Ensuring Trans Women’s Rights in Sports

There has been a recent surge in a number of state legislatures to limit or even ban transgender women from participating in school sports. In late January of 2021, according to The Texas Tribune, lawmakers in Texas filed legislation that would prevent transgender girls and women from participating on single-sex sports teams that align with their gender identity. The bill applies to all trans girls and women who attend public schools K-12, as well as public colleges and universities. According to conservative advocates, the bill is intended to preserve fair competition in women’s sports. 

Texas is not the only state to create such legislation. Idaho passed a similar law last year called the, “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act”. The Montana state Senate is considering a bill called the, “Save Women’s Sports Act”. As of right now, according to the ACLU, nine other states are considering similar bills in their 2021 legislative processes. How legitimate is this concept of “saving women’s sports”?

Many conservative advocates assume allowing transgender women to compete against cisgender women provides trans athletes with an unfair competitive advantage. This isn’t necessarily true, especially in the era of modern medical treatment. First of all, prior to hitting puberty, individuals who were assigned male at birth have no advantage over individuals assigned female at birth. According to the NCAA Office of Inclusion, trans women who transition medically at a young age never undergo a male puberty, removing any theoretical competitive advantage they might have had on the basis of sex. If the transition is undertaken later in life, research shows that any average strength and endurance advantage a trans women may have arguably had over an average cisgender woman tends to be negated by roughly one year of estrogen or testosterone-suppressing hormone treatment. One must also take into consideration natural physical variation among trans women, just like among cisgender women or any other group of people. Many transgender women possess no physical advantage whatsoever compared to cisgender female athletes, regardless of hormone treatments or other forms of medically transitioning. As Connecticut track athlete Andraya Yearwood notes:

“One high jumper could be taller and have longer legs than another, but the other could have perfect form, and then do better… One sprinter could have parents who spend so much money on personal training for their child, which in turn, would cause that child to run faster.” – Andraya Yearwood

It is irrational to legislate against a theoretical physical advantage that tends to be negated completely by medical treatments commonly applied to transgender individuals, all the while failing to address other competitive discrepancies between cisgender women. If a woman is taller than other women she is competing against, should she be banned from competition? What if one competitor weighs more, or has greater muscle mass? What if a competitor has the resources to afford a private trainer or program that helps her gain a competitive edge over other athletes? These other competitive factors have never required legislation to level the playing field, so for what reason should transgender women be banned from competing in women’s sports?

In fact, Texas laws discriminating against transgender athletes may be harming the fairness of women’s sports far more than they are helping. Mack Beggs is a transgender man who, at 17 years old in 2017, won a Texas state title for girls wrestling. Beggs’ victory was met with controversy, with critics pointing to his testosterone treatments potentially giving him a competitive advantage over the cisgender girls he was wrestling against. Beggs himself would actually have preferred to be wrestling against boys. However, Texas’ University Interscholastic Scholastic League’s rules state that competitors must compete with whatever sex is indicated on their birth certificate, forcing Beggs to compete against girls. In this case, Texas laws’ failure to recognize Beggs’ gender identity may have created the exact situation they have a stated desire to avoid: individuals with a potential testosterone-based competitive advantage competing against cisgender women in women’s sports. Seemingly, a greater understanding and acceptance of transgender people’s rights and needs would help maintain fairness in women’s sports—not the other way around. 

It’s also worth briefly addressing the myth that some transgender women may actually be men posing as women in order to intentionally gain a competitive advantage in a sport. This fear led to a 40-year history of “sex verification” procedures that, as of a 2011 NCAA report, never uncovered a single incident of gender-identity based fraud. 

What policies make sense when it comes to transgender women participating in women’s sports? Based on modern medical treatments that can affirm transgender individuals’ gender identities extremely well, transgender women can live lives very similar to that of cisgender women, at least from a biological perspective, and through that, a competitive perspective. In fact, the greatest barriers between transgender women and living extremely similar lives to those of cisgender women are socially based, and creating laws that perpetuate transphobia are counterproductive. In that sense, we can see these laws as very similar to notorious “bathroom bills” aimed similarly at keeping transgender people out of public establishments aligning with their gender identities (even if public restrooms are a more physical establishment than an athletic competition). So, assuming conservative lawmakers would not seek to use “preserving fairness in women’s sports” as a manner of spreading fear and disinformation, and they truly want to ensure fair competition among individuals with matching gender identities, there is one clear course of action it makes sense to take: any state legislature that believes that transgender women have an unfair advantage in women’s sports should provide transgender women with the resources they need to medically transition. 

Since medical treatments for transgender women, such as testosterone suppressors or estrogen treatments, are proven to unequivocally eliminate any theoretical competitive advantage that transgender women may possess over cisgender women, the only unfair scenario would arise if a trans woman was unable to secure the treatments she needed, whether because of cost or any other reason. As such, state legislatures concerned with the fairness of women’s sports should pass legislation ensuring medical resources to any transgender individual who might need it, rather than spend all of their time trying to shut an entire group of people out from same-sex athletic competition by the time they start Kindergarten.