Thread by @KirstiMiller30

Most of the anti-sentiment against transgender athletes of course largely comes from a place of wanting to protect the integrity of women’s sport, rather than simple hatred and bigotry.

Frankly, given most people’s understanding of the differences between male and female bodies, this is an understandable point of view.

Prominent media personalities such as Piers Morgan, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan, as well as many former athletes like Sharron Davies, Dame Kelly Holmes, Tessa Sanderson, Martina Navratilova and Paula Radcliffe have all been outspoken in their opposition towards trans athletes.

The commentators and athletes above cite the significant differences between male and female gender gap, as reason to exclude transgender women from female sports.

Rogan, an mixed martial arts expert and commentator for the UFC says “If you’re a woman – a natural woman (cisgender) – who is not taking any male hormones or performance-enhancing drugs, you’re doing your best to compete and you’re at the top of the heap,

then someone comes along who was a man for 30 years, and decides that they’re going to be a woman, and competes as a woman, destroys records and dominates you in that sport – that’s bullshit, and that’s not competing on a level playing field” (Rogan, 2019).

Former British Olympic swimmer and silver-medallist Davies believes that “people born biologically male who transition after puberty will retain a physical advantage over their competitors” (BBC, 2019).

She also warned Olympic organisers ahead of the Tokyo Games next year to “not use women’s sport as a live experiment” and urged them delay transgender participation until the science is more settled (BBC Sport, 2019).

On the surface, these seem like fairly sound arguments. Transgender women were born into male bodies and went through male puberty. Therefore, they have insurmountable advantages over their cisgender opponents. Right?

Well… It’s possibly a little more complicated than that. After all, a transgender woman is not simply a “bloke in a dress”. Trans people undergo years of hormone therapy, replacing testosterone with estrogen which, impacts over 200 different bodily functions.

While these commentators and athletes certainly raise some valid concerns, it’s important to note that only 2 trans women athlete have ever competed at the Olympic Games, let alone won a medal or broken a record in 9 Olympic Games.

What thecommentators above fail to take into account is the fact that the IOC does not simply allow a man to rock up at the Olympics, proclaim his femininity and compete. There are in fact rules and regulations surrounding the participation of transgender athletes.

IOC Transgender Participation Guidelines

The IOC first allowed for transgender participation in the Olympics in the lead up to the 2004 Athens Games, by setting out some clear guidelines and policies.
These are the Rules Hubbard competes under being 9 years post operative.

Under these original guidelines, the following was required of transgender athletes in order to compete:

• Surgical anatomical changes (sex change surgery)
• Legal recognition of their assigned sex in home country
• Hormonal therapy for a period of 12 months prior to competition, with a limit of 10nmol/L of testosterone in blood (IOC, 2003)

These rules were altered in 2015. The 12-month period as well as the 10nmol/L testosterone restriction remains intact. However, under the new guidelines, athletes are no longer required to have sex-reassignment surgery as this....

is “inconsistent with developing legislation and notions of human rights” (IOC, 2015), nor were they required to have legal recognition of their assigned sex, due to the difficulty of obtaining this in countries where transgenderism is illegal.

Further, there had been talk of the IOC reducing the 10nmol/L limit to 5nmol/L, like the AFL did in 2017 in response to the Hannah Mouncey case.

The IOC guidelines also state that when an athlete has declared their gender as female, “the declaration cannot be changed, for sporting purposes, for a minimum of four years” (IOC, 2015).

It’s also an “incredibly rare thing to transition” according to Dr James Barrett, the leading clinician at the Gender Identity Clinic in London.

Given the 2-3 year process it takes to even change genders, it would be “incredibly impractical to just decide to be female, only to change back to living as a man at a later date” (Dawson, 2019).

This largely puts to bed fears that athletes may decide on a whim to switch genders purely for the purpose of succeeding in sport.

While this extinguishes the possibility of a “Zuby” situation occurring in professional sport – Zuby is the British rapper who

“temporarily switched” his gender so that he could film himself breaking a female deadlifting record and put it on Instagram (McManus, 2019) – it still leaves us with plenty of questions about the IOC’s policy.

First and foremost, what’s the significance of 10nmol/L? What is the difference in terms of athletic performance between 10nmol/L and 5nmol/L?

Does either restriction serve to adequately protect cisgender females from the physical advantages of men over women? How does this restriction effect athletic performance?

Further, the IOC’s fixation with testosterone limits implies that testosterone is the only factor that influences athletic performance. Is this actually the case? Or is the IOC completely barking up the wrong tree by making this all about testosterone?

And finally, what kind of competition is the IOC trying to create? In the amendment to the Transgender Participation Guidelines in 2015, the IOC states its overriding sporting objective as the...

“guarantee of fair competition”. Is it even possible to balance this objective with the rights of transgender individuals to compete?

When it comes to testosterone levels, there is massive variation amongst the male population, to the point where anywhere between 9.7nmol/L and 38.1nmol/L is considered “typical”, while “typical” females range from just 0.5-2.4nmol/L (Fretterman and Haldeman-Englert, 2019).

