Joyce activated, issue 11
I’ve been thinking about trans inclusion in sports this week, because I was commissioned by Nikkei Asia to write about the topic after the decision by the International Swimming Federation (FINA) to bar anyone who has gone through any part of a male puberty from elite women’s competition. The 152 national federations attending the regulatory body’s annual general assembly in Budapest voted on the measure on June 19th, with 71% accepting the recommendations of a scientific panel tasked with considering transgender inclusion (15% were opposed and 13% abstained). That panel had concluded that there was no way of including male athletes in female events without unfairness to females—and in particular that testosterone suppression in adulthood removed at best a small part of the male sporting advantage.
The commission from Nikkei Asia came out of the blue. I wasn’t given a tight brief for it and what I filed ran without a single change except for house style. The smoothness of the process was a huge contrast with my mostly abortive attempts to get any sort of hearing in the British media. It was a welcome reminder that out there, in the great wide world, it is the sex-denialists who are understood to be extremists. And that, I think, will help save us all on issues that require international consensus—such as elite sporting regulation.
FINA is not quite the first mover in rescuing female sports for female people. World Rugby paved the way in 2020 with a similar policy—which some of its national federations decided, with much virtue-signalling huffing and puffing, to ignore for domestic games. The global governing body was motivated in part by a healthy fear that allowing grown men to enter scrums with women would lead to concussions, or even broken necks—and to its referees and regulators getting sued.
For FINA, the galvanising factor was presumably the prospect of Lia Thomas setting records at the Paris Olympics in 2024 that no woman would ever be able to beat. And it can’t have done any harm that one of the highest-profile names to have spoken out on the issue is Sharron Davies, who was cheated of an Olympic gold in 1980 by a doped East German athlete, while sports regulators stood by and did nothing. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of my sport for doing the science, asking the athletes/coaches and standing up for fair sport for females,” she tweeted. “Swimming will always welcome everyone no matter how you identify but fairness is the cornerstone of sport.”
Ah yes, fairness. I still feel as incredulous today as when I first discovered, about four years ago, that some people—adults, with fully functioning eyes and brains, and whom I knew to be pleasant and not obviously sexist—were willing to say, out loud, that allowing male people to compete in female competitions could possibly be fair. But I’ve thought more since then about what “fairness” means in sport, and it does take some unpicking.
Briefly, the purpose of sporting competition is to identify and reward the specific advantages a particular physical activity brings into play. Some people are better runners than others, because of some combination of physique, training, nutrition and drive. Some of those advantages are innate; others—such as coming from a rich country with good training facilities—are outside an athlete’s control. Even so, the entire purpose of competition is that the people who are more gifted in the ways tested by running will defeat the less gifted.
For some reason it’s become de rigueur at this point to bring up Michael Phelps’s giant feet and wingspan, and ask rhetorically whether it’s “fair” that he is so naturally gifted. The answer is: yes! Of course! The entire point of swimming competitions is to find and reward people with these sorts of advantages—the sorts that make you a great swimmer. Imagine you tried to do something to equalise such advantages: it would destroy the competition. You could never rest until every swimmer’s time was identical. You’d have to penalise one person for having better technique, and boost another for not having bothered to train. Perhaps you would then score competitions according to how much you had handicapped or benefited each competitor. What fun to watch that would be!
But there is another type of sporting advantage: the categorical sort possessed by one group and lacked by another, and which makes a big enough difference that it swamps everything else about an athlete. The people who possess all the categorical advantages are prime-age men. If you threw everyone into the pool together, or onto the racetrack or pitch or whatever, you would quickly notice that the winners—indeed all the medallists, and perhaps all the qualifiers—would be able-bodied men aged between about 18 and 35. Women, under-18s, over-35s and athletes with disabilities who had the best bodies possible in those categories, and the best training, nutrition and drive, would be defeated by prime-age men, including ones who were nothing like as impressive by these measures.
That is what “male sporting advantage” means. At whatever level—international, national, county, school, fun run—prime-age males would do best. Other people would rarely get a look-in. And that is why sports run male and female competitions, age bands for the under-18s and over-35s, and for weightlifting and boxing, weight bands too—because if they didn’t, they’d never identify people who are exceptional in the ways sports are supposed to reward, unless those people are prime-age males.
Sometimes people say at this point: well, what about how no one short can make it in basketball? There are two answers to that. The first is that you certainly could set up a basketball league for shorties—perhaps for men under six foot and women under five foot eight (other cut-offs are of course possible). Conceptually, that would be no different from weight categories in boxing.
But I doubt there would be much interest—and that’s related to the second answer, which is that there are many different body types. And sporty people, by and large, choose a sport for which their body is well-suited. Wiry people become runners, tall people become basketball players, bulky people play American football and so on. (Interesting, by the way, that people like to fight and watch others fighting so much that weight categories are worthwhile for boxing, but height categories aren’t for basketball. Interesting, too, that gymnastics, which relies heavily on a physical characteristic where women decisively outrank men, namely flexibility, sets almost entirely different challenges for the two sexes.)
