February 10, 2025 ; Catergory: essays
I’m not seeking to provide an answer to the trans sport debate in this short essay. I simply haven’t assessed my thoughts in the area deeply enough to say with strong confidence where my opinions lie - just sympathies to certain (pro-trans) sides of the aisle. Nonetheless I want to write about the issue at hand mostly because I believe that the centring of trans women in sports misses that the issue this crowd interfacing with is larger than just trans women - and that tensions in this domain are symptoms of a larger unsolved problem in sports generally. Finally it should be said from the outset that I take it that trans women are women. Your take on this stance will directly determine what you understand the trans women in sports debate to even mean, and I’m not interested in arguing against those who believe ill informed things about trans people.
Let’s start by taking the focus off trans people and focus in on a philosophical question: what is the purpose of sports? I believe that society at large holds two competing answers to this question. Firstly, that sports is about finding and celebrating the absolute best amongst us - to reward those who are the upmost in human performance. A good example of this philosophy in practice is Michael Phelps - who is noted to have many genetic abnormalities that happen to align in such a way as to make him an abnormally good swimmer. These traits by far and away make him objectively better suited to excelling at swimming than his competitors - something borne out in his impressive sporting record - but this is okay because, of course, he’s achieving the epitome of sporting excellence. He is the human peak in swimming and under this philosophy is rewarded appropriately.
There is another philosophy, which imposes notions of fairness unto sports. Post-enlightenment, liberal society has been fully sold on the idea of the meritocracy - that one can from sheer work and dedication alone be rewarded in return for their efforts. Of course, the idea of meritocracy generally has its flaws and one of those is presupposing an equal starting point - which as we’ve seen in sports isn’t the case. A response to this realisation is to simply accept it and carry on - buying into that first philosophy fully - but we might instead be tempted by a notion of fairness in sports. That is to say, that we should intervene somehow to rectify an imbalance. The primary way that we’ve seen this concern win out is in the establishment and perpetuation of women’s sports.
It’s historically been the case that women have had, on average, a disadvantage in sports compared to men. Putting aside the social, political and historical barriers that have existed (and still do exist) for women entering sports - a big contributor to this historical divide has been the higher average levels of testosterone found in male populations as compared to female ones. Testosterone being a hormone that generally aids one in many sports due to helping one to build and retain muscle mass (alongside making one on average taller if present during puberty). If we subscribed to a raw talent view, we may find that in many sporting domains women rarely win in comparison to men. This outcome may be disfavourable for several reasons, whether because is has a knock on effect of discouraging women from sports, conveying a societal belief in women’s inferiority for not excelling in a made up human practice, or maybe you’re committed to some higher investment in general notions of fairness in outcome. Whatever the justification may be, we’ve decided that in this specific case we can cede some ground to the fairness camp and create women’s sports divisions so that they can be recognised more frequently for achievements within their own domain.
So we arrive at the current configuration for modern sports. In theory it works great! We still measure for raw talent but segregate where it seems appropriate in the name of fairness. In comes Caster Semenya, a South African athlete competing in middle-distance running. She’s abnormally good at it. Much like Phelps she’s genetically far better suited for running than her competitors. One of those ways? She’s got incredibly high levels of testosterone for a woman. In fact it’s within ranges for the average man. We’ve come across a dilemma! As mentioned before, men on average have much higher testosterone levels then women do on average but that needn’t mean it never happens. Caster Semenya causes us a problem because she is someone assigned female at birth, who identifies as a woman (so is a cis woman) and yet has broken past the barrier we’ve used to segregate the sexes. If we care about raw human talent then we should surely accept her as she is and let her compete - but on the flip side it seems we’d be compromising on our ideals of fairness to let her compete. So which is it?
Well maybe we attempt to side step the issue entirely - “Caster Semenya is in fact intersex, not female, so she shouldn’t be placed with non-intersex women”. Now, in mentioning the existence of intersex people we’ve opened a whole new can of worms. Unfortunately the sex binary isn’t as comprehensive as we’d like it to be and the splitting of people into the male/female sex binary doesn’t do justice to the nuance of human existence. In sports we typically don’t really consider men who are intersex as they typically aren’t intersex in ways that make them better at sports but for women this is more common. I don’t claim to answer here what the right position is to take on intersex people in sports - rather point out that this is a place wherein notions of raw talent and fairness meet at a dialectic.
If we move the domain back to non-intersex women we still might find ourselves porting the issue back with us. After all, not all women have the same levels of testosterone themselves. There isn’t a single typical level of testosterone in the female body but rather an expected range - but even this range isn’t binding. Those with PCOS may have higher levels of testosterone naturally for example. Should these people be disqualified on the basis of fairness, or should their genetic abnormalities be seen as valid advantages one can have for the purpose of excelling in human achievement?
And it’s now that we can turn our attention back to trans women in sports. Women who have previously lived with higher testosterone levels that they may or may not have benefitted from (passively through puberty or actively through training) who now exhibit a female hormonal pattern (and depending on the amount of time passed having experienced changes from that such as decreased muscle mass). Certainly a unique case but as we’ve seen isn’t itself a unique problem. In fact trans women in sports really just is another edge case that exposes the clashing of these two competing ideals of fairness and talent - where they don’t completely align. We could simply see trans women as women who have a unique advantage in sports due to a genetic abnormality (having been born AMAB) after all. Once more - I don’t seek to answer what it is we ought to be choosing as the right answer to the trans sports question, but if there is an answer then I think it’s found not in answering within the specific domain of trans people but rather within broader questions on the nature of sports by in large and asking whether the current organisation of sports is really the best we have in order to manifest what it is exactly we want from sports as a human practice.