In addition to opening the door wide for trans men
Outsports has a scoop on the transgender guidelines the International Olympic Committee is expected to adopt before the Summer Olympics later this year.
The guidelines stem from an unpublicized “Consensus Meeting on Sex Reassignment and Hyperandrogenism” the IOC held last November. The guidelines have not yet been distributed by the IOC, but Outsports received the new policy via a trusted source.
The guidelines leave no restriction for a trans man, like triathlete Chris Mosier, to compete against men. Mosier’s participation in the World Duathlon Championships, for which he has qualified, has been in doubt.
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In addition to opening the door wide for trans men, the new policy removes the need for women to undergo gender-reassignment surgery to compete.
“The waiting period for trans women goes from two years after surgery to one year after the start of HRT,” Harper said. “This matches up with the NCAA rules and is as good as anything. The waiting period was perhaps the most contentious item among our group and one year is a reasonable compromise.”
So what do the guidelines say?
[T]he IOC Consensus Meeting agreed the following guidelines to be taken into account by sports organisations when determining eligibility to compete in male and female competition:
1. Those who transition from female to male are eligible to compete in the male category without restriction.
2. Those who transition from male to female are eligible to compete in the female category under the following conditions:
Wait, that’s interesting. No restrictions for FTM, restrictions for MTF. Why’s that, do you suppose? Well, because males, on average, have a large physical advantage once they go through puberty. They have more muscle mass and larger bones. Females thus have a physical disadvantage. So the guidelines compensate for that how?
2.2. The athlete must demonstrate that her total testosterone level in serum has been below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to her first competition (with the requirement for any longer period to be based on a confidential case-by-case evaluation, considering whether or not 12 months is a sufficient length of time to minimize any advantage in women’s competition).
But there’s nothing about the physical advantage. There’s nothing about puberty. There’s nothing about when in her life the athlete lowered her testosterone level.
Once again, the disadvantage to this will fall entirely on girls and women. Trans men won’t be any threat to male sports, but the other way around?
To my mind, the logical conclusion to this is that humans no longer have sexual dimorphism. Oh, some will be larger than others, and that division will still overwhelmingly correlate to the division between sperm / ova production, but that can’t at all be termed sex!!! because mentioning biology as correlating to anything at all is transmisogyny.
/s
If testosterone levels were the only thing involved in men’s sports advantage, women with untreated PCOS would already hold all the women’s records.
Honest question, how well are trans women able to maintain muscle mass once their testerone dips below a certain threshold? I expect it takes longer to lose that mass than the restrictions cover, especially if they are training to be Olympic athletes, but I’d be curious to know what kind of discrepancies can be expected.
@3 Hormones aside, trans women who’ve gone through puberty as males will always have an advantage. Their skeletons are more robust and the number of muscle cells they have will remain the same ( generally more than women) no matter the levels of testosterone.
Where will this lead? Will women’s Olympic teams be composed of more and more trans women? What chance would an all biologically female track team have against another composed entirely of trans women?
What about basketball teams?
I dunno, I’ll take the team of biological females from the NCAA Division I championship basketball team over the team of biological males from a Division III school that didn’t make the playoffs, or, better, from a school that has a club level team. It is the case that, on average, men have more robust skeletons and so on, but sports are not about average in anything.
I was under the impression that most of what’s keeping women ‘down’ in sports are social factors (e.g. having less time available for training, less financial and social support for their chosen pursuit, relatively lower pay even when they do succeed). Is it a good thing to, as we currently do, separate people into groups based essentially on what gender society sees them as?
If the concern really is physical difference (between the sexes or people previously exposed to T) why not separate groups of people based on objective metrics (height, weight, body fat percentage or distribution, or some combination of those and others), rather than gender?
(I’d be curious to see scatter plots of, say, serum T level (at whatever time point might be relevant) and speed, strength, or whatever seems relevant to a particular sport, but I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t an awful lot of scatter on such a graph.)
I don’t think ignoring effects of hormones and early life upbringing is a good idea, nor do I think classifying people based on those things is a good idea. I’m not sure what the ‘best’ answer is :-/
The very reason women’s sports competitions were started was to ensure an even playing field…between women.
Were women and men capable of playing on an even field, there would be no need for separate women’s sports teams in the first place.
I know a very affable trans women who works guiding school children across a very busy intersection. She famous throughout the neighborhood.
She’s Jewish and six foot ten…and affectionately refers to the children as her ‘Munchkins’
Women are capable of playing on an even field. Just not in equal numbers. If we just talk about height, there are fewer women at the extreme heights that are of significant advantage in basketball, so there would be fewer women who could be selected for a team if sex were disregarded. But fewer does not mean none.
There are shorter players whose skills are at such a high level they can play effectively against tall players; they are few, but, again, not none. There have been leagues proposed, even organized, specifically for shorter players. When was the last time such a league received media coverage? Contrast that with the media coverage of short players like Muggsy Bogues or Spudd Webb in the NBA. (I don’t follow the sport these days, I don’t know current short players, sorry.)
There are good reasons for having separate leagues for women, but I disagree that “women can’t compete with men” is one of them.
@Ibbica: Add to that – pressure to not be overly competitive.
I read an interview with one of the top 16 tennis players in the world (can’t remember who, sorry) where she was talking about how she, and many of the others in the top 16, were not as athletic (that is, not as muscular) as they might be – or as the Williams sisters are.
She replied that it was a deliberate decision on her part, and she presumed on many of the others, to be “more feminine” because of the extra media opportunities, like modelling, that were available to her that way. Think about that – one of the top people in the sport on the planet, deliberately deciding to be less competitive in order to match society’s demands for how she “should” look – and *not* being completely outclassed for it by dozens of her competitors, because they’re all appear to me making the same tradeoff for the same reasons!
Oh yes. I think you may have read about that here – I think I shared something about it awhile back.
Longer ago than I thought, so not exactly “here” but at the other place.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/07/first-of-all-shes-a-woman/
Regarding physicality:
Yes, but that’s because your comparison is not rigorous. A good comparison would be one that keeps all factors as close to identical as possible, barring only the one being examined; hence, that one factor is the only variable in the comparison. However, you stipulated that the female team is much more skilled than the male, and thus your comparison has more than one variable.
A better comparison would be one in which the teams selected were both equally trained and experienced, and then you will find that the men’s team will take the lead in any sport requiring an element of strength / endurance / height / reach and such.
The simplest explanation to that is that the physicality of humans has a clear disparity that maps very well to biological sex (not gender!), a concept known as sexual dimorphism. While there is plenty of overlap between the sexes, it remains that making a division along that axis very easily makes the disparity a non-issue.
As for divisions based on objective metrics, this is already standard in sports such as boxing… but I would point out that competitive fighting is an individual pursuit. Introducing such a division to team sports would result in multiple teams being a mix of the sexes, but I am thinking it would also be more complexity than is necessary, and would have the added headache of adding a plurality of teams, stretching club budgets and dividing fan interest and spending between them.
Thus, this strikes me as being very impractical for all but individual competitions.
Citation?
Lather, rinse repeat for the claim of ‘sexual dimorphism’ in humans, specifically regarding the lack of (or limited) overlap that implies.
Citation… for claiming that strength / etc. skews toward men? or for claiming that the team that has the advantage in terms of strength / etc. will outperform the other in a pursuit requiring such physicality? I’m a bit baffled that either of those needs a citation – height and weight in particular are quite visible in day to day life – but here you go.
And regarding the point that sexual dimorphism supposedly implies ‘no (or limited) overlap,’ please note that the very next sentence after I mention the term begins “While there is plenty of overlap between the sexes…” and thus should not be taken as implied at all.
I should add that the third paragraph of the linked-to section (‘Humans’) is particularly relevant to the current discussion.
@Holms
The reason I picked as extreme an example as I did is because I wanted to challenge the idea that men uniformly are better athletes than women uniformly. Sure, I’ll accept as given that the top men are better than the top women, but that doesn’t automatically imply that all men are better than all women, to the point that women need separate leagues. We don’t have separate leagues for short people, we just have very few short people on the top basketball teams, and likely more in the lower echelons.
There are some good reasons why there are separate leagues for women. But using the claim that men are better athletes, that no women can compete? That’s not one.
But it is. If you are talking about professional athleticism at least, then you are talking about the extremes of physical performance, and hence your observation – that the top men are better (in terms of strength, height etc.) than the top women – is the specific tier that is relevant. If you are suggesting that the more demanding sports become unisex, then you are arguing for the total exclusion (or very close to total exclusion) of women at the very top tier of play.
From a more detailed part of the sexual dimorphism article linked above, some excerpts:
– The female skeleton is generally less massive, smoother, and more delicate than the male…
– In the female, the … [concave surfaces to which the balls of the femurs attach via ligaments], are located farther apart, which increases the distance between the most outer points of the femurs … and thus the width of the hips; female femurs are therefore, more generally angled (laterally, further away from vertical). This greater angle applies a larger portion of the gravitational/vertical load as valgus torque (rotational force against the knee). This, combined with the female’s weaker tendons & ligaments and a narrower intercondylar notch, causes increased susceptibility to injury of the ACL in female athletes.
