Right: United States transgender athlete, Chelsea Wolfe, was selected for the US BMX team. but only as an alternate, or stand-in team member. Wolfe did not compete, as no vacancy occured for her to fill, but supporters of transgender athletes applauded her selection as a step in the right direction.
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Arguments against women transgender athletes taking part in sporting competitions against cisgendered women
1. Cis male athletes have a major competitive advantage over cis female athletes
It has been claimed that the innate physiological advantage most cismen have over a majority of ciswomen makes it unfair that athletes born male be allowed to compete against athletes born female.
An article published in SportsRec outlined the nature and basis of men's athletic advantages over women. These are explained as: 'Athletic differences between men and women have much to do with innate characteristics determined by genetics and hormones. These include height, weight, muscle mass, body fat and aerobic capacity. As a group, women do not run, jump or swim as fast as men. Women are also more prone to certain types of athletic injuries than men. Due to higher estrogen levels, women have more body fat than men. The leanest female athletes, such as top marathon runners, have body fat of approximately 8 percent, compared with 4 percent for their male counterparts. In addition, women's bodies are less muscular, but their joints are more flexible, which gives them greater range of motion -- an advantage in sports such as gymnastics.' The SportsRec article further explains, 'Testosterone enables men to develop larger skeletal muscles as well as larger hearts. Men also have a larger proportion of Type 2 muscle fibers, which generate power, strength, and speed. Testosterone also increases the production of red blood cells, which absorb oxygen, giving men an even greater aerobic advantage, reports "New York Times" writer Gina Kolata, in an interview with Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky, an exercise researcher at McMaster University in Ontario.'
These differences are summarised an article published in Human Kinetics taken from 'Best Practice in Youth Sport' by Robin Vealey and Melissa Chase. The article states, 'Several physical characteristics of postpubescent males predispose them to outperform females in sports that require strength, power, and speed. Adult males tend to be taller with longer limbs. The breadth of their shoulders allows for more muscle on a larger shoulder girdle, the main contributor to postpubescent males' advantage in upper-body strength. Adult males have more overall muscle mass and less body fat than females, even in trained samples. Male athletes average 4% to 12% body fat compared to 12% to 23% in female athletes. Males develop larger skeletal muscles, as well as larger hearts and lungs and a greater number of red blood cells (which absorb oxygen for an aerobic advantage). Without question, males and females differ on several physical characteristics that influence sport performance.
In a review published in the Journal of Physical Education and Sport on November 24, 2017, the extent to which physical training can reduce these innate differences was considered. The review states, 'Differences of muscle strength are related to the greater development of muscle mass, which is favored in men from higher testosterone production, whose levels are clearly different between the sexes. Consequently, men benefit from this in all those disciplines that require considerable levels of strength, speed, and power. With training, woman's strength increases, but the gain obtained is lower than that of man. In adult women, the VO2max value is on average less, about of 15-20 percent for trained athletes. One reason for this difference, in relation to maximum oxygen consumption, is the higher concentration of haemoglobin (10-14 percent more) in men, because in men's circulatory system there is greater oxygen transport capacity and, consequently, a greater aerobic capacity, to which the VO2max value is related. At the level of the cardiovascular system, the main differences between men and women are related to the size of the cardiac chambers, the blood haemoglobin concentration, and the volume of circulating blood; in women all these parameters are lower. This penalises women especially in aerobic disciplines.' The review concludes that though an analysis of women's high-level athletic performance starting in the 1980s reveals an initial narrowing of differences, this relative improvement in women's performances has not been sustained, suggesting there are physiological limits to the extent to which women athletes can approach the performances of men.
The SportsRec article also considers the relative propensity to injury of cismen and ciswomen. The article states, 'Women are more prone to injuring joints such as the shoulders and knees. Weaker shoulder muscles and looser supporting tissues mean the joint is less stable than in men, reports writer Michael Lasalandra, in an interview with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center sports medicine physician Bridget Quinn. Also, the injury rate to the anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL, a major knee ligament, is significantly higher in female than in male athletes.'
A recent paper quantified the male advantage across various sports using data from cis men and women. Track and swimming were at the lower end with about a 12 percent differential, weightlifting was on the high end, and for throwing a baseball pitch, that was a 50 percent difference.
2. No treatment will completely remove the competitive advantage of transgender women athletes
Those who oppose transgender women athletes competing against cisgendered women argue that none of the transition therapies or subsequent hormone therapies these trans athletes receive will adequately reduce the physical advantages they retain.
