I recently had two articles come out in Sapiens revolving around the theme of sexism in sports. The first article tackles some of the myths and misconceptions regarding sex differences in athletic performance. The second article takes a look at how sexism is still prevalent in the Olympic Games with a particular focus on natural testosterone level policing among some women athletes and briefly touches on trans-athlete inclusion.
Both of these articles were born out of my experience researching and teaching exercise physiology and the anthropology of sports. And both of these articles attracted some less than pleasant and incredibly misinformed responses.
Responses to the sex differences articles ranged from genuine curiosity and a place from wanting to learn to outright calling me a liar. Many struggle to accept that testosterone is not the end all be all of sports performance. Others cannot fathom that women may potentially have an athletic advantage in some sports. I think what frustrates me the most with these responses is that many of these folks seem to have not fully read the article nor attempt to read the extensive supporting information provided in text.
Furthermore, one of the critical points of this article was that women are woefully underrepresented in exercise physiology research both as research participants and researchers. I state clearly that everything we currently know about women’s athletic performance could be wrong as the current research just isn’t there to make many solid claims . Pushing the physiological work aside for a moment, it is also incredibly difficult to determine if the advantages men do have are actually due to better performance capability or just better opportunity, training, and exposure at a young age – a topic I did not have time to go into with this article.
As for the second article, current responses seem to come from those who are anti-trans inclusion in sports. They claim that it is unfair for trans athletes (particularly trans women) to compete with cis-gendered athletes. One individual responded to my article by linking to this twitter post claiming that Laurel Hubbard (trans-woman athletes competing in Olympic Weightlifting for New Zealand) knocked Nini Manumua out from Olympic competition. However, if this commenter had scrolled just a little further down that thread, she would have seen a strong argument that Manumua would have struggled to qualify regardless of Hubbard’s success. This is equivalent of saying “If the other team didn’t score so many points, we would have one!”
There is also the argument that there are only two distinct biological sexes. This is just patently wrong. You can have a read of this wonderful article lead by Zachary DuBois.
These and other anti-trans athlete arguments are false alarms. You can read why in my article linked above. Or here. Or listen to it here. The idea that trans-gender women are going to dominate sports is not based in reality, it is based in fear and bias.
I also highly recommend a couple of films for folks who may not want to read some of the articles but would like to hear from the trans-athlete perspective: Transformer and Changing the Game.