Fairness in Sports

I protest Moo Deng's unnatural advantages.

Cheating Moo Deng deploys her genetic cuteness advantage.

Over on Wonkette we’ve been discussing that evergreen topic, “Are trans athletes just cheaters who hate fairness, love causing injuries, and just want to win championships that they don’t deserve and/or sneak into the wrong locker room to stare at others’ genitals?” It came up in the context of a wave of forfeits by women’s college basketball squads. Either the teams or the administrations of those universities (it’s not clear which) didn’t want to play San Jose State University because its roster includes a trans woman. Shock! Horror!

But what does one say to the conservative who insists that trans participation in sport is inherently unfair? As Brianna Amore points out at Woke AF, science doesn’t support the argument that trans people on hormone therapy have any overall competitive advantages. The study that Amore describes breaks down a number of measurements of possible advantages in strength and fitness and finds one — grip strength — which likely benefits trans women post medical transition, but multiple others like jump height and aerobic capacity that on average were areas of advantage for cis women.

So if the sport is “Sit in one place and hold onto this while 7 people try to take it away from you,” then on average trans women might have an advantage. However if the sporting event lasts long enough that you have to breathe multiple times, or if the sport involves jumping or sprinting, then (again, on average) cis women are going to come out as the winners.

In other words the science today is almost exactly what I predicted 10 years ago: mixed and muddled, with few slight advantages here or there for trans women, but also some disadvantages and no clear scientific justification for a universal ban. And to the extent that the science isn’t exactly where I predicted, it’s more favourable to cis women than I had guessed.

Does this mean that the most fit trans woman runs out of breath before the least fit cis woman, like my grandma 25 years ago (may she now rest in peace) with her 6 pack a day cigarette habit and COPD? Of course not. Some people are athletes and some are not. Some people are elite athletes and some are not.

The world, in short, is complicated. And unfortunately the jackasses who see one trans woman compete in volleyball will still shout, “See! Unfair! She’s 6’ tall!” only with more testeria and misgendering. And in a development that will surprise no one, there will be many people who fancy themselves as having thought deeply about this topic without ever having actually thought deeply about this topic who take the cries of, “No fair!” seriously.

So while the jackasses don’t deserve your attention, what does one say to the reachable people who believe they’ve adopted a nuanced and evidence-based position of NO FAIR? What is the proper response to people who just have concerns?

While one could point people to research on actual athletes and the effects of specific aspects of medical transition on elite performance, that’s actually irrelevant in most contexts. 6th grade soccer is not high school football is not Golden Gloves boxing is not Olympic bobsledding. There are multiple levels here in terms of both how elite a sport is, the extent to which injury can be inflicted by an opposing player, and even the purpose for the competition.

In the context of K-12 team sports, the comeback to, “No fair!” often is "Kids don't play sports to win, nor do we encourage them to play only for winning. We want every kid to play sports because through sports and teamwork we reduce drug use, depression and isolation, increase social skills, and put kids in an environment where they can see that working hard does have positive results, which trains them up to be good members of our capitalist society. There aren't enough trans kids to field entire leagues, so separate trans-only sports aren't an option, and yet trans kids are some of the more (sometimes most!) at risk youth that we want to play because we want them to experience those benefits. Better to have a trans kid play basketball today than be a heroin addict that your tax dollars have to pay to keep in prison later. On top of that, it's not the trans kids — or any kids — that created the system that encourages children to play sports but then singles them out for causing problems for the system. Fairness to the children from adults is far more important than our idea that some kids shouldn't play against some other kids. If we want to teach our children about fairness, we must first make sure that we, ourselves, are acting fairly."

In the context of high schoolers competing for college scholarships and, “No fair!” the response is something else. The first point is that it simply costs more money to regulate trans players in all the high schools across the country than it does to provide a few extra scholarships specifically targeted for kids who played sports in high school but did not get an athletic scholarship to college. If all the ad money spent screaming about trans people in sports were instead spent on providing scholarships, you would have far more new scholarships than there are trans scholarship athletes in the entire country. The second point is that if the concern is that people need to go to college and can’t afford it, that’s got nothing to do with trans kids. That’s the fault of adult legislators and college administrators. Setting a fair price for school and making sure that talented people can get in even if they come from poor families isn’t the job of one 17 year old sprinter. Fairness requires that adults solve that problem instead of blaming trans kids for it.

When discussing college sports, it’s important to return again to the fact that most college players don’t play to win championships. We watch college sports because the players are accomplished enough to create good, entertaining matches, but very few of these people will go on to play sports or even coach sports professionally. There are many benefits to college students, including that isolation is the number one predictor of who will drop out of college. The more people playing college sports, the more smart, socially connected college graduates the nation has. We want the most people possible playing sports. If the nation’s colleges budgeted to add one more bench player to every team in every sport, we would give far more cis people the benefits of sports participation than we could possibly take away by allowing trans people to participate as well. The money could come from donations from the people who care so desperately about fairness to women in sports, because that would be more fair than solving the problem by isolating people who are already without enough support. If the person you’re talking to doesn’t think that people would cough up the money for that, then the person you’re talking to doesn’t think that fairness in sports is the issue that people actually care about, and maybe it’s time to look at the real issue then. (Spoiler: they will not want to look at the real issue.)

In the context of sports for adults, the comeback to, “No fair!” is, "Medical transition nullifies musculature advantages -- that's scientific fact -- and the only advantages which don't change are skeletal. While being taller is an advantage for some sports, being short is an advantage for others (like gymnastics), yet we allow tall women to choose to compete in basketball and short women to compete in gymnastics where their natural skeletal advantages shine. We should expect that most trans athletes will choose to compete at whatever is fun for them, and that includes some trans athletes competing in sports where they have a skeletal advantage. Until we have height categories for all participants in a given sport, however, then barring all trans athletes in all sports because the average height of trans folks is different from the average height of their same gender peers just goes to prove that the problem people have isn't about some people having tall skeletons. It's about trans people existing. Basic fairness requires that short trans men with fat asses who would provide good weight to a bobsled without increasing wind resistance by sticking too far out the top are allowed to choose bobsledding as their sport of choice while 6’11” trans women are allowed to choose basketball as their sport of choice, just the same way that we allow cis athletes to choose to compete in the sports where they have natural advantages."

It’s also important to remember that not all adult sports have requirements about medical transition. The ones that provide big rewards of money or recognition (like the Olympics or Women’s World Cup soccer) all have strict requirements with science to back up why they think that those requirements will make trans participation in sport fair. The right thing to do is let experts set those guidelines based on the individual sport’s relevant factors. But the local roller derby league or the pub softball tournament probably don’t have medical requirements because everyone agrees it’s flat out not fair to tell people they have to let a doctor stick fingers up their vagina and sign a statement about how natural feeling their cooter is just so that they can hang out with their friends on a Saturday afternoon. Again, there’s nothing big riding on winning or losing. The purpose of these adult sports, like most sports, is not to beat other human beings into the dirt. It’s to get together and have fun.

So when we see cis people beating trans people into the dirt to win elections or internet likes while saying it’s all about fairness in sports, sometimes we simply have to stand up and ask, “What the fuck do you even know about fairness OR sports in the first damn place?”

Incidents involving sports:

Yeah, I was wrong about a thing.

And another thing about trans kids and sports

Women athletes are being abused, and the helpful media aren't helping.

Crip Dyke also writes for the delightfully cussmouthed Wonkette!