The (Possibly)Inescapable Dilemma of Transwomen in Sports.

A somewhat abusive dialogue

A few years ago, I wrote an article for Daily Kos and Medium in which I claimed that the arguments for transwomen’s participation in women’s sports were subject to a logical dilemma. The responses I received were sometimes well informed and to the point. Unfortunately they were couched in a context of abusiveness and inconsistency that made it difficult for me to see this. Wildly counterintuitive claims (some of which arguably deserved serious consideration) were treated as self-evident, and my requests for supporting arguments were attacked as bigotry and misogyny. This made it difficult for me to see that a couple of the responders did manage to propose an arguably legitimate resolution to the dilemma. However, they did so by rejecting my first premise, which is usually considered to be a fundamental principle of the pro-trans position. They also continued to make statements that required this premise, even after they had rejected it.

A logical argument can only prove that a conclusion is true if its premises are true. An argument still has value if a critic can show that the premises are false, if those premises are widely accepted. If we accept that the commenter’s resolution of this dilemma is sound, we also have to reject the distinction between (biological) sex and (social) gender. Transness would then be seen as a physical condition, like your bloodtype, and not a choice or a social construct.

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In logic, a dilemma is not just an upsetting occurrence. It is an argument which necessarily leads to only two possible conclusions. If neither of those conclusions is acceptable, and all possible facts must support one or the other, we are put in a position where our conclusion is dictated by logic alone, and the facts don’t make any difference.

Suppose we say that trans women are women, and therefore should be permitted to compete against other women. There is a logical dilemma at the heart of the resulting debate that seems to inevitably and necessarily make it impossible for trans women to compete as women. Here is the dilemma in logical form:

Transwomen are biologically male, even though their gender is female.

If biological males have an advantage over biological females, they should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports.

If biological males do not have an advantage over biological females, there is no reason to have a separate category of women’s sports.

Either biological males have an advantage over biological females, or they do not.

Therefore, either transwomen should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports, or there should be no separate category of women sports.

Regardless of which horn of this dilemma you grasp, transwomen don’t get to compete in women’s sports. Either they are excluded from women sports, or there are no women sports for them to be excluded from.

The logical structure of this argument is valid, so the only way we could avoid accepting this conclusion is to find some way of disproving at least one of the premises. I couldn’t see any way of doing this until I received this response when I posted this article on my daily Kos page. (If you want to see the whole context, including the pseudonyms of each commenter, click here. )

you’re still making the error of “transwomen are biological males”. . . Someone who is in the process of transitioning or who has done so and remains on HRT (hormone replacement therapy) is not “biologically” the same as before they started to transition. .. Even if anatomically so, they are not biologically so.

Okay. This contradicts pretty much everything I’d read on the topic at that point. Those who have insisted that trans women are women usually say those who disagree have not grasped the difference between Sex (which is biological) and Gender (which is socially constructed). If you haven’t encountered this yourself, there is an article on Substack which has literally hundreds of online examples of Wokesters patronizingly explaining this distinction to skeptics. (Unfortunately, I can’t find the article now. I’m new to substack, and articles pop up and disappear in ways I can’t comprehend. If any one else can find this article, please link to it in the comments.)

However, this article also includes a list with an equal number of messages claiming the exact opposite. Among other things, this second list includes a statement by Philosophy Tube creator/host (and transwoman) Abigail Thorn that since she is female and biological, she must therefore be a biological female. I’m a big fan of Philosophy Tube, but this logic doesn’t work. It’s like saying Donald Trump is a biological creature, and he is president of the USA, Therefore he is biologically president of the USA. Biologically, Trump is a homo sapiens. (No obvious jokes here, please). The fact that he is President is a socio-political fact, not a biological one. When he is no longer president, he will still be a homo sapiens biologically.

If gender is a social construct, transwomen would have two similarly distinct properties of male sexuality and female gender, and my dilemma would remain. If we claim that transwomen and cismen are biologically distinct, the logical dilemma dissolves. The question of transwomen in women’s sports then becomes an empirical matter, dealing with questions such as the actual effects of hormone replacement therapy on (formerly) male bodies, and the importance of lung structure, muscle mass etc. on athletic performance.

