What Nobody's Asking About Trans Women in Sports

But they should...

Source image by Sue Thompson

Much has been written to summarize the current debate over whether trans women should or should not be allowed to participate in sports.

The deeper problem with this whole mess is something I have not seen anyone else bring up anywhere:

“Should trans women be allowed in women's sports?” is the wrong question.

It’s the Wrong Framing

That question, posed that way, pits two fundamentally different kinds of fairness against one another.

The “yes” side observes that trans women are women, and social fairness and equality therefore demand that their womanhood be recognized and that they be allowed to compete against other women.

The “no” side asserts that trans women have physical characteristics that are extreme within the distribution of female characteristics, and that this must necessarily confer a competitive advantage, such that competitive fairness demands that cis women shouldn’t have to compete against trans women. (Serano analyzes the “no” side’s various arguments quite thoroughly at the above link, so I will summarize no further.)

You tried, little AI. You tried. but that flag just isn’t right…

Two Different Kinds of Fairness

Social fairness vs. competitive fairness. That's what the question sets into opposition by its very framing.

Surely, we must observe that social fairness is a sphere in which a person's self-determined identity should matter. My driver's license says—and indeed should say—that I'm female, regardless of what some doctor who couldn't see inside my head assumed at the moment of my birth.

Likewise, we must observe that sport is a physical sphere in which bodies really do matter, and in which competitive fairness is taken as a given. This is why, among other things, boxing and wrestling have weight divisions, and doping is banned pretty much everywhere. Weight divisions recognize that not all bodies are created equal and exist to establish a baseline of competitive fairness despite that. Doping bans aim to ensure competitive fairness within cohorts that are assumed to be fair in the absence of doping.

I believe that both kinds of fairness matter. So what do we do? How do we reconcile these two types of fairness when, at the intersection of sports and trans rights, these two types of fairness seem to be incompatible?

Sports Have to be Fair to be Fun

I say we should fall back on competitive fairness as the basis for sport in the first place. That may be a counterintuitive claim for a trans woman to make, but I do. Why? Because there's no point having a competition at all if you know from the start that it's not fair.

That is, you don't let Babe Ruth sub in for a player on a little league team and still pretend that the other team has a fair chance, do you?

A wide variety of sporting bodies establish divisions and brackets all the time in support of competitive fairness. This is, ultimately the solution.

The problem is that our society has made an implicit assumption that gender is an appropriate basis for one of these divisions.

That’s the part I disagree with. That’s the part that creates the seeming incompatibility between social fairness and competitive fairness.

The Question We Should be Asking

The real question, the one we should be asking but that I have never seen anyone bring up, is this:

How can sports maintain competitive fairness while respecting the lives and identities of all participants?

Framed that way, the answer is not so mysterious: Don’t have gender divisions at all.

Seriously? Don’t have gender divisions at all? Well that what do we have instead?

Capability Divisions

Boxing and wrestling, as mentioned, already provide a model for this, one that is well accepted and has been forever. They recognize that weight (presumably as a proxy for overall height and muscle mass) is a reasonable basis on which to bracket the competitors. The entire existence of the Paralympics is a coarse-grained capability division, providing a context of competitive fairness for people who face additional challenges to their performance.

Capability divisions are not a new idea. Nor are they controversial. The model exists. It works. The Paralympics shows that it’s possible to let competitors compete fairly while not only respecting but celebrating people’s identities.

This is the solution to the supposed contradiction inherent in the manufactured controversy around trans women in sports: the governing bodies for each sport need to evaluate what factors actually matter for their sport and establish capability divisions on that basis.

For example, height and arm length would obviously matter a lot more in darts, say, than much of anything else. For example, suppose height and arm length is the main factor in darts, other than technique. I’m a tall trans woman with long arms. If I were to play competitive darts. If that supposition is true, it would be disingenuous of me to claim that my stature doesn’t help me; and competitive fairness would suggest I should be pitted against people with similar height and wingspan regardless of their gender identity or gender expression.

If such an analysis for a given sport shows that it simply doesn't make sense for that sport to segregate the men from the women, well, fine. So be it. So much the fairer—in both senses—for everyone.

Chess, darts, billiards, speedcubing, cup stacking, equestrian, e-sports: these are all cases where the competitor’s gender has no actual bearing on performance. There are probably others as well.

To the extent that these sports segregate by gender, well, they ought to cut it out. Speedcubing does not, and it is having no problems with people of all identities competing head-to-head.

There's no reason for gender segregation at all. We shouldn’t have “men’s sports” and “women’s sports” in the first place. We should just have “sports,” and each sport should find its own approach to competitive fairness that inherently respects people’s identities.

(Full disclosure: this article is adapted from a Reddit comment I made some years ago at the height of the Lia Thomas furor, and the darts bit has been edited to clarify that I meant height and armspan as hypothetical, rather than proven, physical advantages; f anyone knows of actual studies on biometrics in darts, I’d be happy to see them.)