A study released in January 2021 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that transgender women maintain an athletic advantage over their cisgender peers even after a year on hormone therapy. The study's lead author, Dr. Timothy Roberts, a pediatrician, and the director of the adolescent medicine training program at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, stated, 'At one year, the trans women on average still have an advantage over the cis women.' For the first two years after starting hormones, the trans women in the study's review were able to do 10 percent more pushups and 6 percent more sit-ups than their cisgender female counterparts. After two years, Roberts stated 'they were fairly equivalent to the cisgender women.' Their running times declined as well, but two years on, trans women were still 12 percent faster on the 1.5 mile-run than their cisgender peers. Critics of transgender women being given access to ciswomen's competitions argue that this data suggests, at the least, that transgender women should not be able to compete against ciswomen in athletic events for at least two years, if not longer.
Similar findings have been made before. In 2017, Otago University professor in physiology Alison Heather released similar findings. Heather stated, 'The physiological attributes of males that makes them naturally stronger including anatomical and biological features such as size, muscle mass, lung capacity, and heart size would be an advantage.'
It has been argued that though muscle mass may diminish attributes such as height, lung capacity and heart size would be retained and are likely to prove an advantage in many competitive sports. Heather argued then that the differences, their longevity, and their effects were not well enough known to conclude that transgender women can be fairly allowed to compete against cisgender women. Heather stated, 'Given the lack of research, there is a real need to study what physical advantages transgender females carry after hormone therapy with consideration required for different sports, trainability and for performance. Until then, it is very difficult to conclude that it is a level playing field for CIS women versus trans women." Research conducted in Sweden has similarly concluded that transgender women athletes will retain physiological advantages. Tommy Lundberg, lecturer, and researcher at the Division of Clinical Physiology Sweden's Karolinska Institute focuses on the skeletal muscle strength of trans people receiving hormone therapy. Lundberg concludes that the advantages for trans women in strength are to the point where fairness cannot be ensured in most sports. Lundberg argues that the International Olympic Committee's aim of ensuring fair competition for all, including transgender athletes, will be very difficult to attain. He concludes, 'The IOC (International Olympic Committee) states that the overriding objective is, and remains, the guarantee of fair competition. That's what they say in their guidelines. So that's the problem right now: They don't go hand-in-hand.' Lundberg has argued that even extending the period during which a trans athlete has to have been on hormone therapy prior to competing to two years is unlikely to guarantee fairness. He states, 'It would be an easy fix if you could just change regulation to two years, instead of one. But I don't think that's a feasible solution either. Actually, right now, there is nothing to indicate that.' Lundberg concludes, 'We don't have this easy fix or easy regulation that can be applied. You basically have to choose or prioritize either inclusion or fairness. They don't go hand-in-hand right now. And in most sports, it's going to be problematic to include transgender women and achieve fairness. That's what the current research suggests.'
There are others who similarly argue that the persistence of physiological advantage in transgender athletes means that the goals of inclusivity for trans people and fairness for ciswomen competitors may not be compatible. Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a professor of law at Duke has acknowledged that attempts to restrict trans women's access to competitive sport 'run counter to the movement that seeks to include transgender and intersex people in social institutions based on their gender identity rather than their biology.' Coleman, though sympathetic toward including transwomen in most social institutions, claims that this cannot be fairly done in women's competitive sport. She states, 'Replacing traditional sex classifications with classifications based on gender identity certainly has steep costs in contexts like competitive sport.'
3. Allowing transgender women to compete against cisgender women damages competitive sport for ciswomen
Opponents of transgender athletes competing against ciswomen without major restrictions argue that the trans athletes have such an advantage that their participation could potentially destroy competitive sport for sic women.
Opponents of transgender athletes' participation argue that competitive sport for ciswomen requires that the best of them have some realistic capacity to win. It has been argued that in some areas of competition the advantages enjoyed by the trans athletes are so great as to virtually remove the capacity for ciswomen athletes to have any potential to be competitively successful. A dramatic instance of this has recently occurred within women's track competition at a college level in Connecticut. In June 2020, Bianca Stanescu , the mother of Connecticut college track champion, Selina Soule, wrote about the unfair and insurmountable competition she believed her daughter was facing. She stated, 'After a series of unremarkable finishes as a boy in the 2018 indoor season, the same athlete began competing - and winning - as a girl in the outdoor season that started just weeks later. My daughter would have qualified for the New England regionals in the 55-meter dash in Spring 2019, but instead, the top two spots went to biological boys who identify as girls.'
