Whether or not it honors gender identity
Marathons threw women overboard a year ago:
The San Francisco Marathon confirmed it will allow trans athletes to compete in accordance with their gender identity.
Which is to say, the San Francisco Marathon confirmed it will make it impossible for a woman to win its marathon ever again.
After the Boston Marathon announced on Monday that transgender runners will be allowed to register in the gender category which most closely corresponds with their identity, a Care2 petition urged San Francisco to clarify its policies. It notes that the Bay Area race “requires people signing up for the S.F. Marathon to select a gender, male or female” on its website.
“We would love to see San Francisco Marathon clarify whether or not it honors gender identity for transgender and genderqueer individuals,” reads the petition, which has been signed by over 8,000 people to date.
Note that “honoring” “gender identity” is far more important than women’s right to compete against women.
In a series of emails to INTO, officials said the race would affirm trans identities.
“The San Francisco Marathon is a gender-inclusive race,” a spokesperson for the San Francisco Marathon said in a brief statement. “We encourage runners to register as the gender with which they identify.”
So women will have to compete against male bodies, which means they won’t have a real prospect of winning.
“We take people at their word,” Boston Athletic Association (BAA) Chief Tom Grilk told National Public Radio. “We register people as they specify themselves to be. Members of the LGBTQ community have had a lot to deal with over the years, and we’d rather not add to that burden.”
We’d much rather dump it on women, because hey, women, who cares.
Chicago and New York also confirmed they would allow trans people to self-identify their gender.
Suck it, wims.
Although critics of trans inclusion have warned allowing transgender women to register as women would give them a competitive advantage in marathons, experts in LGBTQ health argued those concerns are based on debunked myths. Taking estrogen to reduce levels of testosterone, for instance, may lead to dehydration and fatigue – a major obstacle in a 26.2-mile race.
“There’s no physiologic advantage to being assigned male at birth,” Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, who serves as director of education and training programs at the Fenway Institute, told the Associated Press.
Oh. Ok then.
I think it matters much less for marathons than other sports. There’s no physical contact, and runners don’t compete against each other except in the sense of comparing times — you don’t have to “defend” against your fellow runners. And as I understand it, men and women already run the same course at the same time.
So the only real difference is which column of the results page a particular athlete is listed in. And my impression is that the vast majority of marathoners care about their time — breaking a particular barrier, setting a personal best, qualifying for the Boston Marathon, etc. — rather than whether they finished 563rd or whatever. So if a few trans women push a particular woman down from 563rd to 566th on the list, I’m not sure that’s a harm worth worrying about.
It’s different at the very top, of course. No doubt it matters very much if you’re going from 1st to 3rd. (Though I’ll note that the SF Marathon apparently hasn’t offered prize money since 2005.)
Is there also a push to allow a third category for nonbinary athletes? The linked article doesn’t mention anything.
Screechy Monkey,
If all the runners cared about was their time and setting a personal best, there would just be one category – “runner”. So there’s obviously a degree of competition involved as well. There are age-based categories for marathons based on differences in ability, and it does matter for those runners if they finish well in their age group. It also matters for women runners of course, and it’s dismaying to see this sort of thing gaining societal approval to the detriment of one sex.
“There’s no physiologic advantage to being assigned male at birth”
This claim is so flawed that it’s not even wrong, it’s just nonsensical. Sex-based physiological differences are well-known and long-recognized, and are the basis for having sex-based categories when it comes to athletic competition.
J.A. @3, exactly. Best female time ever is Paula Radcliffe at 2:15:25. While some websites refer to this as a world record, others describe it as a World Best because the time was set on a course with men running and she was therefore paced by men. The fastest women only marathon time is over 2:17. The fastest men’s time is a bit over 2:01, with the expectation that 2:00 will be broken before long. No one expects Paula Radcliffe’s time to fall soon.
I haven’t found a complete list of marathon times. I’m sure there will be one somewhere, because runners are hellishly competitive. But given that the fastest 10 US men are not even close to being on the list of fastest 10 men ever for the Marathon, and ALL of them are faster than Paula by some minutes, I’ll bet there are hundreds, if not many thousands of men faster than the fastest women ever.
