"But She Identifies as a Woman"

In Search of Common Sense in the Trans Athlete Debate

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"It would be so nice if something made sense for a change." — Lewis Carroll

At a recent party, I mentioned that the female swimmers on the 2022 University of Pennsylvania team had to share their locker room with a “fully intact” man named Lia Thomas. The young women felt angry about undressing in front of this person, and about Penn’s insistence that they prioritize Thomas’ supposed emotional fragility over their own desire for the dignity and privacy of an all-female space.

“But Lia Thomas is not a man,” responded a woman at the party.

“Picture a naked man,” I replied. “That’s what Thomas looked like. Legally, that would be called indecent exposure and voyeurism.”

“But she identifies as a woman,” she said.

Thus we stumbled down the rabbit hole, as Lewis Carroll put it, where things got curiouser and curiouser: two women debating whether women should be forced to share locker rooms and sports teams with men — but we can’t agree on whether certain people who look exactly like men are actually men.¹

In a related semantic somersault, last week’s Washington Post news story about the NCAA’s trans policy referred to Olympic swimming champion and civil rights lawyer Nancy Hogshead as an “anti-transgender activist.” I’ve known Nancy since 1993. We work closely together in the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group.² None of us are anti-trans. We’re pro-female athlete.

More gendered jabberwocky from the Washington Post: “Current rules allow transgender athletes, including women, to compete, so long as they adhere to the guidelines stipulated by their international sport governing bodies.”

Wait — who are the women in “transgender athletes, including women?” Are these women? Or does “women” now mean “men”? Curiouser!

Meanwhile, the NCAA is being sued by sixteen female (meaning female) athletes – a fact the Washington Post curiously omitted.

Did you know that only 31 percent of trans-identified people have taken cross-sex hormones? Only 16 percent have had genital surgery. Most of the boys and men causing countless headaches and injustices for girls and women in every sport are indistinguishable from other boys and men. Yet to refer to these people as male can constitute hate speech.³

Even after testosterone suppression, which only some sports require (for others, simple “self-identification” as a woman will suffice), men remain bigger, stronger, and taller, and thus retain significant performance advantages over women.⁴ Which is why Nancy Hogshead and I (and almost 70 percent of the American public) disapprove of male intrusions into women’s sports.

The whole raison d'être of the female sports category is to exclude boys and men so girls and women can pursue and celebrate their own athletic achievements on their own terms.⁵ Excluding men is not not anti-trans. It’s pro-female athlete.

The woman at the party respects Thomas’ right to define herself. I do, too. “Dress however you please,” J.K. Rowling famously wrote. “Call yourself whatever you like.”

But when it comes to women’s sports and women’s locker rooms, we need to discard the doublespeak⁶ and get real.⁷ And really, Thomas — and other men demanding a right to play women’s sports — are men.

“Clearly that can’t be right,” Martina Navratilova has said. “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women.”⁸

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1. Men are adult humans with bodies designed to produce small gametes (sperm). Women are adult humans with bodies designed to produce large gametes (eggs). There are only two sexes. This is true regardless of whether an individual can reproduce or not - just as humans are a bipedal species even though some people do not have two legs and some use wheelchairs. People can dress how they wish, change their names, ingest hormones, modify their bodies, and adopt or reject sex-role stereotypes but that does not change men into women or vice versa. See also Understanding the Sex Binary and Sex Is Not a Spectrum by biologist Colin WrightofReality’s Last Stand.

2. Thanks to Nancy Hogshead, JD, Olyfor her tireless work on behalf of female athletes.

3. California and New York criminalize intentional misgendering. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission considers a refusal to use chosen pronouns as harassment.

4. Men have greater strength, size, speed, and muscle mass. They have larger hearts, lungs, hands, feet, and skulls. (In a typical year, the fastest high school boys are faster than the fastest female Olympians in every swimming and track and field event except the 5000-meter run.) Women have more body fat, along with monthly periods and sometimes pregnancy and lactation. These enormous sex differences result in performance advantages for men in virtually sport.

5. All sports categories exclude. Weight classes, age groups, and disability categories all exclude people who would have an unfair advantage if they were included.

6. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”― George Orwell, 1984

7. See also On Misgendering: A Quick Note on Why We Do It, Why They Do It, and Why We Shouldn’t Stop by Kitty Finesse in Down the Rabbit Hole on Substack.

8. Martina Navratilova, “Five Years Later: What I’ve Learned about Women and Men in Sports,” Genspect, August 30, 2023. Stella O'Malley