Transgender! Unfairness of Participation in Sports

| Jun 13, 2022
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Lia Thomas

You probably think this blogpost is about whether it is unfair for trans women like Lia Thomas to compete in amateur female athletic competition and we will get to that. Instead it is about how “amateur” athletic establishments are unfair to all competitors including trans women.

What are my credentials for talking about this? In addition to knowing something about transgender physiology, I have some considerable experience in amateur athletics. I played American football for nine seasons, two in junior high, four in high school and three at the intercollegiate level. On my wall is a plaque which signifies participation in an Ivy League championship season and, as a freshman, I also helped out in a minor way towards another Ivy League championship season which also won the Lambert trophy for the best team in the Eastern U.S. (I had particular skills as a single-wing center.) After that, I officiated football for 14 years at the ankle-biter, high school, and junior college level. (Imagine me in zebra stripes and knickers.) My last game was the Junior College championship. Noticing that I had two female kids who needed soccer coaching, I then coached club and travel soccer teams for 6 years with some offseason basketball to keep my teams in shape. Enough about me.

“Amateur” Athletics is Failing

“Amateur” athletics organizations are inherently unfair to all participants because of their inability to keep things amateur due to the lure of professional sports money, their inability to set fair competitive categories and their minuscule research investments to help athletes in setting competitive categories. The latter failing is particularly egregious because of the large amounts of money potentially available from “the gate”.

A Little History

Until last century, sports was mainly an amateur affair. The main participants earned their living through soldiering. This is why many track and field events involve throwing spears, shot, or navigating over obstacles one might find in the battlefield. The Olympics and International athletics also include rifle and pistol shooting as well as equestrian events (think cavalry). During the last century, this situation gradually changed with media providing a larger “gate”. At first, award of prize money was rationalized as helping to fund athlete training. Then it was appearance fees and product endorsements (Wheaties boxes). Meanwhile the organizations that ran the competitions were raking in large amounts of money. Much of it went back to schools and alumni organizations but not to the “student-athletes”. Very little went back to the athletes although they did benefit from better food (training table), some amenities (laundry) and training facilities. (I had the benefit of the training table for three years in the fall.) Now college student-athletes can get endorsement fees. The International and Olympic teams are paid appearance fees and incentive money for winning.

The money has affected the lower levels of competition. Professionalism now literally begins around 8 or nine years old. Young competitors joined “travel teams” or AAU teams to perfect their skills and polish their resumes to be eligible for the best high school teams. Oftentimes, there are “pay-to-play” arrangements by parents to encourage coaches to put their offspring on particular teams and give playing time to their children. (This is particularly true in soccer.) Where necessary, parents move to these best high school districts although there are also some dishonest arrangements for students claiming that they live with their relatives or friends in desired school districts. And, of course, high school students vie for the opportunity to get college scholarships. The amateur organizations seem powerless to stop the corrupting effects of money.

Title IX and Female Sports in the U.S.

I was in position to observe the effects of Title IX on girls soccer and it was not pretty. The girls started playing at age 6 or 7 in “house leagues” but by age 8 or nine, these leagues had fewer and fewer players and the good coaches moved into travel or AAU teams. I saw the stress of competition on these travel teams with girls feeling that they let their parents down if they lost because they might not be able to earn scholarships. I also saw kids that no longer played for the joy of the game. I always took the approach that the girls were there to learn life lessons of individual development and teamwork, but I was not in the majority of coaches. Unbeknownst to me in my naiveté, the “better” coaches were being compensated several thousand dollars a season from their teams. And that did not count the money offered for joining the team or pay-for-play money under the table, direct to coaches.

The professionalism of athletics is a consideration as to why transgender women athletes are rejected. There is money on the line for organizers, competitors and parents, and trans women are seen as a threat. Because competitive sports organizations have become petrified and are uninformed, the fear of losing money also interferes with coming to a compromise solution to competitive sports categories which I will discuss next.

Competitive Categorization

Sports organizers have been particularly inept and uninformed about how to set competitive categories. Generally speaking, competitive sports are inherently unfair. People differ widely in their physiology, and the only meaningful measure of performance is how their own personal best improves. For example, tall people typically have an advantage in basketball. Swimmers with long arms and big feet have an advantage. Wrestlers and boxers have advantages in weight but also reach and reflexes. Runners with longer legs may have an advantage.

It is up to the sports organizations such as the Olympics, International Organizations, the NCAA, the AAU, and State Athletic Associations to set categories for competition. In theory, such categories should be set to create a level playing field for competitors based on human characteristics. They have had some successes with regard to setting weight classes in sports where that matters. However, they have failed repeatedly to find objective criteria for defining sex in creation of categories. First it was Barr bodies which were thought to occur more frequently in females due to them having two X chromosomes, then it was chromosomes and now it is testosterone. Because of these failures, all the while, female-candidate participants have had to parade naked in front of medical panels because the organizers still relied on inspection of external genitalia. Grossly humiliating and unfair to competitors. Also, due to available surgical skill, not very reliable for determining sex at birth. Evidence from internal scans to discover hidden genitalia have also been used. And these humiliations continue today. Although the results of such exams are ostensibly protected by HIPPA, they eventually leak out.

The organizing bodies have been reeling from past scandals in which hormones were administered to improve performance, particularly by Communist countries to gain medals and prestige. Typically, they used a combination of anabolic and synthetic sex hormones. Communist countries are notorious for cheating and ruthlessness; it is part of their Marxist political philosophy. Such hormonal manipulations continue today by several countries with cover ups by their sports laboratories. Anabolic steroids have severe negative side effects. The Russian athletes involved in the last Olympics in Tokyo were unable to participate under the Russian flag and anthem. They were being punished for laboratory corruption.

