Biological men have a place in sport – but it’s not as female athletes | Sam Hall
Elite sport is facing a culture crisis not seen since the Cold War as biological men are smashing records set by biological women across a range of sports. This is especially true in strength sports like powerlifting- where last year Mary Gregory smashed four world records on a single day, somewhat fittingly winning 100% of the events she participated in at ‘100% Raw Weightlifting Federation’. In mixed martial arts, a sport already notable for its brutishness, they are expected to face biological men, resulting in what would be treated as grievous bodily harm or assault outside the cage.
As has been seen, the great modern question of transgender athletes creates an emotive issue because it cuts to the core of what the transgender movement rejects- the truth that there are differences between adult human males (men) and adult human females (women). This is especially relevant for the ultra-competitive world of elite sport where every effort is made to make competition a matter of hard work and diet rather than physiology and the chemicals in your system. There is a reason there are separate categories for different weight classes in boxing, separate events for disabled athletes, and different world cups for men’s and women’s rugby.
Sports should be the essence of hard work, meritocracy, and fair competition. Transgender sport should be no different. Yet, as we will establish, it does not fit neatly into any of the current classifications. Attempting to ignore biological differences, furthermore, has had detrimental consequences to women’s sports.
But firstly, what does the International Olympic Committee have to say on the matter? In 2015, they established that biologically male athletes are required to maintain testosterone levels below 10 nanomoles per liter (nm/l) for no less than 12 months to compete in female sports. For comparison, this is at the bottom end of the healthy parameters for biological males who generally have between 7.7 and 29.4 nm/l of testosterone. But it is well above the parameters for biological women who have between 0.12 and 1.77 nm/l. Ironically, in attempting to deny a biological reality, trans-women athletes only expose more light on the fact that men and women are different.
In 2018, JayCee Cooper, a trans-powerlifter, set records in women's bench press after only a year of powerlifting. In 2014, transgender pro MMA fighter Fallon Fox beat Tamikka Brents, giving her a concussion and a broken orbital bone. In layman’s terms (Biology GCSE letting me down once again) that means she had her eye socket caved in. These athletes do not want to be called men and yet in terms of testosterone levels are at a clear advantage over biological women.
Testosterone is, among other things, responsible for muscle mass and size as well as bone strength. Anabolic steroids, banned by most sports, mimic this effect with synthetic testosterone. Elite sport should not be a laboratory for performance-enhancing drugs and it is for this reason (amongst others) that they are banned. The public go to see major sporting events because they want to see how people perform- not drugs. Fairness is the key. Hard work and a good diet should be the basis of a meda; not the amount of testosterone coursing through someone’s system. That is why we have both men’s and women’s sport to account for this difference in interests of fairness.
Women who are forced to compete against trans-women are in effect being used as lab rats, lest they speak out and be called transphobic bigots, as the leaders in sports are too timid to come up with a satisfactory long-term solution. This has the potential to become the latest scandal to rock elite sport as seen most recently in Russia and in the former East Germany - who ran state-supported doping systems exposed after the Berlin Wall came down. Gold-medal winning East German athlete Andrea Pollack, who died of cancer at age 57 (partially due to the drugs) was systematically doped as a teenager with Oral-Turinabol, an anabolic steroid created by the state-run company Jenapharm. In The Telegraph, former Olympic swimming champion Sharron Davies compares this to the modern world of transgender sports:
“I know what it’s like to stand next to somebody and think no matter how hard I train I don’t have the physical equipment to be able to beat.”
Davies came second in the 1980 Moscow Olympics 400m individual medley after East Germany athlete Petra Schneider took gold. Schneider later admitted taking performance enhancing drugs. Of course the athletes would come off the drugs in time to pass a drugs test but the muscle mass would remain in the same way that an adult biological male athlete might drop their testosterone to compete in women’s events but that won’t discount the increased capability of their muscles, heart, lungs and skeletal structure gained during puberty.
Elite sport too falls victim to the ‘progressive’ left, potentially increasing the pressure on biological women to take dangerous performance enhancing drugs to make up for the advantages male puberty gives to men. What does it say to potential female athletes who see the best biological women in the world being beaten by an unfair contest which one of the top governing bodies in sports condones? Truly we cannot drop this issue for the sake of political correctness or else there might not be women’s sport in a generation’s time.
It is ironic that this is one area in which male privilege does not matter, according to the proponents of trans-women in women’s sports. New Zealand’s Laurel Hubbard was the first transgender athlete to compete in the Commonwealth Games as a biological man in the women’s category, winning gold. Hubbard, 42, competed as Gavin until seven years ago when she transitioned to Laurel. It seems that by simply self-identifying as a woman, Gavin lost all his privilege as a white man and instead became a victimised trans-woman. Quite apart from the wider transgender/gender dysphoria debate, this is a simple question of fairness in women’s sports. As we have established, a biological man may compete against a woman under the current IOC guidelines even if they have more than five times the normal upper level of testosterone of the biological women. How many more serious injuries will adult human females have to suffer at the hands of adult human males before more people start taking this issue seriously?
I do not envy the IOC. However, if they proceed with this issue they will inevitably annoy either the trans rights movement or advocates for biological women’s sports. But surely things cannot continue the way things are? Sport should be about celebrating different abilities, hard work and perseverance, eliminating unfair competition. That is why we have disabled sports to celebrate the peak of human ability in whatever shape that may come. But there is a reason able bodied and disabled athletes do not compete alongside each other. Their physical skills set are going to be different. For example, a wheelchair marathon when compared to a regular marathon. Same sport, different physical abilities.
It is with this precedent that we must take a fresh look at trans sport, unhindered by fears of political correctness. Trans athletes must either stick to the category of their gender at birth or be given separate categories. Trans-women’s sport cannot continue the trajectory of destruction that it occupies at present.
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