The Transgender Threat to Women’s Sports
– By Howard Sierer –
Woke progressives advocate allowing transgenders born as males to compete in women’s athletic competitions. If accepted, their argument in effect would eliminate women’s athletic teams.
Allowing transgenders to compete is manifestly unfair to biological females. Examples abound, the most recent of which is Lia (née William) Thomas’ runaway 1.75 second victory over Olympic medalist Emma Weyant in the NCAA women’s 500-yard freestyle swimming championships.
Thomas and other transgenders should be respected when it comes to expressing their identity. But cells, hormones and muscles don’t change to reflect a chosen gender.
Thomas competed as a male through his junior year at the University of Pennsylvania but declared as a woman this past season. Even though Thomas takes testosterone suppression medications, Thomas is still an anatomical male, changing, showering and dressing in the women’s locker room. Thomas finished 65th competing as a male as a junior but was crowned the NCAA women’s champion this year.
Unsurprisingly, other transgenders born as males are dominating competitions against biological women: postpubescent males on average are just bigger, faster and stronger. In 2017 alone, Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Tori Bowie’s 100-meter lifetime best of 10.78 seconds was beaten 15,000 times by men and boys. Olympic track champion Allyson Felix’s lifetime best 400-meter time of 49.26 seconds was surpassed by over 15,000 men and boys that same year.
Professor and former athlete Doriane Coleman explains these results: “Compared to females, males have greater lean body mass (more skeletal muscle and less fat), larger hearts (both in absolute terms and scaled to lean body mass), higher cardiac outputs, larger hemoglobin mass, larger VO2 max (i.e. a person’s ability to take in oxygen), greater glycogen utilization and higher anaerobic capacity.”
The International Women’s Forum reports that there are more than 3,000 genes that contribute to muscle differences between human males and females. “Genetic differences cannot be eliminated by reducing testosterone, and these differences may create different muscle responses to training between even those men and women who have the same concentrations of testosterone.”
Virtually everyone opposes the use of steroids by athletes who hope to improve their performance. Steroid use is seen as cheating. Yet biological men who identify as women have far more potent advantages over biological women, advantages that testosterone suppression can’t eliminate.
Woke progressives view the plight of transgender athletes as a transgender civil rights issue, ignoring its impact on the civil rights of biological women against whom they compete. Leor Sapir, writing in the City Journal, observes that “The sudden prominence of transgenderism in the West owes in large part to compassion having become unmoored from reason, and to ethics having been reduced to compassion.”
Sapir notes that those who support transgender athletes call them “authentic” women. She explains that “authentic here really means ‘sincere’: transgender women are being sincere, not deceptive, when they say they have a strong inner sense of being a woman. But that sincerity is irrelevant unless one first assumes that what makes a belief true is the fact that it is sincerely held, rather than its correspondence to objective reality.”
Southern Utah University track athlete Haley Tanne is living that objective reality. She speaks for most female athletes when she says, “My teammates and I are watching our records, our scholarships and our competitive opportunities slip away…wondering if anyone in authority is going to have the courage to step up and save women’s sports.”
Allowing biological males to overshadow the progress made over decades by thousands of female athletes is a major setback for women’s civil rights. So why isn’t the women’s rights movement taking up Haley’s challenge?
The National Organization of Women and other feminist organizations are silent on transgenders competing against biological women, caught between their active support of LGBTQ rights and the transgender attack on the accomplishments of biological females.
Opening the door to even more future controversy, Dr. Sabra Katz-Wise of the Harvard Medical School describes gender fluidity, a condition that “refers to change over time in a person’s gender expression or gender identity, or both.” Are biological men and boys with fluid genders “authentic” women when they so choose? Can they be men during the week and women on race day? Why not?
Progressives like Katz-Wise embrace “preferred gender: a deeply held, internal sense-of-self as being masculine, feminine, a blend of both, or something else,” and have embedded it into governing documents in universities and other woke institutions they control.
To sort this mess out, we’ll soon have judges determining what level of testosterone should be allowed for a woman to be “authentic” or if testosterone levels are even relevant. Next will be gender-fluid biological men who merely view themselves as women without taking any medical action.
I join with Caitlyn (née Bruce) Jenner, 1976 Olympic decathlon gold medalist and until recently the country’s most famous transgender, who says, “We must protect women’s sports. At all costs. What [Thomas] has done is anathema to what sports represents and the spirit of competition. Watching [Thomas] completely dominate the competition was heartbreaking and maddening at the same time. My heart broke for the female athletes who worked their entire lives to reach the pinnacle of the sport just to have it overshadowed by this controversy.”
Viewpoints and perspectives expressed throughout The Independent are those of the individual contributors. They do not necessarily reflect those held by the staff of The Independent or our advertising sponsors. Your comments, rebuttals, and contributions are welcome in accordance with our Terms of Service. Please be respectful and abide by our Community Rules. If you have privacy concerns you can view our Privacy Policy here. Thank you!
Click here to submit an article, guest opinion piece, or a Letter to the Editor
