A Fight for Fairness in Sports
Transgender Female Athletes Fuel Debate as They Win Competitions
ATLANTA, Georgia — The women on the swim team at Princeton University in New Jersey spoke of frustration edging into anger. They had watched Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who swam for the University of Pennsylvania, win meet after meet, beating Olympians and breaking records.
On January 9, the team met with Robin Harris, executive director of the Ivy League collegiate athletic conference.
The swimmers, several of whom described the private meeting on condition of anonymity, detailed the biological advantages possessed by transgender female athletes. To ignore these, they said, “was to undermine a half-century fight for female equality in sport.”
Ms. Harris had already declared her support for transgender athletes and denounced transphobia. In an interview, she said that she had replied that she would not change rules in midseason. “Somehow,” a swimmer recalled, “the question of women in sport has become a culture war.”
The battle over whether to let female transgender athletes compete in women’s elite sports has reached an angry pitch, a collision of principles: The right of women to compete in high school, college and pro sports versus a movement to allow transgender athletes to compete in their chosen gender identities.
Although the number of transgender athletes on top teams is small — a precise count is elusive as no major athletic
association collects such data — disagreements are profound. They center on science, fairness and inclusiveness, and cut to the core of distinctions between gender identity and biological sex.
Echoes of those debates ripple outward from pools to weight lifting rooms and tracks, to cycling courses and rugby pitches, and to the Olympics.
Sebastian Coe, the Olympic champion runner and head of World Athletics, which governs international track, speaks of biological difference as inescapable. “Gender,” he said recently, “cannot trump biology.”
The American Civil Liberties Union offered a counterpoint in a tweet: “It’s not a women’s sport if it doesn’t include ALL women athletes. Lia Thomas belongs on the Penn swimming and diving team.”
The rancor stifles dialogue. At meets, Ms. Thomas has been met by stony silence and muffled boos. College female athletes who speak of frustration and competitive disadvantage are labeled by some trans activists as transphobes, and are reluctant to talk for fear of being attacked.
Ms. Thomas herself has chosen silence. In March, after winning the 500-yard (457-meter) freestyle in the National Collegiate Athletic Association women’s championship in Atlanta, she skipped a news conference. She has of late spoken only to Sports Illustrated, saying, “I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team.”
Even nomenclature is contentious. Descriptive phrases such as “biological woman” and “biological man” might be seen as central to discussing differences in performance. Many trans rights activists say such expressions are transphobic and insist biology and gender identity are largely social constructs.
Some trans activists try to silence critics, whom they derisively call TERFs, which stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminists. A spokeswoman for a gay rights group urged a reporter not to quote those she said held objectionable views, including Martina Navratilova, the retired tennis legend, a champion of liberal and lesbian causes. Ms. Navratilova argues that transgender female athletes possess insurmountable biological advantages.
“So I’m a ‘TERF’ — OK, that’s the way you want to go?” Ms. Navratilova said in response. “I played against taller women, I played against stronger women, and I beat them all. But if I faced the male equivalent of Lia in tennis, that’s biology. I would have had no shot. And I would have been livid.”
Former allies are split so bitterly as to make reconciliation a distant prospect. Half of Ms. Thomas’s University of Pennsylvania team sent a letter to the school, released by a lawyer, saying the swimmer had “an unfair advantage.” Brooke Forde, an Olympic silver medalist with Stanford University in California, however, supported Ms. Thomas. “Social change is always a slow and difficult process, and we rarely get it correct right away,” she stated.
America’s hyperpartisan politics has electrified this debate. Republican-dominated legislatures in 18 states have introduced restrictions on transgender participation in public school sports in recent years, according to data from the Human Rights Campaign, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group.
Michael J. Joyner, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, studies the physiology of male and female athletes. Since prepubescent girls grow faster than boys, they have a competitive advantage early on. Puberty washes away that advantage. “You see the divergence immediately as the testosterone surges into the boys,” Dr. Joyner said. “There are dramatic differences in performances.”
Beginning in the womb, men receive testosterone and puberty accelerates that. Men on average have broader shoulders, bigger hands and longer torsos, and greater lung and heart capacity. Muscles are denser.
