Can We Ensure Fairness for Female Athletes While Including Trans-Identified Males?

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In the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, we’re Democrats. Most of us are women. Some are lesbian. We’re sympathetic to oppressed groups. When we formed in 2019, we asked ourselves, How can we ensure fairness for females while including trans-identified males?

What about testosterone suppression? we wondered. Does that mitigate the natural male performance advantage? Extensive research says no.¹ Men retain their height, weight, skeletal size, heart size, lung size, and most of their strength after reducing testosterone.

Performance-Worsening Drugs

It’s also contrary to anti-doping laws to require athletes to take drugs to meet eligibility standards, Olympic champion swimmer and broadcaster Donna de Varona reminded us. De Varona helped launch the United States Anti-Doping Agency and the World Anti-Doping Agency, which are charged with eradicated performance-enhancing drugs in sports. “Little did we know people would cite drug use as a performance-worsening technique,” she said.

Even Little Kids?

What about pre-puberty? Can 8-year-old girls hold their own against 8-year-old boys? No. A century of swimming and running records plus recent research proves it.

Men Don’t Menstruate

More obvious female disadvantages: menstrual cramps, pregnancy, and lactation.

“I can’t even begin to count the number of matches I lost due to periods,” legendary tennis champion Martina Navratilova told us.

After literally years of analysis, research, and discussion, we concluded that we can’t preserve fairness for females while including males. And fairness for females is our priority. We wish it were the priority for all feminists.²

We still encourage accommodations for men who identify as trans, nonbinary, gender-fluid, or anything else so long as those accommodations do not diminish females’ opportunities or financial rewards nor our right to fair, safe, sex-separated sports experiences. Accommodations might involve re-branding the male category as open; scoring separately; creating new categories; hosting coed practices; and educating other men toward reducing locker-room bullying.

Despite our support for accommodating trans-identified males, ours is a tough position for trans allies to accept. They operate on the slogan “transwomen are women” — but, as I explained in an earlier essay, they’re not. They’re men.³

And sports are organized by sex, not by beliefs, gender stereotypes, or identities.

Why Do Women Keep Favoring Men?

Now, in 2024, the research is widely available. Yet trans allies keep arguing that weakened men are comparable to women. “What about the recent transathlete study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine?” asked a female friend this month. “Doesn’t this undermine your declarations of male performance advantage?”

No. See “Fatal Flaws in the IOC-Sponsored Research Study on Transgender Athletes” by Olympic rower Mary O’Connor. M.D., and sport scientist Gregory Brown.

Recent Victories by Male Athletes in Women’s Sports

Meanwhile, male victories are happening daily, in every sport at every level. In the first week of May alone:⁴

• A male cross-country skier named Soren Stark-Chess was named to the Girls’ All-Conference team in the Western Maine Conference, taking one of 10 spots designated to celebrate female accomplishments.

• A Women’s Varsity All-American title in collegiate road nationals (cycling) went to a man named Kylie Small.

• Sprinter Sadie Schreiner won the 200 meter and the 400 meter races (track) in the Division III Liberty League Championships, shattering Rochester Institute of Technology records. If he had competed against the men, he would have placed last.

My turn for questions:

• Do you know that slots on team rosters are zero-sum, so every additional boy subtracts a girl? And every boy who wins or places or finishes anything except dead last affects every other girl in a race? And the presence of boys makes girls’ sports coed, and communicates to girls that their rights to fairness don’t matter?

• Why should male desires take precedence over females’ preferences and rights to fair play?

• Why not support women – who have not yet reached sports equity 52 years after Title IX — and still miss out on 1.13 million school opportunities and $1.1 billion in college scholarships each year?

• Shouldn’t we preserve the all-female sports environment since we know it empowers and strengthens girls and women?

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1. A 2021 analysis by Lundberg and Emma Hilton shows that males retain performance advantages even after suppressing testosterone. In March, 26 sport scholars challenged the IOC’s Framework on Fairness, Inclusion, and Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations, concluding, “The inclusion of transgender women in female sports categories cannot be reconciled with fairness, and in some instances safety, for females in athletic sports."

2. Remarkably, the National Women’s Law Center and the Women’s Sports Foundation prioritize including males who identify as trans over the rights of girls and women.

3. I don’t mean to be hurtful to men who have a deep desire to be perceived as women. But when it comes to sports and private women’s spaces such as locker rooms and restrooms, physical reality matters.

4. The Women’s Sports Policy Working Group catalogued similar male victories for nine months but ran out of resources after logging 578 victories in 44 sports. SheWon.org is keeping a related tally; so far, 664 female athletes have uploaded info about 950 medals they lost to trans-identified male athletes in 31 sports.