On Trans Women in Sports
Ivy #36.3
Art by Eclipse
I’ve been an athlete my whole life. Whether it’s been Baseball in elementary school, soccer in middle school, rowing in high school, or running & the stair master (my love <3) on my own in college, I’ve always enjoyed exercising. When I realized I was a transgender woman in my junior year of high school, I debated asking my coaches if I could join the women’s team, as they had both shown their support for protecting transgender athletes. One of the coaches had a transgender son, and we had 3 transmasculine rowers on the team at the time. I ultimately decided against it and came to the unfortunate conclusion to quit rowing after high school as I feared something like the recent ban on transgender women in all NCAA women’s athletics would happen. I also feared being unfairly targeted and harassed by people I don’t even know.
Athletics are so important to growing children. They serve as an incredible outlet for children to learn important skills, make connections, have a passion for something, and stay active. Trans people and children should not be excluded from this. Forcing them to compete with their assigned gender at birth when they don’t feel comfortable doing that is not allowing that. The whole trans women in sports debate is very much a non-issue that only exists to create a moral panic around transgender people, especially transgender women.
Almost every argument against transgender people is directed against transgender women and ignores the existence of transmasculine people entirely. Men are not pretending to be women to dominate in women’s sports. If they were, there would have been more than 10 trans women out of the 500,000+ athletes competing in NCAA sports, and at least 1 transgender woman competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics. There is so much blatant misinformation about trans women competing in women’s sports because the little information that is out there comes from wildly incorrect statements made by people who know nothing.
Lia Thomas is an American swimmer who pre-transition had multiple times recorded in top 100 in the nation and held the 6th fastest 1000 yard freestyle time in the nation as a college freshman. She swam on the men’s team for a whole year after coming out and had to be on hormones for an entire year before being able to compete on the women’s team to comply with regulations. These regulations for transgender athletes are understandable, and I am fine with them existing for college and professional level athletics only, and only as a requirement to compete, not practice, as long as trans women are allowed to compete in women’s sports when they meet these requirements.
Claiming Lia Thomas suddenly became dominant after she transitioned is just factually wrong. After transitioning her times got worse as expected, as taking hormones deteriorates muscle mass, increases bone density, and increases body fat percentage, and she was still being beaten by cisgender female athletes. She still managed to win an NCAA D1 National Championship in the women’s 500 yard freestyle before her career was cut short after being banned from competing in women’s swimming events. Even without the bans, Lia Thomas faced lots of targeted harassment towards her and her college, and recently had her school records she worked so hard for stripped from her.
In September 2024, Brooke Slusser had outed her teammate on the San Jose State University women’s volleyball team as being transgender to “protect women against males in women’s sports.” This caused a lot of controversy for the team, resulting in 7 teams boycotting playing their team, and giving them 7 free wins to their 14-7 season. The trans athlete had previously competed on the team for 2 years with there being no issue and SJSU’s team and record is nothing extraordinary. It was only when she was outed by her teammate that it became an issue.
Outing someone is one of the worst things you can do to a trans person, it is robbing them of their humanity, preventing them from coming out to people on their own terms, and potentially puts them in a lot of danger, which happened not only to the trans player, but also to the many other players and coaches on the team who became targets of harassment online and protests outside of their games. Many of the schools who had forfeited against them also put out statements to why they did, where they publicly called the trans athlete a male, and news sources use her full name, making her a target for even more harassment.
This is not about protecting women’s sports, many of these people do not even care about women’s sports to begin with, we are just targeted because we are such a small minority of the population. It just makes women’s sports a more dangerous place when harassment like this is normalized. Reading through comments made about trans female athletes is absolutely sickening, and it saddens me how little support there is for this issue even from “progressive” people.
Sports are not fair at the top level. The best athletes all have genetic differences from regular people that help them excel at their sport. Literally just look at Michael Phelps. His body was made to be the best swimmer in the world and nothing else, with his incredibly large wingspan, height, and his body producing less lactic acid than normal. Iten, Kenya, a city of only 42,000 people, has produced so many of the greatest long distance runners because of its high elevation and transport on foot being so common, encouraging a lot of running. All sports’ top athletes have specific builds that help them excel at their sports. No matter how hard I tried I could’ve never been one of the best basketball players because I’m 5’8.
When I started rowing my first year on varsity it immediately became clear I was one of the worst on the team. I was a 5’8 boy in a sport where even the best women are at least 5’10. I placed in the bottom of almost every single race until I finally won one at the end of that year, in a scholastic teams only race. I continued to put in much more effort than others to improve and I was still worse than people on my team who, even those who had a whole year less experience than me.
