I want to start by saying I do not intend to be transphobic. I think it’s wonderful laws are finally acknowledging transgender persons as a protected class. Sports seems to be the exception—partially because it brings up issues of sex rather than gender.
My granddaughter is a swimmer and was 14th in the state at the last high school championship. There is a transgender girl (born a boy and transitioned to become a girl) on the team who was ranked 5th among the girls at the same meet.
When this transgender girl competed with the men the previous year in a near identical time (actually a couple seconds slower than the time she swam with the girls) she was not even ranked because the men were so much faster on average due to biological advantages of muscle mass, height, and whatever else.
This person had been undergoing transitional pharmaceutical therapies for a few years now and had made the decision to switch from competing with the boys to the girls after some physical augmentations to her appearance she felt would make her differences less overt.
Like most competitive high school athletes this girl plans to go to college for her sport, but is using what seems to me to be an unfair biological advantage to go from being a middle of the pack athlete to being one of the best in the state.
I’m quite torn here because of course I think this girl should have every opportunity to play sports with the group she feels most comfortable and shouldn’t miss out on athletics just because she was born transgender, but I don’t feel it should be at the expense of all the girls who were born girls and do not have the physical advantages of the male biology.
This takes things a step further than “some girls are born taller than others or with quicker reflexes than others,” because it’s a matter of different hormonal compositions that, even after suppression therapies, no biological female could ever hope to compete with.
With it just having been signed into law that transgender women competing against biological women is standard now, I’m especially frustrated because no matter how hard a biological girl works or trains, they would never be able to compete and even one trans person switching to a girl’s team would remove a spot from a biological girl who simply cannot keep up with a biological male.
What bathrooms people use or what clothes they wear are gender issues that are no one’s business and it’s great those barriers are broken down. This is a scientific discrepancy of the sexes, so seems to me it should be considered separately.
I want to usher in this new era of inclusivity and think all kids should be able to enjoy athletics, though, so hoping someone can change my view and help my reconcile these two issues.
I offer you only this one simple argument:
The differences in any athletes are in part due to their biology.
So you have to ask yourself at what point is it somehow unfair?
Is it unfair if another girl happens to be the daughter of two olympic athletes? What if they are the daughter of two overweight smokers? These people would assuredly have some genetic advantage or disadvantage. At what arbitrary point is it unfair? What if they are 6 feet tall, is that unfair? Should they get a head start if they are only 5 feet tall?
And of course the golden question -- do you think the best female swimmer can only hope to be slightly worse than a mid tier male one that transitioned? And how can you even say for sure, if the best girl never had to try to beat anybody past her level?
I say this as a man whose wife played hockey on the men's team because she kept hurting the girls. Where's the line?
The answer to that is arbitrary, and thus, we can't fairly define it. All we can do is give these girls the opportunity to compete with, and perhaps rival or beat, another athlete in honorable competition.
We have this idea that competition is always fair but it really isn't. Someone is taller, someone is faster, someone is quicker. That is what sports are -- using your strengths and minimizing your weaknesses to come out ahead of another doing the same.
It's like they say in the song, man. It's the thrill of the fight, rising up to the challenge of our rival.
I'll approach this from an unusual angle.
It's not a transgender issue. It's a categorization issue. We play sports. Why do we play sports? To compete. What are we competing for? Points, times, goals, you name it. We're all aiming for those numbers.
It apparently is well established in this thread that men have a distinct advantage over women in sport. This has been in the general common conscious for a long time, which is the main reason why we historically divided sports into women's and men's. Well, we're now seeing that the 2-gender split doesn't fit every situation (it never did, but it was more than good enough for the time).
What if we adopted a frame & weight-based system like boxing* [see my first edit for clarification], that way people who don't fit a particular gender definition don't get their athletic categorization conflated with their expressed gender? It would make it less confusing when we talk about individuals who don't fit a typical mold - this could pave the way for making it easier to classify surgically or prosthetically-enhanced, drug-enhanced, and even genetically enhanced athletes going forward. We just need to establish a more stats-focused classification system first, then we can make any necessary corrections and additions to it as we go. Just gotta change to categorizing for performance potential in general, not merely gender sex (edit 2: I mean sex here, not gender).
