Trans athletes increasingly face barriers to competition. | Wikimedia Commons photo
We received a comment recently from a reader about the results from Friday’s poll asking if you support the International Olympic Committee’s decision to prohibit transgender athletes from competing in women’s events.
We reported that 57% of our poll respondents agreed with the IOC’s decision to ban trans athletes, which, frankly, surprised me. This reader took umbrage with our decision not to comment on that result, which is fair, as this is a highly divisive issue.
Sports commentator Bob Costas has openly supported the IOC’s decision, as have other sports leaders, while many editorial pages are coming out strongly against the move. What strikes me is that, on its surface, this ruling affects so few people — only one transgender athlete has ever competed in the Olympics and she did not medal. It’s become a hot and disingenuous political talking point, but a policy like this seems unnecessary.
The marker that the IOC is using to measure if a person was born “biologically female” is flawed. An estimated 1.7% of the female-identifying population actually have XY chromosomes typically associated with people whose sex assigned at birth was male, and some may not even know they do. That means an athlete could train her whole life to compete at the Olympics only to be denied for a genetic condition she never knew she had.
We’re not talking about LeBron James playing on the USA Women’s Basketball Team. No matter how much fear-mongering we hear, we’re talking about a tiny percentage of women whose genetic material doesn’t fit a strict definition of “female” that research has proven is fungible at best, regardless of the IOC’s tangled explanation. This then creates an environment where discrimination against an already marginalized group is a matter of policy.
It’s likely to lead to false accusations against female athletes with masculine figures, something the UN General Assembly warned would happen six years ago. Women already have to work extra hard to overcome myriad sexist obstacles to get taken seriously in sports (like being forced to wear revealing uniforms and being sexualized by the media).
We don’t need more obstacles. We need more women in sports.
