By Jeremiah Ancheta

Plenty of anti-trans* bills filed in recent years involve prohibiting “trans students from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity.” According to the Human Rights Campaign, there were “7 anti-trans sports bans in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Montana, and West Virginia” in 2021. 2022 saw anti-trans* sports bans introduced, passed, or signed in Delaware, South Dakota, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Utah.

One case that has seen popularity in the news involves Lia Thomas, a transgender woman competing in collegiate swimming. Many who do not support Thomas’ participation in women’s sports teams claim that it is unfair and reject her trans-identity. According to CNN, “an anonymous letter written on behalf of 16 of her 40 Penn teammates criticized what they saw as her ‘unfair advantage.’”

These reasons for prohibiting transgender women from competing in sports go far back as the 1970s. In 1975, Renee Richards faced discrimination in tennis for being a trans woman. According to Sports Illustrated, “when she accepted [an invitation to play in the Tennis Week Open], 25 players in the field promptly withdrew, claiming Richards still had the ‘muscular advantages’ of a man.”

This post will demonstrate why the justification for prohibiting trans* women from competing in sports is problematic. In doing so, I will appeal to Andrea Bianchi’s paper Transgender Women in Sport and Ivy & Conrad’s Including Trans Women Athletes in Competitive Sport, both of which directly address the topic.

The “Problem”

As stated before, many who want to prohibit transgender women from competing in women’s competitive sports claim that it is ultimately unfair. Bianchi describes their argument, which she calls the Fairness Argument, as follows:

“This unfair advantage is because they are viewed as having certain aspects of male physiology. Critics often believe that having, on average, more testosterone gives them an unfair advantage that makes them perform immensely better than their female-born counterparts (Schultz 2011). Insofar as this is an unfair advantage, the argument goes, trans* women should not be permitted to compete in female categories.”

To clarify, this argument consists of three distinct empirical premises:

1. The amount of testosterone one has is positively and causally associated with one’s physical performance.
2. On average, trans* women have more testosterone than cis women.
3. From (1) and (2), trans* women will, on average, perform physically better than cis women.

Given these premises, it is argued that trans* women have an unfair advantage when competing with cis women in sports. Since trans* women have an unfair advantage over cis-women, they should not be allowed to compete with each other.

If we accept the three empirical premises to be true, how does it follow that trans* women should not be allowed to compete with cis women in sports? According to Bianchi, “One explanation for this argument is the skill thesis, which says that sports are meant ‘to determine which opponent is more skillful’ (Simon 2007, 13). In order to test competitors’ skillfulness, the significance of unfair external influences needs to be mitigated.” 

In other words, the seeming purpose of sports is to determine which individual/team is more skillful – all else being roughly equal. So the idea is that trans* women perform better than cis women, not because of skill but because of the testosterone difference between the two groups. Since trans* womens’ alleged better performance is not due to skill, they should not compete in sports with cis women to maintain the skill thesis, as the argument goes.

Testosterone and Physical Performance

The first three empirical premises have been under contention, which undermines the fairness argument. According to Veronica Ivy and Aryn Conrad in their paper Including Trans Women Athletes in Competitive Sport, “all available scientific evidence suggests that there is no overall relationship between endogenous testosterone and sport performance.”

The scientific research that Ivy and Conrad cite challenges the aforementioned claims. Here are some notable findings:

• “(e.g. Harper 2015, Harper et al. 2018) indicates that post-transition women have no competitive advantage over cis women.”
• “Gooren and Brunk (2004)… the differences within a gender are much larger than the average differences between genders.”
• “Guth and Roth (2013, 656) note, bodies are extremely complicated and it’s not as simple as isolating one or a few genetic or hormonal factors are predictive of athletic success.”
• “In the full paper [Bermon and Garnier 2017] it is clear that they showed no relationship between endogenous testosterone concentration and performance in elite women athletes…”

Furthermore, “even if we granted the premise that there is a relationship between

endogenous testosterone and performance, we permit much larger competitive advantages than is being attributed to testosterone, such as height, metabolic mutations, socioeconomic status, coaching, access to facilities, etc.” In other words, testosterone levels are not the sole determiner in one’s sports performance. If we segregate groups based on testosterone to maintain the skill thesis, then why don’t we segregate groups based on these other factors?

However, even if we grant critics that their empirical claims are true, it does not follow that trans* women should be prohibited from competing with cis women. We will take this approach to show that, even in its strongest form, the fairness argument fails.

Permissible Biological Advantages

Bianchi points out that biological endowments that allow one to perform better than others are already present in competitive sports. Bianchi mentions Michael Phelps and says “it is plausible that his success is at least partially influenced by his ‘wingspan,’ the fact that he is double jointed, and his size 14 feet (Hadhazy 2008). Each of these characteristics is [sic] genetic attributes that many of his competitors probably lack.” 

Michael Phelps, whose success as a competitive swimmer we are fine with, has biological advantages that allow him to perform better than his peers in sports. But as mentioned before, the purpose of sports is to determine which competitor is more skillful – all else being roughly equal. If we should disallow trans* women from competing in sports with cis women due to an unfair advantage the former have due to biological factors (testosterone), then it seems that we should disallow Michael Phelps from competing in sports with other competitors due to an unfair advantage he has over others due to biological factors (wingspan, joints, feet size).

Since we allow many athletes to compete with others despite external factors that advantage them in seemingly unfair ways over others, then we should allow trans women to compete in sports with cis women. As Bianchi says, we should allow trans* women “to compete in female categories since natural genetic endowments are already a part of sports.”

Conclusion

Those who are against trans* women from competing in sports with cis women claim that the former have an unfair advantage due to their testosterone levels that allow them to perform better than the latter. However, such claims are under contention and the current scientific evidence puts doubt on them. 

But even if we grant these empirical claims to be true, it does not follow that we should prohibit trans* women from competing in sports with cis women. There are many acceptable instances in sports where some competitors have biological endowments, that others do not, that allow them to perform better than others. Since we accept such instances, then we should accept trans* women competing in competitive sports with cis women.