Ideally sports would be fair but they aren’t. I was on a school team of around 30-40 people combined for the men’s and women’s varsity and novice teams, having to race against private teams of 200+ athletes from all over that received much more funding and had elite level coaches and athletes (although I had a gold medalist olympian as a coach Junior year :p shout out to Erin Cafaro <3). Sports try to be fair but they can’t ever be completely fair. Allowing the few publically trans women that do play sports to compete with other women will not ruin the competitive integrity of the sport or make them any less fair than they already are. It will only ensure equality and greater acceptance for transgender people everywhere which creates a safer environment for everybody.
The argument against excluding transgender women in women’s sports is rooted in so much misogyny, believing that the average athletic adult male could walk on to any professional women’s sports team and immediately dominate with little experience. It completely disregards the hours and hours of daily training across many years that these women have put into their sport and minimizes the accomplishments made by these incredible athletes.
Trans female athletes are not even allowed to compete in professional sports without lowered testosterone levels for at least a year before competing. This regulation on testosterone levels in women has resulted in attacks on many female athletes of color. Athletes like Christine Mboma, Beatrice Masilingi, Caster Semenya, Dutee Chand, and countless others have all been discriminated against for having various androgen disorders like hyperandrogenism by athletic committees and spectators. Rules in place have disqualified these women from competing or have forced them to medically reduce their natural hormone levels to compete.
On top of the previously mentioned athletes, Lin Yu-ting and Imane Khelif were the subjects of attacks by transphobes during the 2024 Olympics as they were both accused of being transgender women. It’s very common for women of color to face allegations of being transgender because our conceptions of what a “man” or “woman” are is based on white European features and standards, and a woman that is not valued as conventionally attractive is often seen as masculine through the gaze of western society. Transphobia is not just transphobia, it is racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism too. These attacks take away from the incredible accomplishments by these women who deserve so much praise, and attention for their accomplishments, not harassment for something that isn’t even true.
A lot of trans “allies” do not support trans people. You cannot support trans people but be against trans women competing in women’s sports or being in women’s spaces. On top of the obvious things, such as blatantly misgendering us, if you use us as gotchas, use they/them pronouns on us when we don’t use them, are against neo-pronouns, aren’t supportive of gender identities outside of male, female, and non-binary or you uphold gender norms on others at all, misgender people because they’re a bad person, are a bio-essentialist; believing behavior of men and women is inherent to their gender, say a trans person looks more like a man or a woman than a transphobe, saying transphobes are secretly attracted to us, tell someone a person is trans for them (without their permission), treat trans people who don’t pass any differently from those that do, focus on the fact that transphobia hurts cis people more than the harm it causes trans people, center your feminism around having a uterus, continually platform or support transphobes, infantilize us, or fetishize us, you aren’t a good ally as you think you are. Extra emphasis on the fetishization part btw. Your allyship extends to all trans people or it extends to nobody. Don’t equate being gay to liking dick, being a lesbian to liking pussy, etc. or trans women as just women with dicks. And stop using “AMAB” and “AFAB” too. I almost never see those terms being used in a way that is not at least slightly transphobic or exclusionary to trans people.
There is no “I support Trans people but…” you need to have unconditional support of us no matter what, just using our correct name and pronouns is never enough. Let transgender people play in the sports they want to, let trans kids be kids and not have to worry about their rights being taken away from them or be forced into spaces they are not comfortable in. Supporting trans people right now is so important as the republican party is trying to eradicate our very existence and the democratic party can’t even pretend to care about us anymore.
I fear for all of my trans siblings who live in states that are actively having their rights taken away, all the trans sex workers who are forced into this line of work and have to sell their body to support their transition because it’s more difficult to get hired as a trans person, while facing higher rates of sexual assault and violence, all the trans people unable to start their transition due to social or financial circumstances, all the trans people who have been murdered or have commit suicide before they can live out their full lives, all the trans people in places where being transgender is illegal or access to gender affirming care is illegal or limited, trans people who hold identities that put them in even more danger and discrimination, those that have been forced to detransition, trans people who have lost family and friends because of their transition, all the trans children being forced to go through a puberty that does not align with the one they desire, and trans people of color especially who have higher rates of experiencing all of these things than their white counterparts. I fear for the future of all trans people. Trans people everywhere I love you, and never stop being you.
Fear mongering about issues like trans women in sports or in women’s bathrooms is exactly what has led to the position trans people are in in the US right now. These issues are made to seem much larger than they really are to give justification to dehumanize us, we’re such a small portion of the population which makes targeting us so easy. We’re being blamed for so many of the world’s problems, othered, dehumanized, and disrespected so blatantly. We’re supposed to act like living in a society where so much of the population wants us dead is normal. We’re supposed to be content with our “resistance” party who gave up on us because it protects their safety, and lost twice to one of the most awful people alive in the most slam dunk elections ever. Taking away our rights is not going to stop at banning us from women’s sports or women’s bathrooms, they’re not stopping until we’re all eradicated from society.