95. TRANS ATHLETES ARE ATHLETES: Exposing Transphobia In Our Discussions About Sport

At the Philosophy club I run at my school the students wanted to discuss the question of where transgender athletes should compete.  At the start of each session I ask them to set the agenda and pick a question for discussion and for two weeks in a row this issue had come up: in gendered sport should a trans-woman compete in the same field of competitors as people who have identified as female since birth?  This week it got chosen by popular vote and so I attempted a serious philosophical analysis, despite feeling uncomfortable about the possible intentions behind the question. This is a record of that discussion.

The first thing I did was point out that this was quite a strange question to ask, and that we had to be careful that it wasn't coming from a place of prejudice or discrimination.  After all, the assumption which underlies the issue - that somehow a trans-woman in a "women's" sport would give them an unfair advantage - seems a peculiar thing to worry about in a domain - sport - where every individual athlete attempts to develop an advantage over the others they are competing against.  That is the entire point of competition.  If a woman who identified as a woman since birth entered a particular sport and was faster, stronger, or more aggressive than her other competitors I don't believe we would be having the same conversation.  I suggested, therefore, that the issue they wanted to discuss seemed to be coming from making a discriminatory category mistake.  One which erased the existence of some groups of people.  It seemed that the real assumption here was that the "trans-woman" in question was being denied the status of "woman" and was still being perceived as a man.  What they were really asking was whether it was fair for a man to be competing in women's sport.  They were mistaking the category of “trans woman” for “man”. When we accepted the idea that a trans-woman is a woman, the question instead became absurd: in gendered sport should a woman compete in the same field of competitors as other women?  Of course she should!

Now, we could ask a more compelling question about whether sport needs to be gendered at all.  I remember hearing tennis legend, Billie Jean King, speaking the other week about her wish that there were no male/female division in tennis and thinking how odd it was that we just accepted the premise that men should only play men and women should only play women unless in a specific "mixed doubles" scenario.  But this was not the question my students were asking, so I decided to be charitable. Although it seemed clear to me that the question became immediately redundant when we accepted the reality that transwomen are women, imagining that the question wasn't coming from a place of pure prejudice and that there might be some genuine distress at the idea of certain athletes being unfairly affected by the presence of competitors who had been somehow miscategorised for them to compete against, I asked that we outline what the supposed problem actually was.

As suspected, the reason my students believed there to be an issue was because they believed a transgender female athlete would have more strength, speed and testosterone than her cisgender counterpart and that this would create an unfair advantage to her that would somehow undermine an entire sport.

Taking the proposition seriously, I asked if existing sports where this might be a problem didn't already have provision in place for such potentially unsporting differences?  i.e. Weight divisions in combat sports and rankings in athletic events.  The whole point of such things was to ensure a general parity of skill and ability that don't swing competitive sports into a one-sided affair.  If there really were an athlete stronger, faster, or more aggressive than others they were competing against, then surely they could be moved into a more appropriate weight class or ranking? And where sports had no such divisions in place, did that not suggest that such potential differences and disparities were deemed unimportant in that sport across the bigger picture?  After all, years of women had already passed through at varying levels of strength, agility and aggression in all of these sports and at no previous point had it been decided that a separation into different classes needed to be made.  Furthermore, in the sports where such distinctions had already been made, did that not show that if there ever were a genuine problem of differentiated ability arising in a sport or competition as a result of increasing numbers of trans athletes, then a mechanism already existed for dealing with it that did not have to involve segregating this particular set of competitors were it to actually cause such an issue to arise?

I then asked an even more important question, introducing them to the fallacy of the slippery slope.  Because the nightmare scenario they were envisioning on which this whole "issue" was based (that maybe, perhaps, one day - but not actually yet - transgender athletes might start decimating their cisgender competition so much that the competitive aspects of their sport is ruined) was exactly that: a projected fantasy of what might be, not what actually is.  In the slippery slope argument, an opponent of an idea takes something that is actually happening - in this case the increased visibility of transgender athletes - and makes a false entailment that from actual thing A taking place, a further thing, B, will be guaranteed.  We see this sort of argument in debates about euthanasia and abortion for example.  If we allow the terminally ill patient to painlessly end their life, so say those opposed to euthanasia, the next thing you know families will be killing off grandma early to collect their inheritance.  If we allow abortion in the case of the underage girl who was raped, say those opposed to abortion, the next thing you know people will be throwing away their contraception and just getting a quick abortion if they accidentally get pregnant.  Life itself will lose all value!  In both cases, as in the case of the trans-athlete's sports dominance, A does not entail B at all, but B is used as a scare-story - an appeal to emotion, to name another fallacy - which hopes to circumvent reason and convince us to oppose A as a preventative measure against B.  In regards to trans-athletes, however, not only is there no evidence yet of B actually occurring, but we have already established that, if it did, the sports themselves already have measures in place to respond to the issue which do not require the segregation of trans-athletes.

