Sex, Sport & Trans-Identified Males in the Female Category
Why fairness is not "overrated" and where liberals and progressives get it wrong.
At a press conference on March 13th, Donald Trump admitted what thinking persons already know: that he cares about female sport only as a wedge issue to deploy against the Democrats:
“Men being able to play in women sports - I tell the Republicans, I said, don't bring that subject up because there is no election right now. But about a week before the election, then bring it up.”
Note that he mentions sport - not trans politics in general. Trump is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he understands the polling underpinning GOP campaign messaging during the last election - that while a majority of Americans believe trans people should not be discriminated against in things like housing and employment, they also do not think it is fair for males to compete in female sport. So he and his minions will continue to deploy the trans sports issue at strategic moments.
Liberals and progressives have also played a role in keeping the issue viable as a club with which the right can beat us by failing to develop nuance, and think critically, about the conflict between trans-identified males and women’s rights in sport. Historically, any objection in liberal circles to the notion that a male who identifies as a girl or woman should be allowed to compete in the female category has been met with cries of “bigot” and “transphobe” and other efforts to shut down the discussion.
So, on the one hand, I appreciate the conservative Bulwark editor and MAGA critic Jonathan V Last’s efforts to open a conversation here on Substack with no less than two articles and one podcast on the topic in the last ten days.1 Yet, I’m also frustrated with the content of his arguments - perhaps because I’ve heard similar from my side so many times before. They include: it’s not that many, we have too much competitiveness in the US already, and fairness is not important unless money is on the line. His third article is entitled, “Fairness is Overrated.”
Let’s start by recognizing that “fairness” and “competition” are two different things. Fairness means that no competitor has unjust advantages over others, whereas competition involves the contest itself. As the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group (WSPWG) explains, in their public comment on President Biden’s proposed changes to the Title IX regulations on sport, fairness is a prerequisite for the inclusion of a diversity of bodies in sport and is achieved by defining sport categories.
Sport categories include weight classes in boxing, wrestling, rowing, and judo; age categories for children and older athletes; and Paralympic categories for people with disabilities. All categories allow more athletes to compete, and allow different athletes to experience the benefits of sport. For example, weight categories allow smaller athletes to shine, age categories allow younger or older athletes to reap the benefits of sport. Without sport categories, young men would win all competitions [emphasis added].
WSPWG notes that all of these categories are further subdivided by sex, which they describe as “the most powerful performance determinant of all.”
There is no question that males have distinct and significant advantages over females in sport. British developmental biologist Emma Hilton summarizes:
Testosterone, the androgen driving male physical development, is a wonderful hormone. It is responsible for advantageous skeletal features that develop during male puberty, such as increased height, increased bone size and density, longer limbs, wider hand spans and a narrower pelvis, all of which make a 100m sprint or a slam dunk far easier. It also directs hugely increased muscle building capacity, allowing higher absolute masses to be achieved in shorter training times, mass which, by the way, contains a higher proportion of fast twitch fibres (responsible for explosive power) than observed in female muscles. To support this superior physicality, males have greater lung capacity, a higher VO2 max (the amount of oxygen consumed during high intensity exercise), a bigger heart with faster stroke rate and higher levels of haemoglobin, and thus can oxygenate their muscles more efficiently.
Hilton documents a 10% performance gap between male and female world records in speed events that widens when one includes competitions that involve jumping and throwing.


The performance gap is so pronounced that hundreds of high school boys, including 744 seniors in 2017 alone, have beaten the 1988 100 meter record of the fastest woman of all time, Florence Griffiths Joyner.
Testosterone suppression in post-pubertal males will not affect physiological characteristics such as height, hip width, and lung capacity. The most it can do is produce very modest changes in muscle mass and strength, typically “about 5% after 12 months of treatment.”2
Males also do not have to contend with effects of a menstrual cycle on training and performance, which has been found to affect cardiovascular and respiratory function, as well as metabolic parameters (e.g. blood glucose and blood pressure.)
In addition to physiological advantages, males competing in the female category benefit from women’s sports rules, equipment, or playing fields designed for female physiology. Basketball star Mariah Burton Nelson, of the WSPWG, describes 31 such adaptations for females. These include, but are not limited to: lighter shot puts, javelins, hammers, and discuses in track and field, lower hurdles and volleyball nets, lower platform for cliff diving, smaller basketballs and a 3 point line about 19 inches closer to the basket, smaller base paths and fields in softball, and tee boxes typically placed closer to the hole on shorter courses for golf.
In his first piece, “Leave Trans People Alone,” JVL argues that “every single [case]” of a trans-identified male in elite sports is an “edge case,” that such cases are “rare,” and should be decided on a case-by-case basis. He doesn’t explain in what way these are “edge cases.” Certainly, the weight of the evidence cited above indicates male advantage over females in sport is the norm, rather than a deviation from it.
