Firstly –
the video
in question. You have to watch it for this
blog post to make any sense. Secondly, my position in the whole
"trans/intersex/high testosterone female athlete" debate
after having seen Rachel's
video is more or less the same as it has been since I wrote a
blog post about the topic two years ago. This
position is a middle position of sorts, similar to the one espoused
by "scientist first, athlete second, transgender third"
Joanna Harper, whose opinions on the matter are
stated here,
and a more personal account of her experience as a trans athlete on
hormone replacement therapy is something can be
read about here.
Having gotten that out of the way, although I
understand that singling out (only) testosterone as something to
determine female eligibility in sports is problematic (since women
come in all shapes and sizes, etc), I still think that this makes the
most sense taking all things into account. Rachel asks
(rhetorically) why it should be considered fair to permit other large
competitive advantages based on natural physical characteristics like
height where the advantages are greater than the 10-12% which male
athletes have over female ones (supposedly mostly due to their
testosterone levels), but ban levels of endogenous free testosterone
(fT) in female athletes that although comparatively high, confer a much smaller advantage than that. What needs
unpacking here before answering the question is the alleged
"endogenous testosterone that confers a smaller advantage",
and the research that this conclusion is based on. Sure, high fT
levels in female Olympic athletes might account for a “mere” ~3%
difference in performance, but this is only so when using a very
specific tool to measure and define what would constitute“high
levels of fT”.
(I'm jesting – it's not really that bad)
As Roger Pielke writes in his
review of the IAAF study (Bermon and Garnier,
2017), the paper has some significant methodological issues, the most
notable according to him being the inclusion of female athletes known
to have been doping, with those who have naturally high levels of fT.
I myself see the usage of tertiles
to divide female athletes and their athletic performance as it
relates to high fT levels as more problematic. Don't get me wrong;
the study as presented does give us valuable information, but I don't
really know what to do with it for my
purposes, because I'm mostly interested
in the outliers – i.e.
the freaks
– and their relative performance to
the other 99%
which although not by any stretch are
necessarily “normal”, definitely are so relative to the super (in
more than one sense) deviations. Why?
Because the question of female eligibility has always been actualized
in relation to the outliers, rather than a
third of the
elite athletes. The fact that there is an
on average 3% difference in athletic results between the top and
bottom tertiles isn't surprising, nor am I sure that it should
matter to anyone if this data isn't supplemented
by data
concerning the aforementioned 1% (unless
one deems 3% to make all the difference in the world of elite sports
and thus feels satisfied with the data we already have because any more would be "more of the same").
As
Joanna Harper writes: "The
difference in the T levels between the two groups of women in the
Bermon/Garnier study was not nearly as large as the difference
between most women and those with hyperandrogenism. And it is this
massive testosterone-based advantage held by many intersex women that
was the foundation for the now-suspended IAAF rules".
In the Bermon/Garnier study, twenty-four female
athletes showed a T concentration >3.08 nmol/L, a number which
according to Pielke has been calculated to represent the 99th
percentile in a previous normative study in elite female athletes.
What this means is that those women have exceptionally high fT
levels, yet still have 3-10 times lower levels than the average man
does. The argument could be made that although hyperandrogenism in
general (among elite, Olympian athletes, that is*) doesn't seem
to confer a competitive advantage larger than ~3% across the board,
some cases of hyperandrogenism might. One might also
thus argue that some cases of "transgenderism" have even
bigger potential for conferring competitive advantages in female
athletes – especially if allowing trans women who haven't gone
through hormone replacement therapy be eligible for female
competition, which is Rachel's opinion.
My own opinions in the matter are a conglomerate view that I've arrived at after considering the available research, female sports as a whole, the transgender issue, the social justice aspects, etc. I still think that although there is no clear answer here, and there are inconsistencies in all the conclusions which seem possibly correct to me and touches base with all of the point of interests and areas of contention mentioned above, I believe the best way to go from here is to classify people by default as men or women as dictated by their legal gender, and then permit sport organizations to measure athlete's fT levels and deny people who have a higher concentration than say 8 nmol/L to compete in the female category. It might be wise to add some corollary qualifiers following this, such as a time-span in which the athlete must have such and such (low) fT levels, or that the legal gender of the athlete wanting to compete in the female category should also be female. And although my focus lies on the "eligible vs ineligible female regulation" part of it all, I do believe that gender verification by legal documents rather than self-definition would help the cause here to get trans women more accepted the coming 10-20 years as women, and as female athletes, which is very important to me – more so than opening up the playing field for all kinds of trans(feminine) people.
