Guest piece by Daniel Carpenter. 

Depending on your understanding of current, peer-reviewed, scientific literature, men and women are often defined differently. It is also evident that the polarization of this topic is responsible for delineating the area of the political sphere in which you reside. People on one side of the issue believe that being a man or a woman is a subjective self-identity and should be respected by all parties as a matter of human rights, while the other side believes that scientifically a man is an adult human male and a woman is an adult human female. This dichotomy has led to the introduction of transgender athletes competing against cisgender athletes. An important distinction must be made that I will prudently use the words “sex” and “gender” as is appropriate to ensure a proper review of the scientific literature referenced throughout. This article aims to outline the various implications of allowing biological men to compete against biological women in physical sports. I will also explore the roots of gender identity, and the role it lends to the topic being reviewed.

It always seems to escalate to the point of violence when crowds of people gather to protest one another over their views on this issue. It is best described as a hot-button issue for many involved. I hope to see more civil discourse in the future once everyone educates themselves by reading the ideas and support from both sides. We must come to a middle ground when deciding the athletic future of these transgender competitors. As of October 2022 in the NCAA directory, there are a reported thirty-three openly transgender athletes competing in NCAA sports and a total of twelve openly transgender Olympic athletes that have competed since the policy allowing them to compete in their self-identifying category was passed in 2003. Due to these rule changes, however, many cases have arisen that question the competitive fairness for biologically female athletes. I contend that biological males are scientifically proven to have a physical advantage over biological females, which would lead to unfair competitive conditions when any overtly physical sport is played at its highest level.

The existence of transgender athletes is something that should not and cannot be ignored. I believe every American should have the opportunity to pursue their athletic dreams insofar as their participation in their sport of choice does not unfairly hinder the winning chances of the other athletes involved. The LGBTQ2SIA+ community is committed to “pushing sports to be a more inclusive space.” However, a major issue that transgender athletes face is stigma from fellow competitors. Researchers who work towards rule changes at the highest-level state that, “stigma, in general, limits opportunities and can have extremely negative effects on mental and physical health [of transgender competitors].” This stigma is making its way past the field of competition and into the locker room. Transgender athletes feel uncomfortable when they either know or suspect they will face backlash for using the locker room which aligns with their identity rather than their biological sex. Yet, many biological female athletes do not wish to share a locker room with a transgender woman.

 According to a sports medicine research study from New Zealand, “transgender people were more likely to avoid situations when they were afraid of being harassed, identified as transgender or ‘outed,’ such as in clothes shops, public toilets, and gyms.” This study shows that the answer cannot be to force them into locker rooms with which they identify, but to construct a locker room as a space where they can be comfortable and free from judgment while also respecting the boundaries of others. The American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that lobbies for transgender equality, offers another perspective. They firmly stand by their belief that, “excluding women who are trans hurts all women. It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being ‘too masculine’ or ‘too good’ at their sport to be a ‘real’ woman.” Further, this myth reinforces stereotypes that women are weak and in need of protection. While an NIH article further suggests that gender identity is a social-cultural concept; the stances held by supporters of transgender inclusion go against established parameters of fairness in sports. For example, blurring the lines of sex-based categorization may exacerbate the inequity of pitting biological males against biological females in physical sports. Equality of opportunity will not lead to equality of outcome in this specific scenario. The focus of activists have progressed from basic transgender rights to addressing the stigma still held by some cisgender individuals. This transition of their main fight misses my, and many others, main point of using a biological approach which undercuts any progress they wish to make toward transgender inclusion.

There is a widespread misunderstanding among proponents of transgender inclusion in sports that fights for the visibility of intersex individuals as well. They fundamentally misrepresent the prevalence of true intersex people by claiming that 1.7% of births result in an intersex baby. This estimate, developed by Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, is categorically incorrect. The estimate includes several conditions not recognized as intersex and is not supported by the majority of clinicians. The true prevalence of intersex people, not immediately classifiable as male or female at birth, is 0.018%. That is 100x lower than the Fausto-Sterling estimate popularly used in the media. According to the more accurate statistic, only 1 in 10,000 people are intersex. The cases of surgeries being performed to change the sex of those diagnosed as intersex should remain as such. 