It seems to me that the empirical arguments for the Pro-trans side are quite strong, but not strong enough to say “The science is settled”. This is partly because it hasn’t been studied for very long, and the few answers we have raise further questions. Trans activists and bloggers often abusively label anyone who wants further answers as “transphobic” which is both inaccurate and irritating as hell. One commenter said, “TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. Variation is normal. So they should compete with other women. That is the only point that matters. Anything other than that is bigotry and biological determinism.” This is like saying “all Boxers in this league are male, that is the only point that matters. Therefore, there should be no weight classes. If the heavyweights always beat the bantam weights, well, variation is normal.” There are lots of sports which reject the idea that anyone has a right to compete against anyone else of their own sex. Wheel Chair basketball (AKA Murderball) has a very complicated system for measuring the handicap levels of each player, determined by factors such as who has the most functioning limbs, and how well they function. Fencing has competitors grouped by age as well as gender. We could replace the gender distinction all together with distinctions of this sort carried to a higher level of refinement.

In fact, Athletic organizations such as the IAAF and the Olympics have sometimes eliminated certain Ciswomen from competing as women because their testosterone was too high (among other reasons). My Commenters were ambivalent about this fact, sometimes pointing out that “some of {these rules} have caused human rights violations and have needed to be changed, and some are still in contention. . . “they’ve been policing the testosterone levels of some cis-gendered women for decades. They certainly don’t police that evenly across the board but certain women have had to submit to testing and been excluded based on the blood tests and other tests if anything about them sets off the alarms, especially if they are women of color.” At the same time, they also realized, at least in the context of this argument, that they can resolve this dilemma only if the responsibility to determine biological sex is bestowed on some outside scientific authority.

what is happening is not “let anyone play in whichever gendered sport they feel like”, not even in high school sports.” . . . .Even in those high school rules, the “friendly” ones don’t say “just decide which gender you feel like today!” No, even the “friendly” ones involve the actual doctors involved with the trans student and even psychiatrist review.

If you click on these links, you’ll see that there are plenty of guard rails against any boy pretending to be a girl just so he can win medals and/or sneak into the girl’s changing room. However, there was no indication that these rules guaranteed that the trans girls were receiving sufficient hormone treatments to completely eliminate the advantages that derive from masculine puberty. At the first link, there is no mention of any physical requirements to determine whether a trans person can join a woman’s team. The Colorado criterion contradicts itself: first saying “a transgender student-athlete's home school will perform a confidential evaluation to determine the gender assignment for the prospective student-athlete."Then in the next sentence in a 2014 article, Bethany Brookens, an assistant commissioner at CHSAA, says Colorado's policy is to let transgender student athletes compete as members of whatever gender they self-identify. There’s no mention of evaluation of muscle mass, bone density, or any other criterion that usually gives males an unfair advantage. (This may be because this brief description leaves out important restrictions, and if so, I’d like to know about it.)

Nevertheless, there are now clear biological standards in the events like the Olympics, which are designed to ensure equity between cis and trans women. I believe standards like these should be enforced for any major sporting event. Of course, if some kids are playing football in a field somewhere, anybody can do what they want. But county or state wide high school and college competitions should have strict and scientifically rigorous criteria to ensure that girls/women get a fair chance to compete against people of comparable muscular build and bone structure. For some sports, this level playing field can be achieved by measuring testosterone levels. Strong evidence for this has been discovered by Medical Physicist and competitive runner Joanna Harper. When she transitioned into womanhood, she discovered that her hormone replacement therapy (HRT) greatly reduced her speed, strength, and stamina. She spent several years studying this effect in other athletes, and did long term experiments in which “ transgender women who received treatment to lower their testosterone levels did no better in a variety of races against female peers than they had previously done against male runners.”

This experiment was elegantly designed to make each runner their own control “group”. Essentially all male athletes will lose certain abilities once they undergo HRT. The important question is whether this loss will be enough to ensure that they won’t win more contests against women just because they have the benefits of male puberty. If a “C” level male athlete becomes an “A” level female athlete after HRT, that would show the hormones did not fully remove the advantages which motivate and justify the distinction between male and female competitions. Harper’s experiments showed that when her subjects underwent HRT, they kept essentially the same place in the female competitive hierarchy that they had occupied as male runners in the male competitive hierarchy. Her results help explain why Transwomen do not win significantly more athletic medals than Ciswomen, even though they have been competing in women’s sports for decades. As long as their testosterone remains low enough, it sometimes appears that the differences between trans and ciswomen are not enough to justify excluding transwomen from women’s sports.

There is lots of data showing champion women athletes losing to mediocre male athletes, which looks impressive at first. Steve QJ gives us a good sample of these:

. . .Both Serena and Venus Williams were decisively beaten in a single-set match by a male player ranked 203rd in the world. The female 100m world record (which has stood since 1988) has been broken by 366 different male athletes in the first five months of 2021 alone. Fallon Fox, the first openly transgender mixed martial artist to compete in the UFC, took just over two minutes to beat a highly trained female opponent badly enough to put her in the hospital.