In the interest of fairness, and given the
disparities concerning transgender care and acceptance across
countries, one could argue that self-definition is the more just
option for “deciding gender”, but I'm hoping that the problems
for specific individuals (even if seen in the light of class and/or
race) following a stricter admittance policy would be small enough
not to justify to give up "the needs of the many",
whom I deem would be better served by having eligibility
requirements. I believe that the needs of the many are likewise best
served by not allowing fT levels higher than 8nmol/l to
compete in the female category simply because I don't believe
it would be that much of a problem for a clear majority of intersex
and transgender athletes due to my assumptions that 1) not many women
with hyperandrogenism have
testosterone levels in the male range, and
2) very few trans women would
want to, while also serving
as a sort of check for both public outcry, and controversy.
As such, just as Rachel, I am using a proportionality
test as a condition for justifying prima facie discrimination, only
reaching different conclusions than she does. Are the social
benefits of the discriminatory policy outweighing the
cost to those discriminated against? When it comes
to not allowing transgender women compete as women, the answer is
emphatically no, but my answer right now is unequivocally negative
only when there are corresponding modifiers and "prima facie
discrimination practices" applied which expressly regulate and
use fT levels as the central eligibility criteria for participation.
Such are the conditions under which I believe the most goodness can
be expressed and achieved, and although that statement might sound
unambiguously utilitarian, I consider my belief to be more nuanced
than so, in that I approach the matter (but perhaps don’t disclose
this process well enough) also from other vantage points, for example
pragmatism and virtue ethics.
All of sports and it’s idea of “fairness” is,
to be honest, as much make-believe as the rules which govern the
different sports, but in order for the pretense to be kept up, rule
changes of any kind have to be grounded in some sort of “natural
virtue” as much as people’s idea of fairness, and their
intuitions concerning these. There’s nothing God-given in
the whole male/female division, but as long as our intuitions
concerning sex and gender are the way they are, and are so strong
that it’s one of the intuitions we organize our society after the
most, the rules which govern sports will, and should, be an
expression of that fact – given that we value that institution as a
bearer of and a vessel for our moral values. Times they are a’
changin’, sure enough, and so do the rules which follow the times,
but they do so gradually, and I see little value in full-on
revolution when things are going in the right direction already.
We might imagine a future Olympic Games that has done
away with the idea of crowning a champion that is the best there is
in a given category and/or sport, and instead concentrates on
creating an event that is radically different to what we might
imagine today. Where every event that takes place is more centered
around people and their training process, reality-show style, than
performance. Where the people selected for the venue have been done
so by lottery tickets – a different sorts of “veil of ignorance”.
They might even make the Olympics about something else than
competition altogether, focusing instead on play, and fun. The
question comes down to what sort of bodies and events we, right now;
want to watch perform
athletic feats; what
kind of athletes inspire
us; and what rules make us aspire to become better athletes,
competitors, and people, on
the whole, and
as a whole – as
a people.
Paradoxically, as with all aspirations of unity (even unity in
diversity), someone has to draw
the short straw, and it’s not fair, but it can be appropriate and
right nonetheless.
_______
* A 3% advantage performance at the Olympic
level is very much given that it can basically be the difference
between competing for a medal and not qualifying at all, but one must
remember that this is after having added together all of
the other advantages that the Olympians have over the
general population, such as physical markers (height, weight),
genetic variables, other hormonal markers,, accessibility to good
coaching, etc. People who compete in the Olympic Games are the cream
of the crop, meaning that they already have a significant
amount of the competitive advantages that are possible to have,
making high fT just one of many variables which are more or
less “maxed out” in the athletes in question, which, depending on
how you look at it (and depending on how much empiric data, besides
“clinical experience”, we actually might have on the matter),
makes high fT levels even more essential for competition at an
elite level, or, in fact, less.