And while trans-identified males have not overrun elite sport, their participation in the female category has affected numerous women and girls at many levels of competition. Volunteers at shewon.org track and cite official sources for cases of trans-identifying male competitors who displaced a woman or girl in a sporting event, reporting only those they can verify. As of this writing, they have documented 716 competitions in 44 sports where 1114 female athletes lost 1567 medals to trans-identifying male competitors worldwide.
JVL further argues that:
It’s. Just. Sports. This isn’t life-and-death. Sports do not count for anything until you get the the level where money is on the line.
One wonders how a woman or girl gets to the level where “money is on the line” if the competition on the way to that level is unfair. And it’s particularly grating to hear a man discuss female sport and claim that winning doesn’t matter. I can only imagine what response I'd get if I tried telling men that it’s just a few welter weights who identify as feather weights; what’s the big deal? It’s only a game.
My observation is that men go to great lengths to write and revise rules for fairness and safety and to develop systems for monitoring compliance with the rules. The National Football League (NFL), for example, has a committee of nine people who consult with officials, medical experts, and players’ unions to develop rules for safety and fairness. After a new rule is implemented, they then review the rule’s impact “using statistics, video and input from teams, players and medical advisers to make sure it is having the desired effect.”
In the early years of the NFL, rule-making focused primarily on “creating a standardized set of rules to ensure fair play and consistency across games.” Beginning in the 1970s, new rule-making turned to safety, with prohibitions on certain types of tackles and hits, such as the “horse collar,” (grabbing the back collar of an offensive player and pulling him down), “chop block” (where one player blocks a defender below the waist while another engages him above the waist), and “roughing the passer” (hitting the passer after he releases the ball).
Compare this with the integration in recent years of trans-identified males in female sport - based primarily on abstract notions of “inclusion” with little regard to physical implications for women and girls - nor input from them. Just last summer, the IOC allowed Olympic boxer Imane Khelif to compete in the female category because he identifies as female and has a female marker on his passport. This despite test results provided to the IOC by the International Boxing Association (IBA), which had disqualified him from competing with women. (Khelif is a male with a Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD) and does not identify as trans.) Women who objected, or withdrew from their matches with him, due to safety concerns, were excoriated on social media and at least one was made to apologize.
Social norms around inclusion of trans-identified males in women’s sport aren’t limited to national and international competitions. They ripple outward affecting community sport as well. For example, a friend of mine is an avid roller derby aficionado, a sport that has experienced a large influx of trans-identified males in recent years. A life-long athlete, coached by her dad when she was a girl, my friend is unafraid of rough and tumble sport. But it took only one hit from a male to make her realize how unsafe it is to compete with them. She has since given up a sport she loved.
There is another way, not considered by JVL, and dismissed by most other trans advocates, that inclusion of trans-identified males in female sport adversely affects women and girls: shared locker rooms. Better than 80% of trans-identifying males, and nearly all of those under the age of 18, do not have what is euphemistically described as “bottom surgery.” Moreover, the majority of trans-identifying males are sexually oriented to females.
Most women and girls are deeply uncomfortable with undressing and showering among individuals with male genitalia, however those individuals may identify. Every woman remembers the fear, shame, anger, and embarrassment of unwanted male attention when she first began developing; including sexual harassment, ogling, or groping by a boy her age or a grown man. Women and girls who have experienced sexual violence feel particularly threatened in such situations.
The notion that males who identify as female should rightfully be included in female sport and locker rooms is only supportable in the abstract, where vaguely defined notions of “inclusion” and “identity” are detached from real physical bodies. In “meat space,” where actual physical male and female bodies sweat and strain, exert muscle and sinew to perform at their highest capacity, where bodies are naked for bathing and dressing, the construct falls apart. Which is why, for so long, trans activists have insisted on banning terminology such as “male-bodied” - or anything that may call attention to physical sexual difference.
A major criticism of Democratic politics in recent years is that they have focused too much on culture and identity and too little on the material conditions of people’s lives that are the foundation of social inequality. Recently, Representative Sarah McBride (D-DE), the first trans member of Congress, reached out to colleagues and signaled willingness to open a conversation and allow a broader range of views on trans rights. “A binary choice between being all-on or all-off is not constructive for anyone,” McBride said. As with Democratic politics generally, that “broader range of views” on sport policy should be rooted in material conditions; the very real physical factors that preclude allowing males to compete in the female category.
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Unfortunately, I was unable to listen to the podcast with Sarah Longwell as it is behind a paywall and I can only afford a few paid Substack subscriptions.
Hilton, Emma N and Tommy R Lundberg. “Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage.” Sports Medicine. December 2020.
As the article stated, if there were no categories in sport only young men would win prizes. Women's sports means "female sports". "Female" means people with no y chromosome. End of story.
Yes material reality matters. Big time.