Are we seeing the end of girls & women’s sports as we know it?

June 5, 2023
Dan Torunian

In recent weeks much has been written and said on the topic of transgender athletes competing in girls and women’s sports.  It has dominated news cycles and social media platforms with emotional arguments being made by both sides.

The arguments in favor of allowing transgender athletes the opportunity to compete center on two points. One, that as a basic principle transgender athletes should have the opportunity to compete in the sex that they identify as and two, that the data examining the benefit enjoyed by primarily males in transition are either inconclusive or point to a nominal-at-best advantage. 

I can understand the first argument, believing that all athletes should have an opportunity to compete and reap the benefits that sports bring to shaping the human spirit, including discipline, teamwork, self-esteem, perseverance, and humility.

However, the second argument is deeply flawed, conveniently side-stepping centuries of understanding that the physical differences between male and female bodies naturally lead to separating them for competitive purposes, whenever the competition is primarily physical. In competitions where bodies don’t matter- for instance, chess- males and females compete together, and it works just fine! That’s why, for the narrow purpose of physical competition, how someone classifies themselves mentally is essentially irrelevant; it’s how people generally would classify them physically that matters.

But let’s put that aside for a moment and explore what science tells us about trans athletes in sports. Trans issues are recent enough that few studies have been done on trans athletes’ performance – and, to date, there are no published studies on trans athletes competing at an elite level. Indeed, there are very few cases from which to extrapolate any findings. But there is data from a 2020 study that looked at US military personnel who transitioned while in service and found that men transitioning to women maintained an edge prior to and following ‘feminizing hormone therapy’. The study looked at three activities: push-ups, sit-ups and running.  In all cases, transgender women out performed biological women:

• Push-ups (1min) +31% in favor of transgender women

• Sit-ups (1min) +15% in favor of transgender women

• Run (1.5Mile) +21% in favor of transgender women

It’s possible there are some forms of athletic competition where these advantages would be less relevant, and in those sports allowing people to compete as they mentally identify would be perfectly reasonable. But the data supports the point that in many traditional sports, sports like basketball, soccer, or swimming, it makes sense to classify people competitively based on their biological sex at birth.

We are a half century removed from the enactment of Title IX, the federal law that barred discrimination against women in education and that forced a leveling of the playing field athletically at schools across the country. It helped usher in a generation of female soccer players, basketball players, volleyball players, lacrosse players and most recently flag football players. This dynamic peaked in 2016-2019 where more than 3.4M girls annually participated in high school sports, learning valuable skills and living out their dreams. We’ve seen the dominance of the US Women’s National Soccer Team and the US Women’s Olympic Teams have consistently been amongst the best on the world stage. This points the way to a solution for the issue of how to be inclusive in athletics: have a men’s team, a women’s team, and a “third way” team that would include transgender athletes of all types, non-binary athletes, and anyone else who does not feel the traditional male/female dichotomy captures their identity. This solution preserves what is valuable and valued in traditional sports while offering an inclusive path to competition for all.

Everyone deserves the chance to compete in athletics. Sports are among the purest and most enjoyable aspects of our society. The ability to prepare, compete, and ultimately succeed, stirs in all of us a level of drive and emotion that cannot be duplicated. But sports should not be a science experiment. Let’s solve the issue in a way that can work for all!