In June, Gov. Ron Desantis signed into law the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, a bill that makes athletes in K-12 women’s sports ineligible to compete if they were not assigned female at birth. At its signing, Desantis said, “In Florida, girls are going to play girl sports and boys are going to play boy sports,” echoing age-old transphobic rhetoric. Texas State Rep. Valoree Swanson, who introduced House Bill 25, which works in a similar way to the Florida bill and was recently passed by Gov. Greg Abbott said, “House Bill 25 is one of the greatest victories for equality for girls since Title IX passed 50 years ago.”
But do these laws actually guarantee some sort of fairness in sports and is there any biological advantage for trans women to begin with?
Valerie Starratt is a professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Nova Southeastern University and specializes in evolutionary psychology and sexual conflict.
“The things that people say are the reason why they implement these bills, I don’t think always necessarily coincides with the real motivation behind it,” Starratt said.
Although the laws are advertised to be about fairness, the real issue regarding trans women in sports is all about hormones and how they affect the human body.
“From the biological perspective, the issue is not actually male, female or otherwise. The issue is people who live in bodies that have been affected by testosterone and people who live in bodies that have not been affected by testosterone,” said Starratt. “The developmental effects of testosterone cannot just be undone.”
There are certain reported advantages that fully developed trans women who transition later in life have as opposed to those who transition prepubescently or cisgender women. According to the academic journal Current Sports Medicine Report’s 2016 article titled “Beyond Fairness: The Biology of Inclusion for Transgender and Intersex Athletes.”
“There are a number of sports where anatomical and biological features, such as size, muscle mass, and even lung capacity would be an obvious advantage,” the article states.
However, according to a study performed by Louis J G Gooren and Mathijs C M Bunck in 2004, going on hormone replacement therapy for about a year puts testosterone and hemoglobin levels for trans women at around the same level for cisgender women. A 2019 study from Endocrine Reviews found that MTF trans people “reported a loss of muscle mass, an increase in fat mass, and a decrease in bone mineral density.”
Potentially due to data similar to this, in 2015 the International Olympic Committee allowed transgender athletes to compete in the Olympics after only one year of hormone replacement therapy.
Even though the data right now shows that biological differences in adult trans athletes are minimal, these bills are targeted at trans children and teenagers, who have had little to no effects of long-term testosterone.
“If we’re talking about prepubescent athletes, there’s no effect of testosterone. There’s no difference of advantage or disadvantage, it’s irrelevant. It only becomes relevant when you see the effects of testosterone or not.” said Starratt.
This raises questions about if these bills will facilitate anti-trans discrimination, something that Zachary Scalzo, adjunct professor of gender studies at NSU, said has already begun.
“If you start on a gender affirmative path like hormone therapy early or prepubescent then it mitigates a lot of the physiological changes that a lot of these laws are focusing on as the clear biological advantage,” said Scalzo, adding that, regarding discrimination, “We also have to take into account things like school environments have often facilitated lots of anti-trans bullying and behavior and aggression.”
The focus on sex assigned at birth instead of gender also encourages a dangerous discourse for public schools.
Research from the University of Oxford in 2018 found that when 132 college students are presented with information that either bases gender on sex or social terms, the students who received a social view of gender were more open to viewing trans women as women but students who received the sex-based information were more likely to see trans women as men, saying that, ultimately, “The findings suggest that essentialist claims that ground the male/female binary in biology may lead to more transprejudice.”
According to Scalzo, these bills are insisting that “in some way trans women are not real women and just shouldn’t be able to engage in public forum practices,” adding that “we are also now expanding this to be an act of aggression on gender variant minors.”
According to Current Sports Medicine Report, when discussing the concept of gender, a survey’s respondents overwhelmingly agreed that an athlete gender was a suitable replacement for male/female binary sports. For those who disagreed with the proposal, their main argument was that “biological differences between males and females remained even after the transition.”
As for now, the bills stand in the states previously mentioned and other, but the debate surrounding trans athletics is far from over.
“I think the bills are further confusing what gender actually is,” said Scalzo.