No physiological benefit my arse.
J.A. @2,
Fair enough, it does matter somewhat, and I should have qualified my statement with “mostly.”
And of course, I don’t mean to suggest that people can’t care about or blog about or want the right decision to be made on issues that (I think) aren’t a big deal. I’m just saying that marathons strike me as a much weaker case than some of the other sports figures we’ve discussed.
If it turns out that transgender women do seem to have a competitive advantage after all, would health experts then admit that critics had a point? Or would the “debunked myths” suddenly transform into “trite truisms” which no one ever thought mattered? The experts seem to be making a testable claim here.
If the section you quoted is accurate, it sounds like there is no need to take estrogen to register as a female competitor, all you have to do is register that way. They take them at their word. So this is disingenuous at best; manipulative and lying at worst.
And “assigned male at birth”? That means you have male physiology. You have male muscle mass. You have male height, and male type strength. They like to pretend that there is something about being assigned that is illegitimate, but McKinnon and Mouncey were not assigned male, they were born male. Just like I was born female.
Screechy @ 5 – well at least there’s less risk of being smashed in the face or slammed to the ground, but other than that I don’t really understand your point. Runners care about how they do compared to others, so I don’t see the difference.
And, come to think of it, arguably it matter more than some other sports because so many people run and care about running and pay attention to marathons. Weight-lifting (for example) not so much.
There’s no physiologic advantage to being assigned baby at birth, either. As a matter of fact, you could be assigned hippogriff at birth and it wouldn’t confer one iota of physiologic advantage.
Being male, of course, means you have a physiologic (or is it physiological? I’m never sure) advantage over females when it comes to a 26 mile race. Dr. Alex Keuroghlian is an idiot.
I will be very interested to see how this plays out.
iknklast @7,
Yeah, I don’t think trans advocates do themselves any favors with insisting on the “assigned ___ at birth” phrasing. Even if we were to accept the principle that you are whatever gender you identify as, an infant doesn’t identify as anything yet, and many trans people report that they did not always identify as their “non-assigned” gender, sometimes that comes later in life.
And for purposes of talking about sports eligibility, which is largely if not entirely contingent on physical factors, it’s rather disingenuous to just sweep all those physical realities under the carpet. Unless we’re talking about an infant who is intersex or otherwise ambiguously sexed, it’s not like the doctor made some arbitrary decision.
Ophelia,
It’s entirely possible that I just don’t understand anything about marathon runners. I’d like to be in good enough shape to run a marathon, but even if I was I would never want to put my body through it.
There is a difference between (A) running a long distance race because it’s fun and a personal challenge, and (B) running a long distance race because it’s a sanctioned event in which one can accumulate credentials necessary for entry in a major competition like the Nationals or the Olympics. Some races serve both purposes. Sex classification definitely matters for case B, not as much for case A.
And did you go through male puberty? Those physiological changes are not reversible through hormone or any other treatments.
Weasel word detected.
This is just a brazen lie.
The term “debunked myths” certainly gives the impression that someone undertook to study the question of whether being born male confers competitive advantage over women born women, and that this study indicated that no significant advantage is conferred. I’d really like to see this study (or these studies), because I suspect the myths were “debunked” by declaring the very question as illegitimate and “harmful”.
Well, if children were randomly assigned a sex (gender?) at birth, then there very well might not be any physiological advantage to being assigned male. Let’s say my brother, 6 foot 3 and a big brute, was assigned female at birth and I, with asthma and a female body, was assigned male. In that case, I think we could conclude that being assigned male would not, in fact, lead to any physiological advantage. But there is a catch – we are not assigned male or female, we are born with certain physiology that is common to either male or female. There are some androgynous people who may not be evidently one or the other to a casual glance, but still have the physiological structure of their sex.