And here’s the thing: being female (or young, old or disabled) isn’t like any of these other “body types”. There are tall and short women, wiry and bulky women, and so on—but in each case there will be men who have the same body type, and hence choose the same sport, but are far faster and stronger. Women can’t just do as short, tall, wiry or bulky people do, and choose those sports where they have the advantage. In every sport they chose (except perhaps figure-skating and polo), in mixed-sex competition, the men would win.
The right way to think of age, weight and sex categories (and the Paralympics) is therefore as inclusion measures. Without them prime-age males would push everyone else out. This is why the common framing of whether to allow males to compete as females as inclusion versus fairness has started to set my teeth on edge. I have used it myself many times, though at least I have always spelled it out: inclusion for males against fairness for females. But I’m not going to any more. Fairness and inclusion are aligned, not opposed. You need a female-only category both to include women and to be fair to them.
So that’s the argument for having certain categories and not others, and for why it’s “fair” to have certain natural advantages in your category, but not to identify into a category that was specifically set up to exclude people with your categorical advantage. If you want to read or listen more, follow developmental biologist Emma Hilton, sports scientist and adviser to World Rugby Ross Tucker, Open University philosopher Jon Pike, and Cathy Devine, an independent researcher who looks at the human-rights angle of transgender inclusion. Tucker co-hosts a podcast called the Science of Sport, which has run several excellent episodes on the science of male advantage, and the thinking behind categorical inclusion and exclusion.
A great deal of the discussion since this became a live issue has centred on the origin, size and persistence of male sporting advantage—that it’s largely down to pubertal testosterone, that it varies from 10% to 50% and more, depending on the sport, and that suppressing circulating testosterone in adulthood makes very little difference. I think that’s now been widely discussed and understood. So in the rest of this article, I’m going to talk about two arguments against opening up the female category to some males that I’ve haven’t seen discussed as much.
The first is the sheer oddness of the idea that an athlete who has deliberately degraded their performance might thereby be granted entry to a category from which they should be, by definition, barred. “Male advantage” isn’t the only one: we can also conceptualise weight, age and able-bodiedness advantages as the like-for-like additional performance gained by being in a more favourable weight or age category, or being able-bodied rather than disabled. Would we allow a heavyweight boxer, 21-year-old man or able-bodied athlete to self-handicap by taking a performance-degrading drug calibrated to lower that athlete’s performance by an amount matching their categorical advantage, and then to compete in the flyweight category, or as an under-18 or in the Paralympics?
I think it’s obvious that if such a person won a competition, or displaced someone else from entering, it would be inherently unfair because—and this is crucial—they do not belong in that category. Sporting success is zero-sum: only one person can come first; only three people make the podium; only so many even get to enter. If you do not qualify for a category, and you degrade your performance in order to enter, any success you have is at the expense of someone who, unlike you, had the right to be there.
Moreover, the idea that an athlete who degrades their performance can be compensated by being allowed to compete in an easier category is inimical to sporting ideals. If you want to do something that will remove your sporting edge, go right ahead—but accept the consequences, namely that you will be more likely to lose. It’s inherently insulting that there is one category, and one alone, where a degraded performance is being conceptualised as gaining you entry—that a man who has taken drugs that harm his performance is somehow regarded as equivalent to females. It suggests that a woman is an inferior or damaged man, rather than a different type of human being with a distinctive physiology, designed by evolution to perform marvels no man is capable of, but which imposes a cost in sporting performance.
If we wanted to go down this path, there’s a much larger group of athletes besides trans-identified males who might merit consideration: female athletes who want to start a family. Pregnancy certainly degrades performance—I don’t know by how much, but certainly by a very large margin in the later stages. And nobody suggests that pregnant athletes should be granted access to, say, over-65s competitions, or under-12s.
As women know all too well, you can’t always get everything you want. Lots of elite sportswomen forgo motherhood entirely; the ones that don’t lose precious time out of their elite careers. Why the hell shouldn’t a man who wants to transition be expected to make a similar calculation? He could transition and accept that hormones may dull his edge in competition with other men, or he could wait until his sporting career is over to find his true feminine self.
The second point I want to draw out is that allowing males to compete in the female category if they can be shown to have degraded their performance sufficiently would be sex discrimination, as framed in UK law. We already know that it is impossible to upgrade female performance to male-typical levels (and, incidentally, that the attempt is injurious to women’s long-term health). This was, in effect, the experiment carried out by East Germany in Sharron Davies’s era, and the records its athletes set were unachievable by undoped women, but still nowhere near those set by men.
So you would be granting males access to female sports without any movement in the other direction. Men would end up with all of men’s sports and part of women’s; women would be left with just part of their own sport and none of men’s. Men would gain opportunities; women would lose them. And this unfairness would be heaped on top of an already inequitable situation in which women’s sports attracts less funding and sponsorship, offers lower prizes and is treated as second-best by the press and national federations. It really distresses me that this was ever even considered.
You can listen to the audio edition of Joyce activated, issue 11 here.
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And finally, an update on book postage. All have now gone out, except for those to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, which will go today or tomorrow. The American ones will be slow to arrive, however, because I have sent them all together to a friend in New York, who will post them on separately.