Sprinter Chelsea Mitchell, another college track athlete who claims to have been closed out by unfair competition from transgender women athletes has stated, 'No girl should have to settle into her starting blocks knowing that no matter how hard you work, you don't have a fair shot at victory.' Chelsea Manning and Selina Soule were among the plaintiffs bringing a suit against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Council for allowing transgender athletes to deprive cis athletes of any meaningful opportunity to participate competitively. The plaintiffs' attorney Roger Brooks argued that the law guarantees girls 'equal quality' of competition, which he said is denied by having to race people with what he described as inherent physiological advantages. Brooks argued that the transgender sprinters improperly won 15 championship races between 2017 and 2020 and cost cisgender girls the opportunity to advance to other races 85 times.
Opponents of transgender women competing against ciswomen argue that their participation undermines the purpose for which separate competition was originally established for ciswomen. Doriane Coleman, a Professor of Law at Duke Law School, who as an 800m runner, became the United States. National Collegiate Indoor Champion in 1982, has written that the inherent performance gap between male and female competitors makes shared competitions discriminatory for ciswoman. She has written, 'the performance gap between males and females that justifies the existence of a women's category in competitive sports. That gap typically extends to 10-12 percent. Without an eligibility rule based in sex-linked traits, we wouldn't see female bodies on any podium.' Coleman has further argued that such competitive opportunities provide an avenue for ciswomen's advancement. She has stated, 'It matters that girls and women are afforded opportunities equal to boys and men, including in elite athletics. It matters because this is the only way sport can achieve its empowerment goals.'
Finally, it has been argued that creating sporting competitions in which ciswomen were likely to be regularly defeated by transgender women athletes is likely to diminish ciswomen's participation in competitive sport. Barbara Ehardt, the Republican Idaho state representative, who played basketball in college and formerly coached a N.C.A.A. Division I women's team, has expressed concern that residual physical advantages that transgender women athletes might possess could reduce the participation of cisgender women in sports. Ehardt has stated, 'The progress that we, as women, have made over the last 50 years will be for naught and we will be forced to be spectators in our own sports.'
Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a professor of law at Duke has noted that even without the impact of transgender women's competition, ciswomen's participation in college sport has been declining in the United States. She has written, 'The most recently collected statistics show that participation by middle-school U.S. girls is actually decreasing. Funding for and promotion of boys and men remains higher, not only because their participation rates are higher but also because their events are more popular.'
It has long been acknowledged that women athletes typically must train harder to achieve comparable levels of achievement to male athletes. Physiological studies have demonstrated that men have larger hearts, greater blood volume, more red blood cells, greater lung capacity and are on average, taller (15cm) and larger (10kg) than women. The gap does narrow in athletic populations, but in terms of sports performance this means that for any given athletic task - such as running 100 metres in 11 seconds - a woman athlete would be using almost 100 per cent of her potential, whereas a male athlete might use 90 per cent of his potential to complete that goal. It has been suggested that the combined effect of having to work harder and achieve less competitive success would be a decline in female participation in sport. Professor Coleman has concluded, ''Replacing traditional sex classifications with classifications based on gender identity certainly has steep costs in contexts like competitive sport.' 4. Competing against transgender women athletes put cis gender women at a safety risk
Those who oppose transgender women competing against ciswomen argue that particularly in contact sports, competing against transwomen places cis women at significantly increased risk of injury.
Joanna Harper, a PhD researcher at Loughborough University, England, and the author of the book 'Sporting Gender', has stated, 'I absolutely agree that there's a safety issue because on average, trans women are taller and bigger than cis women. If you're looking at collision metrics, the two important factors are size and speed. The data I gathered from 20 distance runners and sprinters suggests that trans women aren't faster than cis women. A study from the U.S. Air Force does suggest that trans women are faster, but [it] didn't measure training in any way. They are still going to be bigger than cis women.'