Testosterone

Caster Semenya

Because they were already monitoring for illegal drugs and hormones, sports organizers turned to testosterone levels as a way of sex determination. This is unfair to the participants because there is a significant degree of overlap between males and females on testosterone levels. And within male and female sex categories there is no correlation of testosterone with performance. Then the sports organizers found that there were women athletes who had naturally higher levels of testosterone, and the organizers then declared that they had to take testosterone suppressing drugs or not be able to participate in certain running events. The result is that the fastest woman in the world (Caster Semenya) and others cannot fully participate in their sport.

Enter Trans Women

So, when transgender women wanted to participate in sports and some cried foul, the organizers immediately turned to allowing trans women to participate if and only if they kept their testosterone levels below a certain threshold for several years. Imagine having to get blood pulled every month and taking doses of testosterone suppressants, so you could participate in sports. And if the results were too high, to start all over again. (We do not even know all the long term side effects of such drugs as spironolactone, bicalutamide, cyproterone for transgender transition. Cyproterone, in particular, is banned by the FDA for toxicity.) But that was not enough, the threshold value is in the process of being set at an even lower level.

At first, the organizing groups let transgender athletes participate in their congruent gender, probably because there were so few. But this inaction set the stage for politicians to take advantage transgender participation as a wedge issue. The organizers should have immediately recognized that transgender people have unique characteristics and tried to figure out how to modify their categories to fit them in. The organizations were soon political deer in the headlights along with the trans women. (Nobody cared much about trans men having a potential disadvantage from growing up as females, producing smaller bodies even though they may be taking testosterone which is otherwise banned.)

So, do trans women, like Lia Thomas, have an unfair advantage over cisgender females assigned at birth. Maybe, but not because of testosterone. Maybe because of spironolactone, LOL. Maybe because she can become one with the water because she is more relaxed, LOL. Lia may be endangering her life in order to compete because of the drugs (not LOL). The NCAA would not know because they have no science on this procedure, (not LOL). Lia has long arms which are advantageous in competition but those are not just a product of testosterone. There are many hormonal and genetic factors that cause body growth throughout childhood and into college years. Should she be blamed for any possible advantages—definitely not. She was not responsible for growing in the way she did because transgender recognition came after puberty and later than some. She followed all the existing rules for NCAA competition. If there is any blame it falls on the NCAA who has not found ways to accommodate trans women or set categories based on objective criteria like weight, arm length and foot size for trans women and other competitors. I am sure that the NCAA is hesitant to use such criteria because they do not have the appropriate evidence. And that falls on them. Think of all the money they rake in. Could they not use more to help competitors?

For all the money provided by competitive sports including professional sports, there is a minuscule amount devoted to research to help competitors or help determine competitive categories. It has taken several high-profile documented cases in which football players committed suicide or perpetrated violent crimes to get researchers off the dime to study the effects of brain injury. Some committed suicide without injuring their brains, so that their intact brain could be studied. Of course, it helped that the military and the Veterans Administration were also interested in traumatic brain injury and funded research.

I am registered to have my brain donated to the VA Brain Center at UCLA, not because I am transgender but because I played football before modern helmets (Yes, Virginia, they were made of leather).

Winners.

There are some initiatives to allow transgender people to participate in athletics and to reform competitive categories to accommodate them. Open competition is available in certain sports, like equestrian events, snooker, shooting, ultimate frisbee and NCAA rifle. Outside of the primary organizations there are experimental events such as conducted recently by the North London ThunderCats Black Metal Bicycle Club which encouraged transgender participation and achieved notoriety after pictures of the finishing stand were mislabeled. The picture showed the top two finishers who were transgender, and a cis-woman holding her baby in third place. Some social media took this photo out of context to indicate that it was scandalous for trans women to finish ahead of cis-women but Reuters fact checking refuted this claim. The cisgender woman in third-place was quoted “Thanks for your concern, but I am delighted with my podium (place), super proud to be part of the team that organizes such an inclusive and exciting event, and proud to race with such awesome competitors.”

Donna De Varona

Which brings us back to swimming and Donna De Varona, an Olympic gold medalist swimmer who was recently on the Bill Mahr show to talk about the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group which seeks to accommodate transgender athletes without unfair competition for cisgender female athletes. However, this group has been criticized for taking the middle ground by both sides of the debate who seek to gain power over the issue. De Varona is quoted about the group “We’re interested in starting a dialogue and creating policies where we can find a solution. No one else is doing this. No one else is focusing on a solution. The extreme positions are keeping us from focusing on a fair, science-based solution. All of us have benefited from sport and we’re just trying to help.” Typically, for comedy purposes , Mahr mocked transgender athletes and kept interrupting De Varona so that her message could barely be heard. Both the President’s Executive order and the 18 states banning transgender participation are getting in the way of a rational solution. But the politicians do not care, they are hungry for wedge issues.

As I indicated in my Knife Edge blog, the road to transgender progress is straight down the middle of science, rationality, and individual sovereignty without being held back by the radical left and right.

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Category: Transgender Body & Soul

danabevan

About the Author ()

Dana Jennett Bevan holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and a Bachelors degree from Dartmouth College both in experimental psychology. She is the author of The Transsexual Scientist which combines biology with autobiography as she came to learn about transgenderism throughout her life. Her second book The Psychobiology of Transsexualism and Transgenderism is a comprehensive analysis of TSTG research and was published in 2014 by Praeger under the pen name Thomas E. Bevan. Her third book Being Transgender was released by Praeger in November 2016. She can be reached at [email protected].

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