Trans athletes facing growing obstacles
Nearly impossible to keep up with legal challenges in the U.S.
Emma Cameron had been competing in trail and ultra running as an out trans woman since she began transitioning in 2017, and for the most part she didn’t face much discrimination while doing so.
Sometimes she finished on the podium, or even won, and sometimes she didn’t. This past year has been more hostile, though, as legislative bills around trans athletes started cropping up. The author of one of those bills, in Cameron’s home state of Wisconsin, even used her as an example as to why new laws are needed, posting her face on social media and seemingly asking supporters to attack her.
Lately, it has been near impossible to keep up with the legal challenges trans athletes are facing in the United States. Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee enacted laws banning trans athletes from girls’ school sports in March, while Alabama and West Virginia did so at the end of April. North Dakota and Kansas both had similar bills vetoed by their governors. This is all amid comments by trans woman and former athlete Caitlyn Jenner, who is also running for governor of California, where she stated she opposes “biological boys who are trans competing in girls’ sports in school.”
Closer to home, Digit Murphy, head coach of the Toronto Six of the NWHL, faced backlash on Twitter when it was pointed out that she supports the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, a group that advocates for “affirming girls’ and women’s sport while including transgender athletes.” Screenshots from the organization’s site circulated, including a statement that “Just one or two trans girls who are decent athletes will displace a lot of females,” which was criticized primarily for the implication that trans women don’t count as women.
Some trans athletes also support the group.
According to Ottawa cyclist and trans woman Evelyn Sifton, a lot of the arguments against trans women competing in sport appeal to truthiness, or the idea that because something sounds like it makes sense, it must be true. For example, she says, the argument that “trans women are stronger because they, quote unquote, used to be men.”
Joanna Harper is a Canadian researcher now based in the U.K. who is trying to debunk some of these arguments. She’s also a runner, trans woman, and author of the book Sporting Gender: The History, Science and Stories of Transgender and Intersex Athletes.
One of the main findings in her research so far has to do with hemoglobin (the protein the blood that carries oxygen). Hemoglobin levels change very quickly in trans women on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) from male levels to female levels. These levels have a particularly big impact in endurance sports.
Cameron has noticed the impact on her own race times. Her best marathon time prior to transitioning was 2:48, which was 17 minutes less than the Boston marathon qualifying time for men of her age, 3:05. Her time after eight months of HRT was 3:18, 17 minutes less than the Boston marathon’s women qualifying time of 3:35. Not everyone will happen to have such precise time differences, but the general change for Cameron was obvious.
“It’s very clear to me that I didn’t run as fast as I did before, especially with things like sprinting and high intensity kind of things. That wasn’t there anymore, I had much less of that and most of that happened very, very quickly,” she says.
Sifton also found she was a top-20 athlete in the men’s category when she used to race triathlons, and is now still a top-20 cyclist in the women’s category.
For non-endurance sports, however, Harper says the evidence is less clear.
“It seems extremely unlikely that strength losses in trans women will bring strength levels down to those of typical or cisgender women,” she says.