Referring to the recent draft proposals by World Rugby to ban transwomen from the women's competition, Harper stated, 'Now, of course, what you really want to know is how big are the transwomen playing rugby versus the ciswomen playing rugby? We don't have any data on that. But as a population group, transwomen are bigger than ciswomen, so there's definitely some reason for concern over a potential safety issue.In a 38-page draft document produced by its transgender working group, World Rugby acknowledged that there is likely to be 'at least a 20-30 percent greater risk' of injury when a female player is tackled by someone who has gone through male puberty. The document also indicated that the latest science shows that transwomen retain 'significant' physical advantages over biological women even after they take medication to lower their testosterone. The rugby report stated, 'Current policies regulating the inclusion of transgender women in sport are based on the premise that reducing testosterone to levels found in biological females is sufficient to remove many of the biologically-based performance advantage; however, peer-reviewed evidence suggests this is not the case. Ciswomen players (who do not undergo androgenisation during development) who are participating with and against transwomen (who do undergo androgenisation during development) are at a significantly increased risk of injury because of the contact nature of rugby.'
World Rugby's working group notes, players who are assigned male at birth and whose puberty and development is influenced by androgens/testosterone 'are stronger by 25-50 percent, are 30 percent more powerful, 40 percent heavier, and about 15 percent faster than players who are assigned female at birth (who do not experience an androgen-influenced development).' Crucially those advantages are not reduced when a transwoman takes testosterone-suppressing medication, as was previous thought - 'with only small reductions in strength and no loss in bone mass or muscle volume or size after testosterone suppression'. It also recognises that the advantage is so great - and the potential consequences for the safety of participants in tackles, scrums and mauls concerning enough - it should mean that welfare concerns should be prioritised.
5. Seeking limitations on trans women athletes competing against cisgender athletes is not transphobia
Those who oppose transgender women competing against cisgender women claim that the accusations of transphobia levelled against them are unjust. They argue that they are merely seeking fairness and safety for ciswomen and that they value this over inclusivity. They claim that their opposition to transgender women competing is not based on prejudice but on the desire to treat cisgender women fairly. They further claim that accusations of transphobia are used against them to avoid considering their legitimate concerns.
Liberal Senator Claire Chandler has been cited as an example of someone who was accused of transphobia after she opposed transwomen competing in some ciswomen sports because of their unfair advantage. Speaking in Federal Parliament on August 3, 2021, she objected to New Zealand transgender female weightlifter Laurel Hubbard being able to displace Nauru's 18-year-old Roviel Detenamo in the women's 87-plus kilogram category. Chandler highlighted that Hubbard's previous performances as a male were 'miles off Olympic standard' and claimed that the only reason she was able to qualify for the Olympic women's competition was because of the residual advantages she had from being born physiologically male. Chandler stated, 'The only explanation for that is male advantage, which, by definition, is an unfair advantage in women's competition.'
The year before, in July 2020, Chandler argues that transgender women athletes posed a risk to ciswomen athletes' safety when they competed against each other. Chandler cited World Rugby experts who claimed there was a 20-30 per cent higher risk of injury for women tackled by transgender females, and new research showing trans players born male lose little of their physical advantages after 12 months on drugs to lower their testosterone. Chandler claimed, 'Evidence about safety risks for female athletes is highly relevant to women's sport at every level and should be made available.'
Chandler's critics have accused her of being transphobic, that is, of having an irrational fear of, aversion to, or showing discrimination against transgender people.
On August 30, 2021, Senator Nita Green, a leader of the LGBTQ ginger group Rainbow Labor, stated in the upper house that Senator Chandler's campaign to limit transgender women's access to ciswomen's sport was an attempt 'to veil her transphobic views as faux feminist values'. Public figures such as Chandler have defended themselves against accusations of transphobia arguing that their concerns do not spring from aversion or discrimination but from a desire to see that cisgender women are treated fairly. Chandler has stated that 'unfounded accusations of "transphobia" against women like JK Rowling have been used to justify appalling abuse and threats of violence against women on social media.' Chandler has claimed that these unjustified accusations of transphobia are being used to silence are being used to silence those who are concerned about a distortion of women's sport. Chandler has stated, 'So many women have contacted me with concerns about this issue (of trans activist claims on female sport), but they are worried that if they speak publicly, or even internally, they might face consequences at their club or at their work...
How do Australians know that they are able to speak freely about women's rights? The idea that someone could lose their job or be banned from the sport they love for acknowledging that [gender differences] exist should be alarming to every fair-minded Australian.'
Similarly, the United Kingdom LGB Alliance has stated, 'People are sick and tired of common sense being presented as "transphobia". Bev Jackson, a co-founder of the United Kingdom LGB has stated, 'It is astonishing that we have reached a point at which talking about the need to preserve safety in women's sport is somehow mischaracterized as "transphobic".'