly subject and that any argument made is automatically filtered through a left-right lens to mark points in the petty culture war raging through the West (yes, France is starting it’s own a-woke-ening, albeit from a post-colonial perspective). However, I still want to make my argument, so bear with me as I plow through this thing.

I’m obviously no scientific expert; I have absolutely no training in any field pertaining to biology or medicine. I do have some experience in sports: I played high-school basketball (for what that’s worth), spent over 20 years in gyms and have studied martial arts for over ten years. I train 5 or 6 times a week, clocking in almost 10 hours between Monday and Saturday, and I’ve also competed on the amateur circuit. I’ve had to do weight cuts and runs at the crack of dawn; I’m not saying I’m a good athlete, but I do take it seriously. Make what you will of that.

Nevertheless, I feel that when we talk about “trans inclusion in sports”, we tend to import culture-war ideology into a field that has little or nothing to do with ideas like Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. E.D.I. is a concept based on equality of outcomes and representation: If a company or a specific field lacks women, minorities or oppressed people, the workplace is deemed “problematic” and should address the inequality, noticeably through targeted hiring strategies. The basic idea behind E.D.I. is that we should have 50% women CEOs, engineers, scientists, etc., and that said representation should be applied to all kinds of “oppressed peoples”: racial minorities, disabled people, and others.

The problem, of course, is that sports aren’t about equity or equality. They are about promoting fairness, a concept that appears on the boilerplate of the International Olympics Committee, to name the biggest sports organization in the world.

What is the difference between “fairness” and “equity”?

Simply put, if you focus on an equality-of-outcomes approach as the one used to measure discrimination in the workplace, this means that if Lebron James and me step on the basketball court for a one-on-one game, you’d have to weigh Lebron down by tying a 50-pound dumbbell around his neck, to make sure he can’t jump higher than I can.

This is obviously ridiculous, because sports aren’t about “equity”, they’re about guaranteeing a “fair playing field” by making sure Lebron doesn’t travel or carry the ball while I’m called by the referee for it. It means we both get the same set of rules, and the same chance, by starting the match on equal footing. Whatever happens from that point on is fair game.

This brings us to the trans issue. The question seems to be, “do trans women have an unfair advantage when practicing sports with biological women?”. The answer to this is pretty straightforward: we don’t really know. There haven’t been enough studies conducted one way or the other to say there is a clear-cut answer to this question. It’s a very recent issue, and we need more longitudinal studies to be absolutely sure what the answer is.

However, this isn’t to say we don’t know anything about male-to-female trans people’s physical performance.

What the studies say

One of the most cited studies tackling this question is Robert et al.’s (2020) longitudinal study of 29 trans men and 46 trans women in the U.S. Air Force during over 2 years. They found that gender-affirming hormones minimized the athletic gap between trans and cis athletes, but not enough to compensate for the advantages of going through puberty as a male. Even though the rates of doing push-ups and sit-ups between the trans and cis women groups became pretty much the same after two and a half years, they found that trans women still ran 12% faster than the biological females (read the study, here).

Does this mean trans women have an advantage? Again: maybe, because Dr. Timothy Roberts himself also declared that when you put the 12% faster running time into perspective, it doesn’t seem that much since, “to be in the top 10% of female runners, you have to be 29% faster than the average woman. And to be an elite runner, you've got to be 59% faster than the average cis woman”.

Another study, conducted by Joanna Harper (who happens to be a trans runner herself), concluded that the strength advantage of a trans athlete does not disappear with hormone therapy treatment, but endurance was reduced to the level of biological females due to a decrease in hemoglobin levels.

Finally, a study conducted in Sweden in 2021 found that "muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed".

I could go on, but the reality is that these studies are far from conclusive. More longitudinal research needs to be conducted, and other factors have to be measured. Whoever tells you they have a direct and transparent answer to the question of “the advantage of trans women in sports” is being simplistic or carrying water for their ideological team. The same can be said for the blanket term “sports”, which focuses on strength and endurance; what happens with sports where technique trumps brute force? You can see how the issue is complex when you break it down…

Let’s talk about trans, baby

What should we do with this data, or lack thereof? It seems obvious that some trans athletes do have an unfair advantage: think about transgender cyclist Emily Bridges, who competed as a male (and won) in February 2022 and expected to compete as a female in April 2022, since she met the testosterone level requirements. Or the most jarring example to me: A transgender fighter named Fallon Fox, who competed as a female in a high-level violent contact sport like MMA, yet didn’t even tell her opponent she had undergone a transition before the fight. Maybe I’m old-school, but that just doesn’t seem fair to me.

The flip side of all of this, is that I believe in an inclusive society, where people can live, practice sports and work however they want. Saying something like, “sorry, trans athletes, we don’t have anything to offer you, here”, is an aberration. As a society and a culture, we can certainly do better than that, or we must at least try.

A humble idea

Everybody knows trans people are a small, small minority, so the snickering right-wingers making remarks like “start your own division or league”, is plain silly. There aren’t even enough men for a 165-pound division in the UFC for Christ’s sake; how do you expect us to start a “trans-only” league?

It’s also true that having an advantage over the competition doesn’t mean trans athletes will always win against biological women: Fallon Fox did lose via TKO ground-and-pound to an unknown fighter, once.

This is where I think we can take a page out of the book of competitive Jiujitsu tournaments. The martial art, which pits competitors against each other in a point-based or submission grappling match, has two different categories: weight categories and an “absolute” category.

In jiujitsu, competitors are divided by belts (which refer to your technical level and comprehension of the sport) and by weight classes (which tend to increase every 6 kilos or so). Competitions are also divided by gender. This leads someone to fight in the “female blue-belts under 65 kilos” category, for example. It really is a great way to gauge your level against similar competitors.

However, the “absolute” category does away with weight limits. “Absolute” means that every female blue belt in the tournament will fight in direct-elimination matches to determine the winner. If you know nothing about jiujitsu, you’ll probably think the heavyweights will win each division: the 120 kilos purple belt will obliterate his 72 Kgs opponent. Well, you’d be wrong. Even though strength plays an important role in a match, technical proficiency largely trumps brute force (here’s a match between a rooster weight and a heavyweight, if you need proof).

Why not then use “absolute” categories as a temporary solution to allow trans athletes to compete? Since there aren’t enough people to start trans-only categories, the addition of an absolute seems to me like a nice compromise: allow biological females to compete in their categories while adding an extra competition where trans athletes could test themselves.

I know this isn’t the final answer to the question of trans-inclusivity in sports. However, while the data and studies solve the problem of unfair advantages in female competitions, an absolute category could satisfy all the contestants, including trans athletes, without penalizing biological females whose outcomes (and scholarships, sponsoring and monetary compensation) would still be taken into account in the biological-females only, category.