![]() ![]() Fair competition doesn’t mean that no one ever dominates – think Indurain, Phelps, Martina Navratilova, and Usain Bolt. The second big mistake is that the IOC misunderstands fair competition. ![]() But male sex advantages are category advantages. The so-called “Phelps gambit” – the idea that Phelps’ natural body shape gave him “unfair” advantages within his category, and therefore we should accept the male advantages of trans women in the same way – doesn’t work, because we don’t classify for Phelps advantages they are competition advantages. PCN Photography/Alamyīut, since few people want to do away with female sport (at least explicitly), male advantage must be excluded from it. Pictured here before breaking the world record in 2008. Swimmer Michael Phelp’s body shape has been drawn into debates. We could shift male advantage from being a category advantage, for example, to a competition advantage. If you want to allow these advantages, you must do away with the category itself. These categories exclude certain sorts of advantages by definition. The more obvious ones are age, weight and sex categories. Some of these are between sports – like between e-bikes, motor bikes and road bikes, or between different formulae in motor sport. Competition advantages are the sorts of things that we let play out in sport: who is the most skilful, or fastest, or the best tactician? And, yes, sometimes, we are interested in who has the biggest genetic gifts, like the lung capacity of cyclist Miguel Indurain or the wingspan of swimmer Michael Phelps – and what they can do with it.Ĭategory advantages, on the other hand, are those that we control for, through categories. There are two types of advantage in sport: competition advantages and category advantages. The first is that what matters about male advantage is not just its size but the kind of advantage it is. The general idea is that, if the advantage held by trans women is sufficiently small, so that they won’t win all the time, then it is permissible - and “meaningful” - for them to compete in the female category.īut there are at least three big things wrong with this approach, or so I’ve argued. Setting the new terrain here is the International Olympic Committee, which, following the researchers Joanna Harper and Yannis Pitsiladis, has given its blessing to the twin ideas of “meaningful competition” and “disproportionate advantage” in its policy documents. Fair competition or ‘meaningful’ competition? Some tend to argue that, even though trans women have residual male advantages, it can still be reasonable for them to compete in the female category: something that proponents are now calling “meaningful competition”. This has led to an attempt to re-engineer the idea of “fair competition” itself. ![]() And we always knew that the skeletal advantages remained. ![]() A systematic review of studies showed that, even if hormone therapy reduces levels to those seen in women, strength, lean body mass and muscle area remained higher for at least three years. Although you still get the odd piece trying to make the claim that testosterone suppression can remove male advantage, most of the serious people in the debate have given up on this claim. One new development has been a sort of quietening on the scientific front. And it is clear that the terrain has been shifting from the terrain of science to the terrain of ethics. Tensions are still very apparent, but there are some signs, with these new policies, of a shift on global policy from one based on testosterone levels to one based on male advantage acquired at puberty. Like British Athletics, British Triathlon said it wanted an “open” category for “all individuals including male, transgender and those non-binary who were male sex at birth”, while World Aquatics will make trans women athletes ineligible from competing in elite women’s swimming and diving, saying “fairness was non-negotiable”. Other sporting bodies have proposed stricter eligibility rules, including Rugby Football Union, the Rugby Football League, British Triathlon and British Athletics, based on excluding male advantage gained through puberty or “androgenisation” (the process leading to irreversible musculoskeletal and cardiovascular changes at puberty) from female competition. Most recently, World Athletics announced its “preferred option” of a reduced 2.5nmol testosterone limit for trans women to compete, with a final decision due on March 23. World sport has been convulsed over the past few months – indeed years – by questions about trans athletes, especially trans women, competing in their acquired gender. ![]()
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