Blurred Lines: Trans and Intersex Inclusion in Women's Sports

Why we can’t treat trans women the same as we currently do women athletes with disorders of sex development

Why care about women’s sports at all? 

Sports took up a pretty large chunk of my free time as a kid and young teen. In addition to being a competitive highland dancer, I participated in cross country and middle distance track events from middle school until my mid-teens. In high school our running coach even convinced me to join the wrestling team for two years. I only ever won one fight, when I finally faced a taller and lankier opponent (my body type at the time was not ideal for the sport), but I had a lot of fun. 

Our coach was unusually supportive of the girls’ teams both in running and wrestling, perhaps putting even more focus on our performance than he did on the boys. He didn’t treat us with kid gloves, made us spar with the boys and expected 5 days a week adherence at practice plus weekend conditioning. It wasn’t that our coach was a big feminist, it was just that he cared about winning school titles and correctly recognized that there was more low hanging fruit to be plucked by encouraging the girls in particular. This was especially true for wrestling where our coach’s recruitment of girls paid off. We had around eight girls on the wrestling team vs. the two or three most other schools had, which made winning tournaments a breeze.

Overall, I’m glad that I spent so much time on sports growing up. It gave me a basis of fitness that made it much easier to rebound from sedentary periods in my 20s, built some discipline and forced me to practice pushing through performance anxiety. And even though I sucked, knowing the basics of how to take someone down is a cool skill. I think it’s important that other young women have the opportunities to get these experiences as well. Participation in sports can build confidence, improve your sense of physical embodiment and provide an outlet for healthy expressions of competitive aggression. Of course, that doesn’t imply that I think it’s important for women to be equally represented or compensated in pro sports leagues.

Prior to the passing of Title IX in 1972, which provides that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”, many girls didn’t have the same opportunities to participate in school based sports programs as the boys did. I’m not going to discuss the ways in which Title IX has been extended well beyond giving girls the opportunity to participate in athletics to requiring schools to force complete parity in participation, despite the quite obvious fact that women are on average less interested in sports relative to boys, but

Richard Hanania

covers it well in The Origins of Woke. 

Regardless, at the time, the degree to which performance differences resulted from socialization and lack of opportunity vs. biological differences wasn’t entirely clear. In the years immediately after the passage of Title IX a general improvement in the performance of elite female athletes relative to males was observed, but, as Carole Hooven notes in her book Testosterone, this didn’t last all that long: 

From 1972 to 1980, the sex differences in Olympic trial times went from 17 percent to 13 percent (running) and from 13 percent to 11 percent (swimming). In the last forty years, the gap hasn’t budged.

At the elite level, there is generally no overlap between the female and male participants since, in almost all cases, the worst elite male athlete is better than the best elite female athlete. Even Serena, by far the best female tennis player of all time, says that, from her perspective, “men’s tennis and women’s tennis are completely almost two separate sports” and that “I only want to play girls because I don’t want to be embarrassed”. 

And even for the general population, sex segregation makes sports much more fun for girls and women. I briefly played on a mixed-gender recreational soccer team during my master’s degree and after that experience I vowed I’d never again play with the boys. It just isn’t fun. This persistent gap between male and female athletes is precisely why we need sex segregation if girls and women are to meaningfully participate in sports. But controversy around sex segregation goes back much further than the discussion regarding how to deal with trans women athletes.

Unfortunately, sex segregation is one sided and can seem creepy

Because weight classes are used in many combat sports, weigh-ins matter a lot for competition. Everyone recognizes that without weigh-ins people would fudge the numbers to fight in the weight class below their own because it would be an obvious advantage. This is why you normally end up with everyone in a weight class weighing in right near the top of the range - if the lower weight class was in sight they’d lose the extra pounds to qualify for it. And in addition, most fighters' day to day weight will be higher than their fighting weight. Even high school level wrestlers would do things like forgo water the day ahead of weigh-ins in order to make the cut.

The reason for this, of course, is that weight classes exist to organize combatants based on size so that real skill, rather than brute strength, will determine who wins. This segmenting also allows a wider variety of people to have the opportunity to compete in and win major competitions. Sex segregation is done for a similar reason - to allow women to compete at an elite level against one another. When the issue of whether it’s “fair” to include trans women in women’s sports comes up, some people respond that elite sports isn’t about fairness at all, but about seeing human excellence on display. But if we really only want to watch the most excellent of the excellent, we’d only have one category and we’d only be watching men.

At low levels, no one is asked to do a “sex verification” in order to compete in the women’s category. In part, this is because it’s much harder to fake being a woman since it’s part of how you’re identified by others, it’s on your identification documents etc. than it is to lie about your weight. But at the Olympic level, various forms of testing have been required on and off over the past century.

Many highlight the “naked parade” used to confirm female sex by the I.A.A.F. (now World Athletics) in 1966 as a particularly low point in the sex testing of women athletes. And it’s easy to see why many view these sorts of tests in general as invasive, sexist and humiliating. After all, these tests can include genital exams and male athletes are never subjected to this indignity. But of course, there’s an obvious reason to test women and not men. Because the men basically compete in the “open” category. It’s already the hardest category and there’s no advantage to be gained by pretending you belong in it. It’s not surprising that we aren’t discussing the inclusion of trans men in male sports (which typically only requires self-ID), because none of them would make it into the male elite level if they tried. 

Truly intersex individuals are extremely rare, but they are overrepresented among elite athletes competing in the women’s category. This is because there are particular disorders of sex development (DSDs) which provide a clear performance advantage over female athletes. World Athletics, which ratifies all world records for track and field and is recognized by the Olympic committee gives us a sense of the scale of the apparent advantage in an FAQ about their intersex regulations: