Trans People Belong in Sports

We trans guys are pretty non-existent in the debate about trans people playing sports, mainly because misogynistic and transphobic thinking insists that trans men would never be physically capable of besting a cis man. But, in my experience as a trans man playing rugby with cis men, I’ve found myself more than capable of tackling and taking down my opponents — regardless of body size and strength. My experience illustrates an important point: bodies are diverse, regardless of sex assigned at birth. There are cis women who are bigger and stronger than cis men, even though it is certainly the norm for cis men to be bigger and stronger than cis women.

Most importantly, as Bobby Riggs found out when he faced off against Billie Jean King, just being a man does not mean that you are guaranteed to defeat a woman in sports. This is an alarming concept for the patriarchy. The 1992 Barcelona Olympics is a great example of the lengths the patriarchy will go to in order to protect the male ego. Zhang Shan, a Chinese shotgun shooter, won the gold medal in the mixed-sex skeet shooting event. At the following Olympics, women were not allowed to compete in skeet shooting [1].

Human beings are obsessed with categories because categorization is a survival skill. We love people to fit neatly into boxes, and we use labels to put them there. These labels are extremely useful – they help us to better understand ourselves and our relationships with others. However, labels become problematic when they cause us to ignore the nuances of individual experience. The arguments against trans women in sports rely on labelling trans women as universally superior to cis women (with the implied transphobic reasoning being that this is because trans women are men). Not only is this an untrue statement, but it also leads to cis women who are talented athletes being scrutinized and challenged about their bodies — an experience that is even more prevalent among women of color.

The Algerian boxer Imane Khelif experienced this scrutiny on the global stage when she was accused of being a transgender woman after winning her matches “too easily” in the 2024 Paris Olympics [2]. In 2018, World Athletics lowered the testosterone threshold to 5 nanomoles per liter of blood for races between 400 meters to 1 mile. As a result, two 18-year old Namibian sprinters, Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi, both cisgender women, were barred from competing in the 400 meter event [3]. Even children are negatively impacted by transphobia in sports! A total of 28 states now ban trans students from playing in sports consistent with their gender identity [4]. In February of 2024, Natalie Cline, a member of the Utah State Board of Education, publicly shared a photo of a local girl playing for her high school basketball team, insinuating she was transgender due to her larger build and short haircut. Cline was rebuked by state legislation, but the 16-year old still faced online threats and harassment. Cline later claimed her actions were the result of “the push to normalize transgenderism in our society” [5].

The policing and scrutiny of bodies in sports is so terrifying because it takes very little for the media to manipulate people’s fear of the unknown – in this case, “transgenderism”. The controversy around Lia Thomas is a perfect example of how the coverage of a single trans person led to uninformed outrage that pressured sports institutions to hastily change long-standing inclusive policies.

Thomas is a transgender swimmer who competed on the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania before beginning her medical transition in May of 2019. As per NCAA regulations at the time, she spent a year on HRT before competing on the women’s team in the 2021-2022 collegiate season. During that time, she became a prominent figure in the debate about trans women in sports, with Sports Illustrated calling her “the most controversial athlete in America” [6]. Critics accused Thomas of having an unfair advantage over “biological women”, pointing out that her rankings in the women’s division were higher than her rankings in the men’s division. This article (Lia Thomas: Trans swimmer didn’t have unfair advantage, data shows | The Independent) by The Independent does an excellent job of breaking down in-depth why the claims of unfairness are unjustified. To summarize, the article explains that Thomas was a highly competitive swimmer in longer-distance races when she competed in the men’s division, and that it is entirely possible her performance could have reached NCAA men’s division championship levels if she did not go on HRT. Additionally, her times in the women’s division events she competed in were not record-breaking; in the 500-yard freestyle race that she won, her time makes her the 15th fastest college swimmer — a total of 9 seconds behind Katie Ledecky’s 2017 record [7].

This is clearly a complex debate with many nuances; however, media often sensationalizes stories in order to attract attention from its audience, often at the cost of that nuance. In the 2022 NCAA Swimming Championships, Thomas won the 500-yard freestyle and became the first transgender athlete to claim a national title in swimming. She also tied Riley Gaines for 5th place in the 200-yard freestyle. Gaines told The Daily Wire, “It was a bit disheartening…It really was. I left the pool with no trophy. Not a big deal, but it was the goal that I had set all year” [8]. Given this dramatic comment, it is important to be clear: Gaines would not have even placed in the top three in the event, regardless of whether or not Thomas had competed. Not only that, but Gaines did leave with a trophy. She was handed the 6th place trophy to hold on the podium and mailed a 5th place trophy. By positioning herself as a victim, Gaines was able to leverage media attention to become a prominent voice campaigning against transgender women competing in sports, describing herself on her website as a “leader defending women’s single-sex spaces, advocating for equality and fairness, and standing up for women’s safety, privacy, and equal opportunities” [9]. In In 2023, she was among four women who testified at a House Oversight subcommittee hearing about changes to Title IX proposed by the Department of Education [10]. She led demonstrators outside the NCAA convention in January of 2023, saying, “Today, we intend to personally tell the NCAA to stop discriminating against female athletes by handing them a petition that we have garnered nearly 10,000 signatures on in just a couple of days” [11]. Currently, Gaines is among several athletes and former athletes to bring a lawsuit against the NCAA, alleging that the NCAA’s policies governing sports eligibility for trans student-athletes discriminate against cisgender women. Gaines’s case demands that the NCAA categorically ban all transgender women and girls from competing in sports [12].

As I pointed out at the beginning of my essay, bodies are diverse. Should Michael Phelps be banned from swimming because of his unique body structure and lower-than-average lactic acid production? Katie Ledecky is 6’0″ — should she be banned from competitions because her height is too “manly”? Policing bodies is a dangerous path: one that, as I pointed out earlier, harms all people. It is true that studies done on transgender vs. cisgender women show some advantages in strength during the first 3 years of HRT [13]. One military study of transgender men and women in the United States Air Force found that prior to gender affirming hormones, trans women performed 31% more push-ups and 15% more sit-ups in 1 min and ran 1.5 miles 21% faster than their cisgender counterparts. After 2 years of taking feminizing hormones, the push-up and sit-up differences disappeared, but trans women were still 12% faster [14]. Another study of nonathletic trans women and cis women found that while absolute lean mass remains higher in trans women, relative percentage lean mass and fat mass (and muscle strength corrected for lean mass), hemoglobin, and VO2 peak corrected for weight was no different to cisgender women [15]. In fact, a recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found notable disadvantages faced by transgender women athletes, including less lower body strength, being unable to jump as high, a lower maximum rate of oxygen consumption, and higher overall levels of body fat. The authors concluded that the results should “caution against precautionary bans and sport eligibility exclusions” [16].

Disappointingly, sporting institutions have not proceeded with caution. In 2022, as the attention around Thomas’s swimming career was peaking, the NCAA changed its trans-inclusive policy, which had existed since 2010 and required athletes to have been on HRT for at least 1 year and to lower their testosterone levels. Now, the NCAA takes a sport-by-sport approach for transgender athletes [17]. Following Thomas’s championship victory, the world swimming governing body adopted a new “gender inclusion policy” that effectively bans transgender women from competing. Despite the term “inclusion”, the policy only permits swimmers who transitioned before age 12 to compete in women’s events. Notably, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health recommends 14 as the minimum age for starting gender transition hormone treatment [18]. In January 2024, Thomas took a case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland to try to fight the ban [19]. Unfortunately, she lost the case in June of 2024, meaning she was unable to compete in the Paris Olympics [20]. In February of this year, Donald Trump signed an executive order banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, stating “the war on women’s sports is over” [21]. In March, he froze $125 million of funding to UPenn, Lia Thomas’s alma mater, citing policies that allowed trans women to compete in women’s sports [22].

Transphobia is rooted in fear of the unknown. It is natural for there to be debate and scientific inquiry about gender and athletics. However, when individuals turn to the media and use sensationalizing and dehumanizing language to magnify that fear, the results are inevitably harmful. Riley Gaines did just that when she made comments about Lia Thomas’s genitalia and claimed some of the swimmers felt “violated” and “undressed in the janitor’s closet” to avoid having to share a dressing room with her [23], [24]. So did three of Thomas’s former UPenn teammates, Grace Estabrook, Margot Kaczorowski and Ellen Holquist, who claimed that Penn and other universities within the NCAA “have knowingly stolen opportunities and awards from women, placed women in physical danger, and facilitated the sexual harassment of female student athletes” [25].

Trans women are women. A trans woman changing in a bathroom is not sexual harassment — bodies are bodies, and simply existing in your body is not harming anyone. Everyone deserves the right to feel comfortable in spaces, and if someone else’s body or appearance makes you uncomfortable, you always have the right to leave that space. The only women who have had opportunities stolen from them are the trans women and girls affected by the slew of transphobic bans imposed on athletics. Trans people belong in sports. Nobody is going through the difficulties of socially and medically transitioning simply to dominate women in sports. Every athlete knows the joy of feeling included on a team, and as a trans athlete I am deeply grateful that I can live as my true self and experience the euphoria of competing with other men. I hope to one day live in a world where all people feel included and welcomed in sports, and I hope that society learns to embrace the diversity of bodies as an asset to be celebrated rather than a danger to be policed.

[1] https://www.olympics.com/en/athletes/shan-zhang

[2] <https://19thnews.org/2024/08/cisgender-women-of-color-anti-trans-violence/>

[3] https://www.11alive.com/article/news/verify/olympics-namibia-runners-disqualified-testosterone/536-64b05c61-7be2-4ca0-9768-d6250df17c19>

[4] https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/youth/sports_participation_bans

[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/utah-official-faces-calls-resign-falsely-suggesting-teen-girl-transgen-rcna137903>

[6] Lia Thomas interview: The story of the Penn swimmer at the heart of the transgender athlete debate – Sports Illustrated

[7] Lia Thomas: Trans swimmer didn’t have unfair advantage, data shows | The Independent

[8] https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/riley-gaines-i-left-there-with-no-trophy-after-tie-with-lia-thomas-kentucky-standout-disappointed-with-ncaa/

[9] https://www.rileygaines.com/>

[10] The Importance of Protecting Female Athletics and Title IX – United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability

[11] Demonstrators protest NCAA’s transgender athlete inclusion | AP News

[12] https://www.aclu.org/cases/gaines-v-ncaa