Wouldn’t then having the testosterone limit for transgender women at 10nmol/L (5-10 times what’s considered “typical” for women) give them a massive advantage over their cisgender opponents?

Absolutely not, this is because the androgen receptors of XX females are “highly sensitive to testosterone, requiring 6-10 times less to attain the same level of health of someone born with an XY chromosome.

This, means that not only do transgender women not have an advantage over their cisgender counterparts, but they are actually at a disadvantage due to the health complications associated with having an XY body with such low levels of testosterone.

I represented Australia in the modern pentathlon & Aquathon and played many years of Group 9 -13 rugby league for Wagga Wagga prior to my transition.

The first thing she noticed was increased levels of fatigue and energy loss after about 2 weeks because of the reduction in her testosterone & hemoglobin levels. At about the 3-month point I began to notice a change in her odour to a more “feminine” scent, as well as even

greater levels of fatigue which started to affect various aspects of my athletic performance, some more profoundly than others.

Within 3 months I couldn’t run half of what I was running before, but I didn’t notice much of a drop off in strength or the weights I could lift. My endurance was affected far quicker than strength because the treatment reduces your haemoglobin levels very quickly 3-4 months.

which reduced the oxygen in the blood and your VO2 output to well within the female range.

What’s interesting about this is that it highlights a major chink in the IOC’s armour when it comes to its policy on transgender participation. That is having a single testosterone limit across all sports & all athletes – sports that require athletes to have a variety of

different physical skillsets in order to succeed – is an extremely easy policy to poke holes in and can potentially create a lot more problems than it solves.

For example, if reducing your testosterone takes a lot longer to affect your strength than it does your endurance, how does it make sense that a sport like weightlifting has the same 10nmol/L testosterone limit and 12-month transition period as a sport like marathon running?

Further, how does a governing body like say, World Rugby, go about formulating a fair policy when their sport requires neither pure strength nor pure endurance, but a combination of both?

What about when comparing different positions? What constitutes fair for a winger? Is that different for a front rower?

The appeal of having a single testosterone limit covering all sports and all kinds of athletes is fairly obvious. It’s extremely simple in every single facet. It’s easy to test, it’s easy to explain, and it makes it easy to distinguish between what is a “woman” and what is “not”.

However, it is also fundamentally flawed in that it assumes testosterone levels are the be all and end all of athletic performance – this is not necessarily the case.

A 2014 study of the endocrine profiles of 693 elite athletes in a post-competition setting (blood samples drawn within two hours of an event) showed that 16.5% of males had what’s considered “low” testosterone, while 13% of women had what’s considered “high” levels of T.

What this shows is that there must be more to athletic capabilities than just the amount of testosterone in someone’s blood.

There’s also no doubt that decreasing testosterone levels through treatment affect’s one’s athletic performance to the point where most transgender women do not perform as they did prior to their transition.

The trouble with what the IOC is doing is that they are trying to formulate policies based on unsettled science. When talking to people on different sides of the argument, this is the one thing that everyone seems to agree on.

Whether or not trans athletes compete at an advantage we don't truly know that yet. Comparing male versus female physiology leads to misinformation as it assumes that a transgender female and a cisgender male is physiologically exactly the same – they are not.

An alternative to the status quo is banning transgender participation pending further research. This, however, is a dangerous path, and has severe human rights implications.

The banning of an entire section of the population from competing in the Olympic Games would constitute a breach Article 27 (1) of the UN Declaration of Human Rights which states:

“Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits” (UN, 1948).

What about giving transgender athletes their own spaces to compete by adding 2 extra divisions – one for transgender females and one for transgender males?

On several grounds, totally no. Firstly,on a human rights ground, if you’re a legally recognized woman like I am, why should the IOC be able to say you’re not a woman anymore?

If you’re a legally recognised woman, sport must change, not the athlete. Also, by having individual trans sports you are forcing people to be out, which makes it a privacy issue as well.

Anoth objection comes from more of a practical standpoint.

“The issue is that there haven’t been large enough numbers – I mean how many transgender women are there who want to play AFL? Certainly not enough for a competition and possibly not even enough for a team.

I believe a complete overhaul of the binary classification system in sport is needed in order to balance inclusiveness with fairness. “Sport needs to embrace the genetic diversity. There are 9 different chromosome combinations.

To try squeeze them all into two is very difficult. The female category was created around 100 years ago as a protected category because females couldn’t compete with males. 100 years has now passed and it’s not so clear cut anymore what is male and what is female.

I advocate for a system where sports are “segregated based on physical traits and abilities”, which would allow people to compete against those “more suited to their physical abilities.

Compassion and some scientific back up@is the only way forward. Scientific back up is key here. Whatever the IOC decides to do, it cannot continue to act without evidence as it has previously, nor can it continue with its one-size-fits-all testosterone limit.