While we were talking fallacies I also pointed out that the slippery slope was predicated on straw man too.  In the straw man fallacy (or straw person fallacy, as perhaps it should be renamed) a caricature of an opponent's position is drawn and then defeated, achieving nothing because it is arguing against a position which nobody actually holds or isn't actually true.  In this case, I asked if people could name multiple cases of trans-athletes who actually were unfairly advantaged in strength, speed or aggression against their cisgendered counterparts?  In the recent Olympics, for example, while transgender Canadian soccer star, Quinn, along with her team, won gold for Canada, New Zealand transgender athlete, Laurel Hubbard, made history competing in the women's weightlifting event but failed to win a medal, coming last in her group.  While the straw person argument plagues not only my students, but the International Olympic Committee (who still haven't come to an agreement yet on their own rules regarding trans-athletes), the reality is that - just like any other athlete, different trans athletes have their own individual strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages.  There is no unique transgender advantage beyond a misogynistic assumption that men are physically superior to women in strength, speed and aggressiveness.  Guess what - some cisgendered women are stronger, faster and more aggressive than some cisgendered men, and vice versa.  The assumption that a trans-woman, because she once had, or still has, some historic male physiology, would be "better" at a sport than a person who has identified as female their whole life is one based on a faulty essentialism.  Trans-women are women.  And some women are better at some men at some sports.  Other men may be better than other women.  People are differently skilled.  But the fact that this argument consistently seems to revolve around specifically female trans-athletes and few seem worried about a trans-man having unfair advantages over his cisgender male counterparts suggests that sexism and misogyny are definitely part of the motivation of this discussion.

A final, further, assumption I pointed out is the assumption in all of this that athletics and sports and the question of who gets to compete in them are fair anyway.  The narrative of those wishing to exclude transgender athletes trades on a fairy-tale of the hard-working and deserving cis-gender woman who gets her moment of glory stolen from her by a nefarious trans-woman "cheating" with the advantage of some vestigial “maleness”.  Leaving aside once again the sheer prejudice and trans-denying nature of such a narrative for a moment - where is the equal outrage for all the other athletes equally robbed of their moment of glory because of a fellow competitor with other kinds of unfair advantage unrelated to their gender history?  The athlete with money to hire better trainers and equipment, for example?  The one who went to the private school and was able to have their nascent talents nurtured while less fortunate people had theirs die on the vine?  The one who was spotted by the scout when so many others were missed?  The one who happened to live near a club that had an opening, and had parents who could afford to pay the fees?  The one who happened to switch on the TV at an impressionable age and see the big game which sent them on the journey to stardom while so many of their peers took other paths?  Sports, athletics, are never fair.  Every team is a story of all those who never made it and were never given their opportunity and every competition is a story of all those who trained just as hard only to fail.  A bad night's sleep.  An ill-timed injury.  Sun in the eyes.  An unexpected illness.  Any of these things could add unfair disadvantages to some competitors and not others and sports thrives on such misfortune and inequality.  There is no outrage about such things though, because those outraged by the inclusion of trans-athletes are not actually outraged about unfairness, they are outraged about acceptance of something they do not accept: that a trans-woman is a woman and a trans-man is a man.

The trans-athlete "issue" could, were it not born of prejudice and discrimination, be equally seen as a positive instead of a problem.  If the unproven worry ever became true and an influx of new trans-athletes really did begin to decimate the accomplishments of their cisgender counterparts then how exciting as we see the fight begin of who will be first to beat them!  Before Roger Bannister beat the four minute mile in the 1950s, such a feat was presumed to be impossible.  Nowadays it is fairly common.  Sport is always evolving.  Every generation some athletes come along and do something that it is believed can never be beaten…and then it is.  Again and again and again. We accept this of athletes who identify as the same gender their whole lives, so why not of transgender athletes too?

Because, and I'll say it loud one more time for the people who need to hear it, the so-called "issue" of where transgender athletes should compete in gendered sports is only an "issue" if we deny trans-athletes their gender.  If we accept that trans women are women and trans men are men then the "issue" becomes incoherent. When we don’t, we are being transphobic, and our motivation is not protecting sports or preserving competition - it is a bigoted attempt to erase the reality of trans people’s existence and prevent them from competing in something they have every right to compete in. And that goes not only for my students, but for the International Olympic Committee too.

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE  and from all good booksellers.