The President of the United States devoted an entire executive order to making it harder for transgender athletes to compete, which the NCAA has already said it will follow. The Republican Party has vowed to install “protections” against these players for cisgender female athletes because, apparently, they’re dangerous. California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has asserted that this group of sportsfolk poses “an issue of fairness.”
Most people—79% of respondents to a poll from the New York Times and Ipsos—think trans people shouldn’t be allowed to play sports in the same gender category that they identify as. As Politico put it in a recent article, permitting one to do so is “a real question” in America.
But it shouldn’t be.
The prevailing argument for prohibiting trans athletes—trans female athletes, especially—from competing in the category of their stated gender is that they have a biological advantage. Trans women, the argument goes, are born with male bodies, which have been found to be stronger and more powerful than female ones. According to endocrinologist Dr. Bradley Anawalt, these differences don’t diminish with transitioning: he pointed to data from 2023, collected from physical fitness tests of U.S. Army and Air Force enlistees. They showed that trans female participants were able to run quicker than cis female ones within their first two years of starting hormone treatments and able to do more sit-ups than cis women within their first four years—while never losing the ability, no matter how much time passed, to complete more push-ups.
On the other hand, in April 2024, the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a study finding that trans female athletes actually had certain greater challenges than cis female ones: their lower-body strength and ability to use oxygen during exercise were found to be inferior. Though the study did find that trans women had greater handgrip strength than cis women, which is seen as indicating greater strength overall, the researchers behind it noted that greater investigation is needed of how transitioning affects trans athletes’ performances. Their work, they said, showed that these athletes should not be prohibited from competing before it can be proven that they have an unfair advantage in their particular sport.
For that matter, being overly concerned with “unfair advantages” has quickly become poisonous to cisgender athletes as well. Famously, there is the case of Imane Khelif, a cis female Algerian boxer subjected to online attacks last year. The International Boxing Association claimed she had not qualified to be part of the women’s category when being tested in an undescribed manner. Then there’s Christine Mboma, a Namibian world-record-setting runner who was found to have naturally above-average testosterone levels. Her levels happened to exceed those allowed by World Athletics, the organization that governs the sport of track and field internationally. As a result, she was subjected to invasive questions about her gender, forced to run shorter races than she once had, and forced to take medically dangerous drugs in order to remain allowed to compete at all. These are both cisgender women, and yet it is the same bodily scrutiny as they faced that holds trans athletes back.
“There are real transgender athletes who are trying their hardest, but at the same time getting hormone therapy, and that is changing their body,” senior Klaus Bullis said. Bullis, a trans man, has played on the girls’ tennis team for all four years of high school. “A lot of time, trans women get shorter, their shoe sizes get smaller, they lose muscle mass, things about their body change…they aren’t just a guy on a girl’s team.” (Bullis concedes that he does not know the full experience of being a trans woman.)
Quite frankly, the entire “debate” around trans athletes is ridiculous to have in the first place if one observes the political origins of this debate. Donald Trump has publicly stated that he only advises Republican politicians to start raising a hubbub about trans people in sports a week before elections happen. This is not a legitimate argument, but a fraud carried out by politicians looking to enrage people in order to get elected, and 79% of America is falling for it. The NCAA commissioner himself has estimated that there are only 10 trans athletes in the entire organization.
I, for one, can think of no greater disadvantage in a game than the mental pressure of your own government being against your existence. There is no more unequal competition than that between a high school or college student and a state governor, or federal senator, or the president himself. The restrictions we place on trans athletes—who are only a subset of a single percent of the US population—are many things, but “fair” isn’t one of them.
