Unfair Advantage… Not!

There is an awful lot of anti-trans legislation and an awful lot of people talking about it who don’t know the all the facts.

Striking a balance between fairness in competition and the rights of transgender athletes
The Conversation
By Chris W. Surprenant
May 18, 2021


[…]
Caught up in this political point-scoring are real people – both trans athletes who want to participate in competitive sports and those competing against them.

As a professor of ethics and public policy, I spend much of my time thinking about the role of the law in protecting the rights of individuals, especially when the rights of some people appear to conflict with the rights of others.

How to accommodate transgender athletes in competitive sports – or whether they should be accommodated at all – has become one of these conflicts.
[…]
Yet some legislators have latched onto these examples, using them as a basis for bills that ban all transgender teens from participating in gendered divisions that differ from their birth sex. But these bills don’t solve the competitive imbalances that can occur with athletes like Beggs. Worse, they might prevent transgender teens from competing altogether.

Well… This topic has been researched by the NCAA and the IOC and nowhere in his article does he mention those facts.

Since studies have shown that kids who participate meaningfully in athletics have better mental and physical health than their peers who don’t – and teens who identify as transgender are at a significantly greater mental health risk than their peers – it’s a worthy goal to try to accommodate their desire to compete.

Agree.

Separating athletes by biological sex is necessary because the gap between the best male and female athletes – at all levels – is dramatic.

Now this is where I start to have major problems with his article.

What he doesn’t talk about is the fact that up until puberty girls and boys are not that different in body strength, it is puberty that defines the difference between girls and boys. So when trans girls go on puberty blockers they do not gain any competitive advantage, and for adult athletes the NCAA and the IOC found that after two years on hormones that the muscle strength deteriorate to that of a female athlete (I know after a year on hormones my muscle strength dropped way down).

I point to these examples because, put together, they show that no fitness regimen, no amount of practice, and no reallocation of financial resources could allow the best female athletes at any level to compete against the best male athletes at that same level.

Notice he doesn’t talk about hormones or puberty blockers.

There are many other factors that give athletes and advantage… such physical attributes as height, body mass are the two that come to mind. There are socioeconomic factors such as being able to afford a person trainer or being able to pay for court time.

He proposes an “Open” division where girls, boys and trans children can compete together, which is still segregation. He ends with…

While whatever decision is made is unlikely to make all competitors happy, this approach seems to be the most fair and feasible given the relatively small number of transgender athletes and the unique circumstances of each athlete.

As far as I am concerned, there is no advantage between cis athletes and trans athletes if the International Standard of Care is followed.