This is the dynamic for “assigned ______________ at birth”. You might be able to get people to believe a statement like “There’s no physiologic advantage to being assigned male at birth”, because it sounds arbitrary and random (which is what the trans advocates would like to you to believe. But if you put it in a scientifically sound way and said “There’s no physiologic advantage to being born male”, nearly everyone is going to laugh you out of the room because it is so obviously ridiculous.
And saying that does not make me an anti-feminist who thinks women are inferior. It makes me a realist (and a biologist) who understands that we are a sexually dimorphic species. That doesn’t mean there is “an estrogen vibe” or that thinking is “more of a guy thing” or that “women aren’t funny”. It doesn’t mean women can’t hunt the mammoth or invent things or discover things or write masterpieces. It just means men are stronger and faster than women because they are, on average, larger than women.
This article sums the differences between men and women wrt running quite nicely:
https://www.livescience.com/59289-why-men-run-faster-than-women.html
Places on national olympic teams, college scholarships, and, perhaps most important, corporate financial backing are all at stake here. Will some pedestrian McKinnon be the face of Nike?
What even is an expert on LGBTQ health? Lesbians don’t have special medical needs; they’re physically no different than straight women. And (with the obvious exception of STIs) gay men don’t either. Same for the B’s; same for the Q’s. So I take it “expert on LGBTQ health” is just another insidious euphemism for trans advocate.
Maybe they mean LGBTQ mental health, but why would anyone consult a mental health expert about male and female bodies in sports?
ScreechyMonkey – I am a runner, and if you are not, you could be forgiven for not realizing just how devastating this actually is. One of the examples you give, qualifying for the Boston Marathon, is quite a common goal for semi-serious runners. No aspirations to win or earn a living, just a personal milestone.
Qualifying times are segregated by age and sex. For 18-34 year old men, 2019 required a finishing time of 3 hours and 8 seconds. Women needed 3:30:08.
It gets even more dramatic in the higher age groups, because of limited spots. A 51 year old man needs to run 3:30 minutes, which is as above the qualifying standard for women 18-34. A woman of that age needs 3:55.
To put in practical terms, I am 51. I am knocking on the door of 3:30 right now. it’s hard, at least for me. But I hope to reach that goal next month, I think I should be under it.
Or, I could check a box on the form, and take a spot from a woman my age with my training run time from last Sunday. Maybe even aim for a top 10 finish (fastest was 3:13, 10th was 3:24). I should be competing against times of 2:44 to 2:54 for men’s top 10. I don’t understand the physiology etc. behind it, but the simple fact of the matter is that if I had worked as hard and long as the women in that top, my time would be well under that mark. I have no right to take a spot from any woman running the Boston Marathon.
Thank you Ian, that’s informative.
A look at the one (1!) study used by the IOC to determine their policy:
https://medium.com/@Antonia_Lee/the-iocs-transgender-guidelines-are-unscientific-and-pose-a-serious-risk-to-the-health-of-both-5f5f808748e2
Of course, these marathons aren’t even requiring runners to conform to IOC guidelines–they’re relying on self-identification.
Thanks Ian, I stand corrected. I was assuming that, to use Sackbut’s categories @12, the vast majority of runners were strictly type A (doing it for personal challenge) and not type B (caring about the credentials/rankings) or both.
Part of it comes from the simple fact that you can be a type A, but the personal challenge is that Boston qualifying time – not quite a ranking, but necessarily a credential to enter. The vast majority of runners at Boston are not competing per se, but are proud to have earned the right to run it.
There really is a narcissism to the idea that one could discover something about one’s identity, and incidentally reveal that you had all along been an elite athlete.
This article, re Paul Radcliffe’s comments on the Boston Marathon and transwomen, came across my feed today. I thought it relevant.
An issue not mentioned in the article is the gradual creep of women’s times when some men’s times are counted as women’s. On top of that, if birth certificates and other documents have sex indications changed, it will be even more difficult to determine, on a large scale, which times are women’s; even looking up the birth certificates of the top 100 “F” finishers won’t be sufficient.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/07/paul-radcliffe-transgender-runners-identify-female-get-unfair/