Transgender Inclusion and Participation in Sports

Proponents of these bills say that the goal is to ensure that school sports are fair and safe for everyone who participates. We agree that students should have a fair chance when they play, and that they should be safe.

This is where schools and parents come in—they know best about what’s safe and fair for their students. They should set the rules for who gets to participate in sports, not politicians. In elite sports, athletic associations set the standards. This is what is already happening in Massachusetts, and there’s no sound reason to change the policy. 

What’s more, bans against participation in sports haven’t been limited to sports like swimming and track & field; they’ve also extended to chess and darts, two games that aren’t associated with competitive physical advantages or athletic ability. The goal is to exclude trans people from public life, not to ensure fairness in athletic competition.

No. Competitive advantages in sports come from extensive training, nutritional quality, physical fitness, and access to high-quality practice facilities. According to multiple scientific studies, biomedical factors related to puberty, such as bone density, testosterone levels, and lung size, do not predict athletic performance. The distributions of testosterone levels among elite cis male and female athletes overlap. Focusing on testosterone levels can also exclude some non-transgender girls from participation in school sports. For example, about 10% of women have polycystic ovarian syndrome, a condition that increases their testosterone levels. 

Discussions of competitive advantage aren’t always appropriate, either. Most youth who participate in school sports aren’t training to be professional athletes or Olympians—they just want to play alongside their friends and classmates. In cases like this, schools don’t need to go through the extensive testing that elite athletic associations use.

Banning trans girls from girls’ sports may lead to invasive genital inspections and questions about menstruation. Gender-nonconforming or highly athletic non-trans girls may be stereotyped as masculine, raising suspicion that they might be trans because they don’t look or act feminine enough. These suspicions can lead to harassment and bullying, both by other students and by adults. Attitudes like this led the Algerian Olympian boxer Imane Khelif to be harassed by multiple public figures, including Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and J. K. Rowling. Although Khelif herself is not trans, anti-trans sentiment was used to discredit her athletic achievements.

Harassment, bullying, and intrusive questions aren’t the only risks that cis women and girls face when transphobic sex-testing policies are implemented. Unscrupulous coaches and other officials can use these policies as an excuse to sexually abuse the athletes being tested. Genital inspections can lead very quickly to sexual abuse—and when school athletes are involved, this is child sexual abuse.

By attacking a small minority, those promoting trans sports bans are inconveniencing, marginalizing, and abusing a much larger group of people. This is far from the stated goal of “maintaining fairness and safety in girls’ sports.”

It depends on the situation. If trans people are forced to compete in a transgender or open category instead of the men’s or women’s, then this is a kind of segregation that implies that trans people (especially trans men and women) belong to a third gender category, rather than the gender with which they identify. On the other hand, there are some people who want to compete in a separate trans or open category, especially nonbinary people who do not want to be forced to choose between the men’s and women’s categories. Trans people should be free to participate in any category that aligns with their identity. Ultimately, it’s a question of autonomy.

Most people who want to discriminate against transgender people in sports and athletics are disproportionately focused on trans women and girls. This is rooted in transphobia but also in sexism against cisgender women, since there are perceived differences in the physical abilities and constitutions of cisgender women as compared to cisgender men. This extends to transmasculine individuals, who are generally seen as less of a threat to transphobes due to their implicit sexism. In athletics and sports, this means that they don’t see a competitive advantage for trans men. This is just as problematic as accusing trans women of having “physical advantages” by seeing them as men, or “former men,” since it erases a trans man’s status and identity as a man entirely.

Trans men and transmasculine people often play on women’s teams, especially if they haven’t started masculinizing hormone therapy. If they decide to start hormones, they may lose their athletic scholarship (if they’re college students) and give up the sports they love.

Although biological distinctions seem straightforward, they’re often more complex. A surprisingly large number of people are intersex—their bodies don’t conform neatly to male–female distinctions. For example, some intersex people may have multiple sets of genitalia. Others may produce sex hormones at levels that are associated with the “opposite” sex assigned at birth, or they may not respond to sex hormones the way most people do. Intersex conditions have multiple causes, including chromosomal and hormonal differences. Examples of intersex conditions include Turner syndrome and androgen insensitivity syndrome.  

Intersex people can have any gender identity. Some intersex people are also transgender—they may have been assigned one sex at birth, but they realized later on that their gender identity is different. 

Women diagnosed with intersex conditions often face discrimination in sports. Examples include Caster Semenya, a Black South African Olympian runner. (Semenya does not use the label “intersex” for herself.) When she was an active runner, she was subjected to intrusive sex testing and media scrutiny because of her appearance and medical status. Although she was assigned female at birth and has a vagina, she has XY chromosomes and her body produces much more testosterone than the typical cis woman’s. World Athletics, the governing body for track & field, distance running, and other similar sports, established a rule in 2018 that women with disorders of sex development (a subset of intersex conditions) had to artificially lower their testosterone levels to compete in the women’s category for the 400-, 800-, and 1,500-meter dashes. This testosterone rule does not apply to cis women without a disorder of sexual development. Laws and policies restricting transgender people from participating in sports may also place restrictions on intersex people.

Read the Intersex Justice Project’s Framework for Intersex Justice for more.