{"id":23123,"date":"2023-03-23T16:51:06","date_gmt":"2023-03-23T16:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=23123"},"modified":"2023-03-23T16:51:06","modified_gmt":"2023-03-23T16:51:06","slug":"how-world-sport-got-into-a-mess-over-trans-athletes-and-how-it-can-get-out-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/arts-social-sciences\/how-world-sport-got-into-a-mess-over-trans-athletes-and-how-it-can-get-out-of-it\/","title":{"rendered":"How world sport got into a mess over trans athletes \u2013 and how it can get out of it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jon Pike<\/a>, The Open University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

World sport has been convulsed over the past few months \u2013 indeed years \u2013 by questions about trans athletes, especially trans women, competing in their acquired gender.<\/p>\n

Most recently, World Athletics announced its \u201cpreferred option\u201d<\/a> of a reduced 2.5nmol testosterone limit for trans women to compete, with a final decision due on March 23.<\/p>\n

Other sporting bodies have proposed stricter eligibility rules, including Rugby Football Union, the Rugby Football League, British Triathlon<\/a> and British Athletics<\/a>, based on excluding male advantage gained through puberty or \u201candrogenisation\u201d (the process leading to irreversible musculoskeletal and cardiovascular changes at puberty) from female competition.<\/p>\n

Like British Athletics, British Triathlon said it wanted<\/a> an \u201copen\u201d category for \u201call individuals including male, [male and female] transgender and those non-binary who were male sex at birth\u201d, while World Aquatics will make trans women athletes ineligible from competing in elite women\u2019s swimming and diving, saying \u201cfairness was non-negotiable\u201d.<\/p>\n

Tensions are still very apparent, but there are some signs, with these new policies, of a shift on global policy from one based on testosterone levels to one based on male advantage acquired at puberty. And it is clear that the terrain has been shifting from the terrain of science to the terrain of ethics.<\/p>\n

One new development has been a sort of quietening on the scientific front. Although you still get the odd piece trying to make the claim that testosterone suppression can remove male advantage, most of the serious people in the debate have given up on this claim. A systematic review of studies<\/a> showed that, even if hormone therapy reduces levels to those seen in women, strength, lean body mass and muscle area remained higher for at least three years. And we always knew that the skeletal advantages remained.<\/p>\n

This has led to an attempt to re-engineer the idea of \u201cfair competition\u201d itself. Some tend to argue that, even though trans women have residual male advantages<\/a>, it can still be reasonable for them to compete in the female category: something that proponents are now calling \u201cmeaningful competition\u201d.<\/p>\n

Fair competition or \u2018meaningful\u2019 competition?<\/h2>\n

Setting the new terrain here is the International Olympic Committee, which, following the researchers Joanna Harper and Yannis Pitsiladis, has given its blessing to the twin ideas<\/a> of \u201cmeaningful competition\u201d and \u201cdisproportionate advantage\u201d in its policy documents. The general idea is that, if the advantage held by trans women is sufficiently small, so that they won\u2019t win all the time, then it is permissible – and \u201cmeaningful\u201d – for them to compete in the female category.<\/p>\n

But there are at least three big things wrong with this approach, or so I\u2019ve argued<\/a>. The first is that what matters about male advantage is not just its size but the kind<\/em> of advantage it is.<\/p>\n

There are two types of advantage in sport: competition advantages and category advantages<\/a>. Competition advantages are the sorts of things that we let play out in sport: who is the most skilful, or fastest, or the best tactician? And, yes, sometimes, we are interested in who has the biggest genetic gifts, like the lung capacity of cyclist Miguel Indurain or the wingspan of swimmer Michael Phelps \u2013 and what they can do with it.<\/p>\n

Category advantages, on the other hand, are those that we control for, through categories. Some of these are between sports \u2013 like between e-bikes, motor bikes and road bikes, or between different formulae in motor sport. The more obvious ones are age, weight and sex categories. These categories exclude certain sorts of advantages by definition. If you want to allow these advantages, you must do away with the category itself. You can change how you categorise. We could shift male advantage from being a category advantage, for example, to a competition advantage.<\/p>\n

But, since few people want to do away with female sport (at least explicitly), male advantage must be excluded from it. The so-called \u201cPhelps gambit\u201d \u2013 the idea that Phelps\u2019 natural body shape gave him \u201cunfair\u201d advantages within his category, and therefore we should accept the male advantages of trans women in the same way \u2013 doesn\u2019t work, because we don\u2019t classify for Phelps advantages; they are competition advantages. But male sex advantages are category advantages.<\/p>\n

The second big mistake is that the IOC misunderstands fair competition. Fair competition doesn\u2019t mean that no one ever dominates \u2013 think Indurain, Phelps, Martina Navratilova, and Usain Bolt. Of course, we could organise a handicap version of every sport to allow, as near as possible, everyone to cross the line at the same time, so that who wins turns out to be arbitrary and at the whim of the handicapper. But our standard understanding of fairness in sport is a matter of processes (a \u201clevel playing field\u201d) not outcomes (a \u201cphoto-finish\u201d).<\/p>\n

The third mistake is about the place of self-identity in categorisation. The IOC\u2019s medical and scientific director, Richard Budgett, has endorsed the slogan \u201ctrans women are women\u201d. But you don\u2019t need, for now, to make your mind up on whether the slogan is true or not, because, either way, the logic of the IOC approach is wrong. If the slogan is true, then trans women should be eligible for women\u2019s sport without having to pass any further tests. But if the slogan is false, then it\u2019s difficult to see what motivates testosterone limits and tests, whether 10nmol or 5nmol or 2.5nmol, for two years, or three years or more, because women\u2019s sport should only be for women.<\/p>\n

Having looked at the science \u2013 and worried about the logic \u2013 World Aquatics, World Rugby, British Triathlon and British Athletics have come to more or less the same conclusion.<\/p>\n

Everyone should be welcome into sport, of course, and everyone must have a fair category in which to compete. This can be done with a female category \u2013 which excludes anyone with male advantage – and an inclusive, open category for anyone who wants to compete in it. With a few details to sort out, this is a solution for almost all athletic sports, which is maximally inclusive and fair to everyone.\"The<\/p>\n

Jon Pike<\/a>, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, The Open University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jon Pike, The Open University World sport has been convulsed over the past few months \u2013 indeed years \u2013 by questions about trans athletes, especially trans women, competing in their acquired gender. Most recently, World Athletics announced its \u201cpreferred option\u201d of a reduced 2.5nmol testosterone limit for trans women to compete, with a final decision […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":23125,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[869,1525,1640],"class_list":["post-23123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-social-sciences","tag-fass","tag-news-home","tag-ou-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}