– Females in general have lower total muscle mass than males, and also having lower muscle mass in comparison to total body mass; males convert more of their caloric intake into muscle and expendable circulating energy reserves, while females tend to convert more into fat deposits.
– Males remain stronger than females, when adjusting for differences in total body mass, due to the higher male muscle-mass to body-mass ratio.
There are plenty more particulars there.
Holms, there are differences in averages. What are the ranges, maximums, minimums? What is the magnitude of each difference? Effect size and variance matter a great deal, especially when considering interactions between multiple variables some of which aren’t necessarily quantifiable, e.g. some social effects as mentioned above).
It remains to be demonstrate that all ‘elite’ men will always be better at everything ‘sport’ than all ‘elite’ women (if anything, women may be BETTER suited than men for endurance sports in particular). Or whether they actually have some measurable traits that are always bigger or smaller or some perfect size. We have not reached the point where women universally receive equal training and support for such pursuits, so while the playing field isn’t level, we can’t just assume that the differences are due to sexual dimorphism (btw, in the grand scheme of biological species, humans are not clearly sexually dimorphic, too much overlap).
Regardless, even if all ‘elite’ men have, say, longer legs than all ‘elite” women, ‘fastest’ and ‘the person with the longest legs’ aren’t necessarily synonymous. If that were so we wouldn’t need to run any competitions at all, we could just break out a tape measure and call it a day.
@Holms #17
“You are arguing for total exclusion…”
Quite the opposite. There is currently total exclusion. No women can play in the NBA, or the NCAA “March Madness”, just for two examples. I don’t buy “separate but equal”.
“…or very near total exclusion…”
The difference between total exclusion and very near total exclusion is significant.
There were two women who passed Army Ranger School. Not many, but some. No one suggested there be separate Ranger units for women; either take everybody who passed the test regardless of sex, or exclude women a priori. They decided on the former.
I’m not arguing for mixed male/female leagues. I’m saying that the rationale that men are the only ones physically capable of playing sports at certain levels is weak, and I don’t buy it, including when it is used to impose restrictions on transwomen.
Extremes are easy to investigate; simply look for the world records in various events and ask whether the male record beats the female.
In athletics:
Every event involving running speed, at every distance including marathon, yes. Running-while-jumping-hurdles, yes. Steeplechase, yes. Relay races, both distances, indoor and outdoor… yes. Long jump, high jump, triple jump and pole vault? Yes x 4.
How about walking? This might be more balanced due to it being less about raw musculature and more about- nope, still male at both 20 and 50km.
Fine, move on to the throwing events. Shot put, discus, hammer throw and Javelin: yes yes no yes. Wait what? The women’s discus record beats the men’s record by over two and a half meters! However, I must confess that this answer was so anomalous to my mind that I didn’t believe that the records could be that way on an even playing field, so I went looking for differences between the respective events. Lo and behold, the men’s discus is twice as heavy as that of the women’s event; the anomaly is explained. Oh and while I was checking that particular detail, I thought I should also check the other throwing events for the weight of their projectile as well, and saw the same thing: the projectile was lighter for the women’s events, and yet the male record was still the higher.
I think we can conclude that male bodies not only have a higher average musculature / size / speed and so no, But I think this also establishes that the maxima are also higher. You are just wrong on this point.
And yes we are sexually dimorphic, as the concept of sexual dimorphism does not imply zero overlap, as I have already pointed out in the very first post mentioning it. It is true that we are not as hugely dimorphic as say… spiders, but that does not invalidatet eh concept.
And I remain baffled that an adult could possibly not know that men were generally bigger than women.
Looking at the above, we can see that men and women competing against each other on an even footing would result in the total exclusion of women from the highest level of competition. Look at the 100m sprint for example and compare the list of the 25 best women to the 25 best men. Note that the world’s fastest female sprinter doesn’t even qualify for the men’s list.
Look at the semifinal times recorded at the 2012 Olympics, and note that not a single person in the women’s qualifiers (scroll down) would have made into the final event if competing in the men’s qualifiers (scroll down again). Yes, one of the men would have been beaten by multiple women in the final… had any qualified.
Or let’s throw to an event that has a large mob of people competing in each event, with no qualifiers and such to whittle the field down before a final round; marathon. At the same Olympics, compare the finishing times for thewomen’s event to those of the men’s event. Notice that the times for the women, if combined with the men’s times, only begin at position 65, with all earlier finishers being men.
This is what I mean when I say that arguing for combined events means arguing for exclusion of women. Women’s bodies can not compete on a level field with men’s bodies, and would simply be squeezed out of the competition. here exists a very well documented difference in the physicality of certain bodies, and this disparity maps overwhelmingly to biological sex.