When a male athlete transitions to female, the N.C.A.A., which governs college sports, requires a year of hormone-suppressing therapy to bring down testosterone levels. The N.C.A.A. put this in place to diminish the inherent biological advantage held by those born male. Ms. Thomas followed this regimen.
But peer reviewed studies show that even after testosterone suppression, top trans women retain a substantial edge when racing against top biological women.
When Ms. Thomas entered women’s meets, she rose substantially in U.S. national rankings. Among men, she had ranked 32nd in the 1,650-yard (1,509-meter) freestyle; among women, she ranked eighth and won a race this season by a margin of 38 seconds.
Testosterone levels do not predict performance in every sport. Chris Mosier is a 41-year-old elite athlete who transitioned to male in 2015 and had no testosterone-fueled developmental advantage. Yet he has beaten elite racewalking biological men.
Most scientists, however, view performance differences between elite male and female athletes as near immutable. Joanna Harper, a competitive transgender female runner and doctoral student studying elite transgender athletic performance at Loughborough University in Britain, agreed that testosterone gives transgender female athletes some advantage. But she spoke of inexorable emotional and psychological pressures on transgender athletes.
“Is it so horrible,” she said, “if a handful of us are more successful than they were in men’s sports?”
Reka Gyorgy, a 2016 Olympian and a swimmer at Virginia Tech University, placed 17th in the preliminaries for the 500-yard (457-meter) freestyle in the N.C.A.A. championships — a slot short of making the finals. She wrote an open letter, affirming her respect for Ms. Thomas’s work ethic. She was less forgiving of the N.C.A.A.
“This was my last college meet ever and I feel frustrated,” she wrote. “It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the N.C.A.A.’s decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete.”
To wander the stands last March at the women’s swim championships at Georgia Tech University and ask about Ms. Thomas was to draw shakes of the heads from the families of swimmers. Many emphasized that transgender people should have the same right to housing, jobs, marriage and happiness as any American.
But they talked of the thousands of hours the young women put into their sport. Why, having reached the pinnacle, should they race against a swimmer who retains many biological advantages of a male athlete?
“We have a biological male taking over women’s sports,” said one mother. “I don’t understand why those on the left politically are not supporting cis women.”
Some trans activists have pushed for a U.S. Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It potentially places biology and gender identity on the same footing in sport.
Dr. Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a law professor at Duke University in North Carolina and former top track runner, supports legal protections for transgender people but foresees havoc in the arena of sports. The legal rationale for keeping women’s sports sex-segregated would fall away. “We are bringing a male body into a female sport,” Dr. Coleman said. “Once you cross that line, there’s no more rationale for women’s sport.”
Some trans activists and academics welcome that. Anna Posbergh, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, is a former pole-vaulter who studies gender and athletes. She sees notions of gender disadvantage in sports as rooted in culture and an outdated view of what women can achieve.
“I’m beginning to question the idea of sex segregation in sport,” she said. “We need to learn to sit with discomfort.”
Ms. Thomas was not the only transgender athlete to swim at the N.C.A.A. championship. Iszac Henig, a transgender man, swam the 100-yard (91-meter) women’s freestyle for Yale University in Connecticut and attracted little attention. Yet his story challenges the argument that transgender athletes should swim under their gender identity.
Mr. Henig finished in a tie for fifth in the 100-yard (91-meter) women’s race with a time of 47.32 seconds. Had he chosen to swim against men, Mr. Henig would not have qualified for the championship.
At the event, Mr. Henig and Ms. Thomas swam in the race in which they had the greatest advantage. A father, who declined to give his name, watched Ms. Thomas in the 200-yard (183-meter) freestyle. She was, he noted, far taller than her competitors, with long legs and arms, big hands and broad shoulders. A day earlier his daughter had lost to Ms. Thomas in the 500-yard (457-meter) race, and nothing about that race felt fair to him or his daughter.
The father was polite as Ms. Thomas was announced and clapped twice. Ms. Thomas lost by a broad margin. She slipped out of the pool, sidestepped embracing swimmers and walked out, a solitary figure. The father shook his head. “In fairness to Lia,” he said, “the emotional toll.”
He added: “I look at her and see the pressure she’s under. And I think: She’s a 22-year-old kid.”