Ban biological males from competing as females — restore fairness to women’s sports

To allow biological males to compete in women’s college sports, the NCAA requires completion of 12 months of hormone therapy. However, there are now some 19 different state athletic associations that require nothing more than self-identification as a female.

As president of Western Colorado University a few years ago, I penned a brief note to the Chronicle of Higher Education warning that this personal identification threshold created a slippery slope. Any such expressed caution or criticism of these policies has been met with a reflexive woke tsunami describing such dissenters as sexist, transphobic, antiLGBTQ, and generally anti-diversity.

As the evidence has mounted in recent years, it is critical to the survival of women’s athletics that reasonable people have the courage to speak up to help correct these damaging policies.

If it was unknown at the outset, it is now clear that biological males possess dramatic advantages competing against biological female athletes. Part of why the hormone therapy is of limited relevance in NCAA sports is that, unlike Olympic guidelines, there is no maximum level of testosterone that disqualifies transgender athletes.

Further, and perhaps more importantly, male-bodied athletes have spent their entire lives developing the larger structures and muscles that are not simply erased with such therapy.

A review of the scientific literature can be found in “Competition: Title IX, Male-Bodied Athletes, and the Threat to Women’s Sports” from the Independent Women’s Forum & Independent Women’s Law Center. They conclude that in virtually every sport, allowing male-bodied athletes to compete will significantly disadvantage female athletes and deny the opportunity to compete at all for many. Importantly, this research shows that while hormone therapy can reduce muscle size and strength in biological males, it will not reduce it to female levels.

There is a long and rapidly growing list of absurd examples of the unfairness of the current approach resulting in dramatic overrepresentation of male-bodied winners in women’s athletics. The Connecticut state women’s high school track championships garnered national attention where the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons witnessed two biological male athletes alone winning 15 championships — titles that had been held by nine different girls in 2016 — denying female athletes some 85 opportunities to participate in higher-level competitions.

In the 2019-20 school year, June Eastwood, who competed as a male runner known as Jonathan Eastwood in the Big Sky Conference for the University of Montana the previous three years, began competing as a woman after undergoing a year of hormone therapy per NCAA rules. She not only won the women’s mile race in the indoor conference championships but did so by an eyebrow-raising 4½ seconds.

The most recent performances this month of NCAA Division I swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, Lia Thomas, are but the latest pronounced example. She shattered an Ivy League record in the 500-yard freestyle at the Zippy Invitational at the University of Akron. At an earlier meet this year, she placed first while obliterating school records in the 200-yard and 500-yard freestyle. Thomas also set new records in the 1,650-yard freestyle, finishing a nonsensical 38 seconds ahead of the second-place finisher.

American runner Allyson Felix, a woman with more gold medals than Usain Bolt, held a lifetime best for the 400-meter run of 49.26 seconds. Based on 2018 data, about 300 high-school boys in the U.S. alone could beat it.

Any objective person sees these advantages as both unfair and destructive to women’s sports overall. A recent Gallup poll found that some 62% of respondents believed that transgender athletes should compete in sports in the gender category with which they were born. A fair polling of college athletes would likely reflect this view even more strongly, but they are often pressured to support the policies or remain silent (see stories about Lia Thomas’ teammates).

Lastly, one solution employed in other countries is to establish a third category for inclusion of non-binary, transgender, and other groups of individuals in sports competitions. Alumni, parents, students, faculty, and particularly athletes should encourage their schools and the NCAA to act swiftly to correct the current approach and stop the destruction of women’s sports.