US: 545 athletes take a stand against transphobic sports legislation

“You have been silent in the face of hateful legislation in states that are slated to host championships, even though those states are close to passing anti-transgender legislation.”

500 athletes have addressed the The National Collegiate Athletic Association in a letter demanding action against transphobia, Gay Times reports.

NCAA is a member-led organization dedicated to the well-being and lifelong success of college athletes.

“We, the undersigned NCAA student-athletes, are extremely frustrated and disappointed by the lack of action taken by the NCAA to recognize the dangers of hosting events in states that create a hostile environment for student-athletes,” the letter says.

“Put simply: the NCAA must speak out against bills that directly affect their student athlete population if they want to uphold their self-professed ideals of keeping college sports safe and promoting the excellence of physical and mental well being for student-athletes.”

Aliya Schenck and Alana Bojar, two female athletes on the track and field team at Washington University in St. Louis, drafted the letter with help from two LGBTQ advocacy groups.

The New York Times reports that the NCAA, which moved championships away from North Carolina in 2016 when the state was considering a bill to prevent some transgender people from using the restroom that matched their gender identity, has said  that it will “closely monitor” such bills related to sports participation.

That is simply not good enough.

Photo: Terry Miller, No. 4, transgender, competing in  in Connecticut last year. A lawsuit in that state seeks to stop transgender girls from participating in girls’ competition. Photo: Jessica Hill for The New York Times.

What  science really says about transgender athletes

Michel Martin has made an interview with Dr. Eric Vilain  about transgender athletes in sport over at Boise State Public Radio. The short version: It is complicated, but in general trans people do not have any real advantage over cis people in sports.

Anti-trans activists are trying to ban trans kids and adults from public sports.  They say that their laws and regulations are put in place to eliminate any competitive advantage that transgender athletes may have. 

But do they have any advantage?

Eric Villain holds an MD and a PhD. He is a pediatrician and geneticist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., and an expert on intersex conditions.  He’s been an adviser both to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the International Olympic Committee.

I will present a few quotes from the interview here to give you an insight into the most important points made by Dr. Villain. 

Villain points out that men have on average an advantage in performance in athletics of about 10 to 12% over women. The fact is, however, that trans athletes, on average,  are not winning any more than their cis counterparts. So how can that be?

Villain explains:

“…higher levels of the male hormone testosterone are associated with better performance only in a very small number of athletic disciplines - 400 meters, 800 meters, hammer throw, pole vault. And it certainly does not explain the whole 10% difference…

“…I would say that every sport requires different talents and anatomies for success. So I think we should focus on celebrating this diversity rather than focusing on relative notions of fairness. For example, the body of a marathon runner is extremely different than the body of a shotput champion. And a trans woman athlete may have some advantage on the basketball field because of her height but would be at a disadvantage in gymnastics.

“So it’s complicated. And more and more, many trans women athletes, for example, will take gender-affirming hormones, which will reduce their muscle mass and red blood cells, which carry the oxygen necessary for better performance. And that will also reduce the speed, the strength and the endurance.

“…at a high school level, many trans youth do delay their puberty, which means that even if they are not taking these gender-affirming hormones, their natural puberty in their biological sex is not happening, therefore resulting in a delay and an absence of an effect on muscle mass, at least for the male-to-female situation. So the supposed advantage of muscle mass and red blood cells because of testosterone becomes moot in middle and often high school competitions when there have been puberty blockers involved.

Read (or listen to) the whole interview here!

Illustration: sv_sunny
Photo of Villain from Wikipedia.

Chris Mosier, the first openly transgender athlete on Team USA, shares his story

CBS News reports on Chris Mosier, an American  transgender top athlete who is making trans people visible in the world of sports.

“Doing an ironman race is nothing compared to me just existing in the world and some of the pain and the hurt that I had felt up to that point in identifying as trans and having interactions with the world,” Mosier told [NFL player Dhani] Jones.

CBS continues:

In an interview about the speaker series with CBS News, Mosier said he wants to be the role model he didn’t have as a child. He created transathlete.com in 2013 as a “resource for students, athletes, coaches, and administrators to find information about trans inclusion in athletics at various levels of play.”…

Mosier has used his social media to draw attention to specific legislation, such as Tennessee’s House Bill 1572, which would penalize schools that allow transgender athletes to play on the team that aligns with their gender identity. He has also raised awareness online about similar bills regarding transgender student athletes in other states including Georgia, Washington and Missouri.

You can see the whole Dhani Jones interview below.

Nike has featured Chris in one of their ads (photo above from Running Magazine).

Some 200 American Athletes Support Trans Youth Participation in Sports

Athlete Ally reports on American  organizations and athletes supporting the inclusion of transgender people: in sports

Today [December 21] , sports icon Billie Jean King, U.S. National Women’s Soccer Team Co-Captain and World Cup Champion Megan Rapinoe [photo above], and WNBA trail-blazer and legend Candace Parker joined nearly 200 fellow athletes in women’s sports to support providing girls and women who are transgender the equal opportunity to participate in sports.

