The Madcap Campaign Against Trans Athletes Claims New Victims

Two more (cisgendered) Namibian runners have been barred from Olympic competition under rules designed to prevent women with unusual endocrine systems from partaking in elite athletics. It’s a reminder that, although these rules are often talked about for their role in modulating trans women’s place in athletic competition, they also (perhaps more frequently!) restrict other women from competition.

The story starts some while ago, but it may as well begin with the case of Caster Semenya. Observing the cruel, irrational and bigoted treatment of Semenya by sports bodies, by the media and by feminists was an eye-opener for me. It really cut against what, at the time, I saw as a fairly unstoppable tide of social progressivism. And why? What was the problem? Caster Semenya’s natural hormonal balance is unusual and she produces more testosterone than other women. This helps her achieve an athletic, muscular physique.

In 2018 World Athletics (formerly the IAAF) instituted a ban on so-called “DSD” athletes: those with Different Sexual Development - from competition. Among these rules is a restriction on athletes with endogenous testosterone levels in the normal male range. Not just Semenya, but all three medallists in the 800m race at the Olympics in 2016, were foul of this rule at the time. All three were African runners. It is worth noting that it is reasonably common for women to produce testosterone in the “normal male range” specified, while it is also common for elite male athletes to have relatively low testosterone, more typical of a woman. The idea that endogenous testosterone levels translate crudely into athletic performance is not supported by research.

The graph below illustrates the point rather clearly: there is little to no relationship between endogenous T levels and athletic performance. Even the NHS’ rather strict guidelines (<10 nMol/l) on male TRT would have a quarter of the world’s elite male athletes eligible for therapy.

Yes, contrary to what you might assume, “low T” males are actually slightly overrepresented in elite athletics. 25% of elite male athletes have low enough endogenous testosterone that they would pass the restrictions placed on women. So any attempt to stop “men competing as women” using these rules seems pretty useless. So far, it has stopped precisely no men, but quite a few women (of all types: cis, intersex and trans) from competing. This despite the fact that your endogenous hormone levels do not determine your physical development directly. Rather, each person has their own genetic and endocrine environment and it is relative changes to the balance in that environment which affect that person’s physical development. (One might speculate that this is the reason “low T” male athletes are more common: they get more bang for their buck from the exogenous testosterone provided by PEDs).

So why was such an arbitrary and unscientific rule implemented in the first instance? And why are they doubling down on it? We could pore over the rules all day and argue the specifics, but I rather think that the entire project of attempting to regulate gender in sport like this is absurd and unnecessary.

Frankly, the whole campaign to achieve “fairness” in this specific area illustrates a narrow-minded, bourgeois moralism at the heart of competitive sport. I suspect it is no coincidence that the body has been helmed over this period by an Englishman, former Tory MP Lord Sebastian Coe. Historically, few countries have accrued quite as many gold medals in the field of creepy, dysfunctional sexual moralism as the UK. The British establishment, which for decades lauded Jimmy Savile as a national treasure, loves to lecture the rest of the world on matters of sexual morality.

Lord Coe on a run with his dear friend, Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Sir James Savile. I suppose that, if Sir Jimmy’s natural testosterone levels were too high, he could cheat the test by releasing some inside a child’s corpse just prior.

Britain’s bourgeoisie still retains an infantile, titter-titter attitude to anything sexual or genital. They struggle to discuss such matters with any degree of rationality or thoughtfulness (even I couldn’t resist throwing in a necrophilia joke). Pity poor Semenya, whose career as a once-in-a-million athlete must be dashed upon the carbuncles of the intellectually backwards British public school system and the wanton neuroses of a pompous Lord from a parliament filled with ermine-clad child molesters, larcenists and drunks.

In any case, there is no reason whatsoever, as far as I can see, that a competitor gaining an athletic advantage as a result of “different sexual development” is any different from the myriad other ways in which genes and different development benefit elite athletes. Famously, a massively disproportionate number of elite athletes have an unusual “CC genotype”, which allows them to respire far more efficiently than the rest of us. Is this not an unfair advantage?

The Michael Phelpses and Usain Bolts of the world are all people with extremely unusual physiques which give them a clear advantage in their field over 99.999% of people. They are where they are in a large part because they underwent some kind of different development. That’s half the appeal of elite athletics. It’s one of the only areas of life where we ought not to demand equality. It’s not a prizes-for-everyone school sports day - we want to see some superhuman freaks. Why is it not an unfair competitive advantage, for example, that some weightlifters have higher levels of muscular hypertrophy as a result of their genes? Should Eddie Hall, the record-setting lifter who has just such a condition, be forced to take muscle-wasting agents in the name of “fairness”? Why is a testosterone-generating woman so different?

I imagine that the historic reason hormones were not treated as belonging to the same category of advantage as bones or musculature is that hormones can be, fairly trivially, supplemented artificially. But the African runners banned from competition were not supplementing their hormones artificially - and neither are trans women. In fact, as part of their transition, trans women already take strong hormone suppressants which mean they will ordinarily produce even fewer androgens than cisgender women do.

Of course: as soon as this fact became widely understood and the argument that trans women athletes were testosterone-fuelled hulks who would stomp over the poor, frail cisgender competition was seen for the absurd nonsense that it is, the argument shifted to the even more marginal idea that they derive an unfair advantage because their bones developed differently, pre-transition.