However, all of these examples but one are cases of Cismen beating Ciswomen in Athletic contexts. Harper’s data seem to show that HRT effectively erases the advantages that Cismen have over Women. It’s true, as SteveQJ points out, that Adult males have larger hearts and lungs, allowing them to drive more oxygenated blood to their muscles. The structure of male and female pelvises is different, allowing males to exert force more efficiently (when sprinting or cycling for example). Males have a higher ratio of fast-twitch muscle fibres, which generate more powerful and explosive movements. Males have larger hands and stronger grips and broader shoulders and taller bodies. They have all of these advantages at the same time, and none of them is removed by lowering testosterone levels. But isn’t the proof in the pudding? Harper’s data shows that a transwoman’s average competitive standing doesn’t go up when she transitions. Doesn’t that show that the male characteristics that remain after transition don’t make any difference, as far as athletics is concerned?

The problem with this response is that Harper’s research was limited to runners, and in many other sports these anatomical differences can give Transwomen a tremendous advantage over ciswomen. Transwoman Lia Thomas was recently banned from competing in a women’s swimming competition for what I think are very good reasons. In the 2018–2019 season she was, when competing in the men's team, ranked 554th in the 200 freestyle, 65th in the 500 freestyle, and 32nd in the 1650 freestyle. In the 2021–2022 season, those ranks are now, when competing in the women's team, fifth in the 200 freestyle, first in the 500 freestyle, and eighth in the 1,650 freestyle.^[19][20]. If we are going to claim that Harper’s data provides justification for competition between transwomen and ciswomen runners, we also have to conclude that the data on Lia Thomas provides justification for banning her from swimming in Women’s competitions. The fact that she is over six feet tall, and has the broad muscular shoulders of a man is sufficient reason for not letting her compete against most other women swimmers, cis or trans. Such a competition would be as unfair as a boxing match between a light flyweight and a heavyweight. This is probably because swimming, unlike running, propels the swimmer with both arms and legs.

None of this, however, justifies banning all transwomen from women’s swimming, or any other women’s sports. This is what a lot of people are asking for, but a total ban is not necessary to give those people what they say they want i.e. to give ciswomen a fair chance to win contests in women’s sports. Those people who insist that this is possible only if all transwomen are banned from women’s sports are IMO legitimately describable by the frequently abused and abusive epithet “transphobic”. The problem, in so far as there is one, is not their transness itself, but the fact that certain transwomen retain certain masculine advantages despite their HRT therapy. What is needed is more complex and flexible rules, which are based on thorough research as to what anatomical characteristics give advantage in each sport. These need to vary from sport to sport, and should be written by people with extensive knowledge of the physical requirements of that particular sport. This is what the Olympic committee has always done, and will continue to do.

Nevertheless, there are probably still many revisions that need to be made. Harper’s research also revealed extensive evidence that transwomen retain many of the essential characteristics that arguably give men advantages in certain sports.

. . . .Notwithstanding, values for strength, LBM and muscle area in transwomen remain above those of cisgender women, even after 36 months of hormone therapy.

. . .Conclusion: In transwomen, hormone therapy rapidly reduces Hgb to levels seen in cisgender women. In contrast, hormone therapy decreases strength, LBM and muscle area, yet values remain above that observed in cisgender women, even after 36 months. These findings suggest that strength may be well preserved in transwomen during the first 3 years of hormone therapy.

Harper serves as a consultant for many organizations that set these guidelines, but she feels that at least some of these guidelines are not strict enough.

The current IOC policy dictates that transgender women must have a testosterone level less than 10 nanomoles per liter, roughly the low end of typical male values. But because more than 99% of women have testosterone levels less than 3 nanomoles per liter, some researchers have suggested that limit is too high. Harper is among them. "If you're competing in the women's division, you should do so with women's hormone levels," she says. "I understand just how much difference they make."

Pro-Trans Bloggers repeatedly claim that “The science is settled” and label anyone who says otherwise as “transphobic.” The actual scientists, however, think otherwise. Nevertheless, the science has been good enough to make reasonably fair distinctions, and it will continue to get better. Even the best such distinctions would be deliberately designed to exclude some women, both cis and trans, and those who are excluded should not be seen as martyrs. They should play on the men’s teams, where they will be competing with people who have similar strengths. The philosophical question of “what is a woman?” does not have to be universally answered to decide who plays on what team. Only those strengths which are relevant to the sport should be considered. There is no reason to subject anyone to humiliating inspections of chromosomes or genitals. No one uses those parts of their body in any sport I know of, or could imagine. (Admittedly, if you gave me fifteen minutes I could probably imagine a few such sports, but I am not going there!)