The athletes joined Athlete Ally and the Women’s Sports Foundation as signatories to a friend-of-the-court brief Lambda Legal filed today with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, urging the court to affirm a lower court ruling enjoining an Idaho law that effectively banned transgender girls from participating sports in Idaho schools. 

Athlete Ally is a nonprofit organization that advocates for LGBTQ inclusion in sports. The Women’s Sports Foundation is a nonprofit organization focused on enabling girls and women to reach their potential in sport and life.

“There is no place in any sport for discrimination of any kind,” Billie Jean King said. “I’m proud to support all transgender athletes who simply want the access and opportunity to compete in the sport they love. The global athletic community grows stronger when we welcome and champion all athletes – including LGBTQI+ athletes.”

Brief of Amici Curiae 176 Athletes in Women’s Sports, The Women’s Sports Foundation, and Athlete Ally in Support of Plaintiffs-Appellees and Affirmance.

Transgender people in sports: The data doesn’t match the claims that they shouldn’t compete

Interesting article by Michea over at Medium:

Despite the pervasive narrative that transgender people, specifically transgender women, have an unfair advantage and thus shouldn’t be allowed to compete in competitive sport, the history and scientific data show that the narratives are either not backed up by evidence or are simply falsehoods shared to create fear. 

While transgender people have been competing openly in sports for the past few decades, we have yet to see the so-called take over of sport that numerous articles and organizations claim will happen if we allow transgender people to compete in their gender category.

Read more in Transgender people in sports.

“The myth of the “level playing field” in sports” credit Dr. Veronica Ivy for graphic. Image below from Transathlete.com.

Don’t let sports competitions be shaped by misguided “T Talk”

The myth of testosterone is now not only used ti stop transgender women from competing in sports. It is also used to attack intersex women.

In this article  Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis documents that the current attacks against female athletes is based on misunderstandings and a misguided understanding of fairness in sports. You cannot reduce athletic abilities to the amount of T in their blood.

The new rule of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF)  is unscientific, unethical and discriminatory, Jordan-Young and Krkazis argue:

In three of 11 running events [in the research used by IAAF], the lowest T group did better, and the strongest association across all events was the negativeassociation between T and performance in the 100 meters, where lower T athletes ran 5.4 percent faster than the highest T athletes. In none of the events where high T athletes performed better was the gap greater than 2.9 percent.

One independent group requested and obtained a subset of the IAAF data, concluding: “The results of [the IAAF’s first study] are clearly unreliable, and those of [the second study] are of unknown validity,” making it “impossible” to discern the real relationship, if any, between T and performance. Clearly, though, neither this study nor the broader sports science literature support the IAAF’s claim that targeted athletes “have the same advantages over [other] women as men do over women.” 

The IAAF seems to be targeting trans and intersex women, leaving other women with high testosterone levels out of the policy:

Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), the most common reason that women have naturally high T levels, and congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) were recently explicitly excluded from the 2019 regulations even when their levels exceed the threshold, though the IAAF has argued that women with PCOS and CAH derive “advantage” from high T.

Likewise, recent IAAF statements highlight sex-atypical chromosomes and gonads, which functions as a dog whistle to suggest that the targeted women athletes are not “really” women.

This is not about fairness. This is about bigotry and the need to force women into a narrow view of normalcy. Indeed, Stéphane Bermon, the director of the IAAF Health and Science Department, has presented an “ideal female phenotype” at scientific conferences, namely La Maja Desnuda by Francisco Goya (which I cannot include here because of tumblr’s ridiculous female presenting nipple policy). But believe me, this ideal is not based on science.

You can read the whole article here.

Photo of Caster Semenya. Getty Images

Transgender athletes are not a problem

Brynn Tannehill gives a good summary of the trans athlete debate over at twitter:

Transgender boy wins girls wrestling title as he is banned from competing as a man

Since the State of Texas do not recognize transgender identities, the wrestler Mack Beggs has been forced to compete with girls.

SB Nation writes:

When he won a regional competition last week, all hell broke loose. Carrying an undefeated season into the meet, he won some matches on the mat; Other matches he won by forfeit by female athletes who refused to wrestle him.

He should have never had to win a match by forfeit, and he should have never been forced to wrestle against girls. As a boy, Beggs should have been allowed to compete against other boys all along. His high school does have a boys wrestling team.

Beggs has now qualified for the state tournament.

Local transphobes still refuses to recognize him as a man, arguing that his hormone therapy gives “her” unfair advantages in the ring.

He is even being sued by wrestling parent Jim Baudhuin.

Baudhuin has denied that his lawsuit is a reaction to Beggs being a transgender male. Notice the insanely hypocritical and offensive phrasing of his comment:

“I respect that [him being transgender] completely, and I think the coaches do,” he said. “All we’re saying is she is taking something that gives her an unfair advantage.”

First they deny a trans man his right to live his life as a man. Next they punish him when he tries to compete as a woman.

What a sick, sick, culture!