Return to my earlier examples to see how absurd this is. Has there ever previously been a suggestion that women with more typically masculine bone development should be barred from competition? Of course there has not, as the idea is absurd. It has arisen solely as a tawdry, post-hoc rationalisation of the bigotry displayed by these institutions, and broader society, towards trans individuals and women more generally.

There is no dishonesty, nor any attempt to subvert the competition, on the part of trans women or the affected African runners. Semenya is from a rural community and had about as innocent a motive for competing as anyone: she just liked running and was good at it. The claim is that “DSD” athletes undermine the competition for everybody else by how massively overpowered they are. But this runs against the idea of elite athletics and its implementation is unscientific, slapdash and discriminatory. I just can’t help but think that its origins lie in the outdated way in which women athletes are judged aesthetically.

Professional sports has treated women athletes as a source of eye candy for years. I recall how it was common in the media, when she was in her prime, for Serena Williams to be mocked and subjected to snide remarks about her strong, stocky body and aggressive play style. There were ape comparisons made. Throughout her career, Williams has been tested for PEDs far more frequently than her peers. This was how someone who is, by any rational metric, one of the greatest athletes of all time was treated. Why? For no other reason than there is a certain look that women athletes are supposed to have, especially in the eyes of sports bodies and sports media organisations which are still stuffed with sleazy old men like Sebastian Coe.

And yes, that look has a certain pallour. I did not set out to write an article about racism, but it cannot pass without notice that nearly every woman affected negatively by this is black. I won’t go off on a tangent about the history of absurd racist moral panics over black athletes (complete with quack bone “science”), but it seems hard to ignore the obvious: that this is just the latest chapter in that sorry saga. When the rules were changed to allow black people to compete against white, all these same arguments over hormones and bone structure were trotted out to stop the change. Now they have returned and Africans are once again being pushed out of sport. White feminists in England, naturally, cheer and clink their glasses of chardonnay. And among athletes, the loudest cries in support of these rules seem always to come from blonde-haired and blue-eyed types like Martina Navratilova…

This all adds up to paint a picture of World Athletics as little better than its chairman’s beloved House of Lords: that is to say, a bunch of racist, chauvinistic, lounge lizards who should’ve been put out to pasture decades ago. This image is hardly likely to inspire young people, especially young women, to take up competitive athletics. By pandering to right-wing bigots, the body is in dereliction of its duty to promote the sport. They have associated themselves with a political cause which is despised by young people. And it’s young people who compete in athletics. Not old farts who read the Spectator, nor Joe Rogan and his loyal legion of balding, beer-bellied millennials.

As for trans women in sports more generally: I might accept some argument to restrict their participation in female competition, if it could be shown that they had such a consistent advantage over other women that a given sport was becoming totally uncompetitive. It is one thing for athletes to have genetic advantages, another for us to have an entire class of athletes who are prima facie unbeatable. But we are a million miles from that standard. Empirically, trans women do not seem to perform much better than their cisgender counterparts. Sensationalist news stories focus on the handful of incidents where they emerge victorious, ignoring the myriad where they don’t.

MMA fighter Fallon Fox is a classic case. Joe Rogan and other UFC lugheads wrung their hands over Fox and hurled spiteful, crude abuse at her, insisting that her bone density made her some sort of terminator-like force in the octagon. Then Fox gave an opponent an orbital fracture (a fairly common injury) and this apparently showed what a monstrous unstoppable hulk she was. Then her career sort of petered out unspectacularly.

So where are all these unstoppable trans women athletes? In a list of the most successful women athletes currently competing, is there even one trans person? Bro-science halfwits can babble incoherently about bone density until their Tapout shirts are drenched in sweat, but the empirical evidence seems in clear contradiction of their hypothesis. I’m not aware of a single world record held by a trans woman. Surely, if the “science” of Coe and Rogan’s position is as thorough as they maintain, they should hold them all?

The response to this argument inevitably ends with someone asking: so what? You wouldn’t have any restrictions on trans competition? So a man could just identify as a woman and enter the competition?

This cuts to the core of what the argument truly is: one of thoughtless bigotry, which rests upon the conspiratorial notion that trans women athletes are men who transitioned to achieve better results in women’s competition. The idea that men would undergo a long, painful gender transition they didn’t want (what I imagine would be a mind-bendingly horrifying and traumatising experience if you’re not trans) just so they could stand a better chance at winning a sports medal, is quite simply deranged.

If you believe that people are actually doing this then I invite you to transition to a golden retriever in preparation for the next Crufts. Maybe you’ll have better luck competing with those who are closer to your intellectual range.

More seriously: why haven’t you done it then? If the Roganite brain trust who spout this nonsense believe this is a real thing, why don’t they just transition and beat up on all the girls? Surely, by their logic, it’d be an easy road to sports superstardom?

Except, obviously, it isn’t. The personal, social and financial cost of gender transitioning is immense, even for an actual trans person. For anyone else, it would be so severe that it’s unlikely you wouldn’t be driven totally insane over the course of the process. And your reward, if you make it through? Congratulations! Some studies suggest that your bone structure may give you a slight edge in your shot at breaking the women’s world clean and jerk record. Whoop-de-do!

The people who think that this is a real possibility are no less ridiculous than the Republican types with their paranoid fantasies of bathroom sickos. It’s just bigotry leading where it is wont: to belief in totally swivel-eyed nonsense and the inability to take a step back and see that you’re not thinking clearly. I get it: you don’t like trans women. You think they’re gross or whatever. Their dicks scare you for some reason. OK. But please: try and exercise just a bit of reason and critical thinking before you try to deprive them of their civil rights, their careers and their human dignity.