That men have performed better in the recent past does not necessarily mean they are biologically better equipped to perform better.
That on average male humans are larger than female humans does not necessarily mean they are better equipped to perform better.
Sure, size may matter. But in that case we should simply divide athletes up into classes or groups based on those physical characteristics instead of gender or sex.
Honestly, I just don’t care enough about sports to keep debating this further. But anyone who does care enough to keep pursuing this might find these to be of interest:
http://www.imd.inder.cu/adjuntos/article/443/Genetic%20Technology%20and%20Sport%20Ethical%20Questions.pdf
http://isreview.org/issue/72/are-men-really-better-athletes
http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1509&context=sportslaw
http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/NV.AnnualReview.Print.pdf
The point that ibbica has brought up repeatedly (measurements rather than presumptions) is important. Remember, the original topic is about transwomen participating in women’s sports.
Holms, I don’t think anyone is disagreeing with the data you have presented; I just have a different take on it. (For example, your notes about the marathon tells me that women compete quite handily with men at an Olympic level in that sport, even if they don’t win.) I don’t see any of the events for which you’ve provided data as excluding women from playing basketball, any more than I see a tall-ness advantage as excluding short people from playing basketball. I am not convinced that a 6’8″ star female basketball player has a worse chance than a 5’3″ male basketball player, yet there has been at least one of the latter in the NBA.
There are reasons to have separate teams; one such reason might be a deliberate desire to provide wider athletic opportunities to women. That’s a legitimate issue. There are lots of similar efforts at schools that wish to increase the level of athletic participation among the students, including those who can’t make the competitive teams, and there are schools that field multiple competitive teams in certain sports.
Harking back to what ibbaca said, let’s remember that we’re talking about a hypothetical AMAB woman who is being excluded, not because she has a bigger body or stronger bones, but because she was assigned male at birth, and is presumed on that basis alone, without any measurements, to have an unfair physical advantage. What if she is, in fact, small? Why should she be excluded? And if she is large and excluded, why are equally large AFAB women not also excluded?
There is also a presumption that size and physical strength are the most important attributes. That may be more true in strictly athletic events, but many sports require agility and specific skills that don’t correlate well with size, or they accommodate a variety of body sizes through having different roles people play in the game. In these cases, it makes even less sense to exclude someone from participation based on presumptions of unmeasured physical characteristics.
I don’t know the answer here, I’m not advocating one position, I just think it’s simply not obvious that exclusion of transwomen based on length of HRT is warranted. The whole sex-verification business is troubling. It bothers me very much that someone like Caster Semenya had her female-ness questioned. Such injustice is an unfortunate side effect of having sex-segregated teams with one presumed significantly worse than the other.
What? This is not a recent development. Those records for example represent the best time ever clocked, and it is quite simply a medical fact that this has always been the way.
It does if the task we are talking about benefits from that trait. All athletics events for example.
This seems impractical. Divide every event into let’s say, heigh categories? Or leg length or something for runners, perhaps armspan categories for the throwing events… and with what granularity? Every five centimeters? Every half litre of lung capacity for swimmers? It rapidly becomes an utter mess.
But all of these body measurements, along with many other more subtle physiological traits such as blood rbc count, skeletal strength, muscle mass percentage etc. etc. are statistically linked to one single cause: biological sex. With one stroke, this categorisation identifies competitors along the single axis that is most heavily statistically linked to success in a wide range of events, ‘best of the male bodied’ and ‘best of the female bodied’.
Which of course leads back to the OP: how to fit transwomen into that binary since she is, by definition, male bodied at least initially.
I am very much aware of this, and I’ll note that I am not the one that repeatedly brought up e.g. basketball and have kept it about Olympic events throughout.
My cis female friends who are taller than me aren’t banned from competing in women’s sports. My cis female friends who have stronger builds than me aren’t banned from competing in women’s sports. Why should I be?
Unless you’re willing to ban trans women from ever competing in sports at this level, you can’t stop a woman from competing just cause she’s tall, cause cis women are too, or strong, cause cis women are too.
Holms@23:
Basketball is an Olympic event. There are lots of events besides athletics, there are lots of team events. I did mention the NBA, but the difference between a national team and an NBA team is immaterial here.
randomforest@24:
I agree; I find it quite disturbing to restrict transwomen based on a presumption that they might have a physical advantage that might just as well apply to a subset of cis women, and I would not advocate restrictions based on those same physical attributes.
What are people’s thoughts regarding gender verification? None of these tests seem appropriate to me.