The commenter I quoted at the beginning of this article said that transwomen are women because HRT alters their biology, so “Even if anatomically {Male}, they are not biologically so. This may be true, but claiming that the biology is the determining factor of athletic masculinity has priorities exactly backwards. Harper has shown hormones can effect an athlete’s anatomy, which is why the presence of female hormones can be the deciding factor in who competes against who in some sports. Nevertheless, The only reason that the biological presence of hormones makes a difference in this case is because the hormones effect the anatomy. We don’t run with our hormones, we run with our leg bones and leg muscles. Only further research can decide what biochemicals effect bones, muscles and organs, and which anatomical parts are a relevant factor in sports competitions.

Sex vs. Gender

One thing we can be certain of, however, is that these researchers will never conclude that a biological man should be allowed to play on a woman’s team solely because he says “I feel I am a woman.” Many people object to trans women in women’s sports because they believe that any man can baptize himself as trans simply by saying that he is. I believed that myself before I started researching this topic. I now know that principle has never been accepted by any major athletic organization, and it would certainly lower resistance to transwomen in women sports if more people knew that.

One reason many people believe that transness is totally a matter of individual choice is that many defenders of trans athletes repeatedly make statements that can’t coherently be interpreted any other way. I had one commenter who said ““Let people play their games according to how they see themselves, period.” Another commenter said “letting other people decide who is “woman” enough never ends well for any woman”. Academic articles attack the idea that transness is biologically based with the abusive epithet Transmedicalism, and refer to those who hold this view as Truscum.

When transness is viewed as a medical rather than a social phenomenon, it is all too easy to impose statistical and medical logics that do not apply to socially constructed identities. . .Constructions of what constitutes normalcy are subjective.

These statements are not compatible with the previous claim that being trans is a biological fact, and it is only seeing transness as a biological property that resolves the dilemma outlined at the beginning of this paper. You can become a Republican or a Catholic or a baseball player just by choosing to be so, because those are, like gender, purely social properties. You cannot, however, change your biology merely by asserting you are something else. You don’t get to say “I am a woman, period” in the biological sense, unless you possess properties which other people, (i.e. biologists) can see and measure. In other words, to be a biological woman, you do have to let other people decide whether you are woman enough.

Some of my commenters seem to imply that being a biological woman can be a matter of choice. All you have to do is take the proper hormones, and all the essential properties of femaleness fall into place. There is however, some scientific evidence that transpeople are biologically female even before they undergo HRT. This strongly implies that being trans is not a choice, because transpeople are born that way, whether they know it or not. The evidence that being Gay is not a “lifestyle’ but an inherited condition is one of the strongest arguments for defending Gay rights, and the same principle also applies to trans people. It also means that it is not up to the individual to decide whether he or she is trans or not. In this lecture, Robert Sapolsky professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University, describes a Dutch research project that involved thousands of cis and trans subjects, which was later replicated with hundreds of subjects by Belgian researchers. These studies showed that there were certain neurological structures which were almost always twice as large in men as in women. These structures were the same size in both transwomen and ciswomen. The video describes in detail various ways in which alternative explanations for this phenomenon are eliminated by control groups. What this seems to show is that when transpeople say they were born in the wrong body, they are biologically correct. This claim does not imply any kind of dualism between male body and female spirit. It just means that one physical item (the brain) is in certain respects female, and another physical item (the same person’s body) is in certain respects male. This may seem weird, but there is nothing “woo woo” about it.

What it also means, however, is that people can be mistaken about whether or not they are trans. Many people are not happy with their sexual identity for a variety of sociological and psychological reasons. They may have been raised by parents who wanted a child of the opposite sex, they may afraid to admit to themselves that they are gay, they may have been bullied at school etc. Those people will not have these differences in brain structure that identify a person as trans. It is highly unlikely that such people will benefit from HRT or Gender Affirming Surgery (GAS). The people who later detransition (or in some cases commit suicide because they regret transitioning), are probably people who mistakenly believed they were trans because of the current faddish interest in the subject. If we recognize this totally biological distinction, which has nothing to do with the sociological concept of gender, we will be less likely to make mistakes that harm innocent people. We can also recognize that having a female brain does not alter the undeniable advantages that often come with having a male body. If a particular transwoman’s treatments do not fully eliminate important advantages for a particular sport, she should compete in that sport against men, not ciswomen. We play sports with our bodies, not our brains.