According to Timothy Murphy, Professor of Philosophy in Biomedical Science, the first instance of surgically transitioning an otherwise healthy baby was publicly documented by Dr. John Money in his highly criticized John/Joan Experiment. Dr. Money was a psychologist who in 1988 “was among the first to use the term [gender identity] to refer to a person’s felt identity as male or female, as distinguished from that person’s anatomical or genetic sex traits.” Shortly after, he began a study on the Reimer twins, one of whom had been surgically transitioned from male to female after a tragic accident during his circumcision which left him without a penis. It is important to note that the twin who lost his naturally occurring genitalia was not intersex and was transitioned at the behest of Dr. Money. He wanted to study the twins over the course of their adolescence to observe their development and document the outcome of his hypothesis that gender is socially constructed and can be manipulated. 

However, he unfortunately ended up sexually abusing the twins and forcing them to commit sexual acts on one another. Additionally, the twin who was forced to surgically transition never identified with the sex he was forced to live as. This experiment was the first documented medical case of an individual living their life as the opposite sex through their adolescence. The connection I have drawn between this failed experiment and transgender sports is if advocates for the participation of transgender athletes form their basis of gender identity being as valid as biological sex itself relies on ideas founded and popularized by someone like Dr. Money, then a reevaluation should be done on this issue with a modern lens. There is more progress to be made for these athletes, and a reinvented base to support their stance would help their case tremendously. That is not to say the right to lobby for transgender athletes to compete is not by its nature, inalienable. It is certainly protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution but requires improvement to negate misunderstandings.

By the time a student in America has finished high school biology, the topic of puberty has been thoroughly covered. During that course of material, testosterone is taught as the male hormone responsible for muscle growth. It is a collective understanding among scientists that testosterone is a performance-enhancing hormone found in both men and women, but in much higher concentrations in men. According to Hilton and Lundberg’s study: “the momentum and kinetic energy that can be transferred to another object, such as during a tackle or punch in collision and combat sports are, therefore, dictated by: the mass; force to accelerate that mass, and resultant velocity attained by that mass. As there is a male advantage for each of these factors, the net result is likely synergistic in a sport-specific action, such as a tackle or a throw, that widely surpasses the sum of individual magnitudes of advantage in isolated fitness variables.” 

A male’s anatomical makeup can be advantageous in comparison to a female. Lower body strength and increased lung capacity lead to faster track and field competitors and larger wingspan and upper body strength lead to faster swimmers. Upon reading the statistics, one will find that boys begin to eclipse female athletes at an early age. The gap is apparent in multiple athletic disciplines. For example, in 2017 alone, “Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Tori Bowie’s 100 meters lifetime best of 10.78 was beaten 15,000 times by men and boys…Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Allyson Felix’s 400 meters lifetime best of 49.26… men and boys around the world outperformed her more than 15,000 times.” Data from the same study revealed that every world’s best woman athlete had been surpassed in their sport by a boy under the age of eighteen, some as young as fourteen. As for the realm of powerlifting, athletes from the men’s lightest weight category, are out-lifting the strongest women in the heaviest weight category. The plethora of sports data available exhibits the competitive advantage of male competitors over their female counterparts. A renowned endocrinologist from Australia, Dr. David Handelsman, has performed many studies on the effects of testosterone on human development. After all his years of research, Dr. Handelsman said he was led to “render the unassailable personal assertion of gender identity incapable of forming a fair, consistent sex classification in elite sports.” His conclusion on the idea of asserting gender identity instead of sex to decide whom to compete against in sports as being unfair is an important finding that offers a different perspective. It is all too clear among athletic competitors that females are disadvantaged due to their biological makeup, resulting from their lack of testosterone during pubertal development. The long-held debate over whether transgender athletes should compete against cisgender athletes whose sex aligns with their gender identity will be at the forefront of the discussion regarding sports in America. Between the accounts of transgender stigma and elite college athletes being dethroned by a transgender athlete, there lies a chasm where no one has cared to venture and entrench themselves. Individuals who support the idea of transgender women competing against biological women do so from a place of deep care and admiration, yet overlook the established scientific data that raises questions about their cultural issue. Conversely, proponents of disallowing transgender participation do so from the standpoint of protecting competitive norms of physical sports. There is no moral gray area surrounding this topic. Men are stronger, have denser skeletal structures, are faster, taller, and leaner than women, and have been since the earliest fossil record of our species.