Questions About Sex in Sport and Sports Policies
These data and comparisons explain why competitive sport has traditionally separated biological males (people with male bodies) from biological females (people with female bodies), and also why legal measures like Title IX in the United States require institutions to set aside and protect separate and equal funding, facilities, and opportunities for women and girls.
Still, society is being pushed in this period to reconsider both importance of separate sport compared to other values, and the way the girls’ and women’s category is protected. As a result, the conversation includes four general categories of policy options:
1. Keeping girls’ and/or women’s sport only for females.
2. Keeping the two categories but allowing males to compete in girls’ and women’s events (a) where they identify as girls and women, and/or (b) because they want the opportunity for some other reason, e.g., they are swimmers and their high school has a girls’ but not a boys’ swim team.
3. Keeping the two categories but allowing males to compete in girls’ and women’s events only if they identify as such
and they transition their testosterone levels to within the female – ovarian – range.
4. Erasing the categories – no divisions by “male” and “female” however these are defined – and featuring only “open” sports and events where everyone competes together, or else in sports and events based on different classifications like height or weight.
Our goal in developing and presenting the data and comparisons in TABLES 1- 4 is to provide some of the facts necessary to evaluate these options and to help answer the overarching question: what would happen if we stopped classifying athletes on the basis of sex or else allowed exceptions to that rule? More specifically, we hope that the data and comparisons are useful as people think about the following questions:
How important is sport, its particular events, and goals?
Should societies and sports governing authorities continue to be committed to equal sports events and opportunities for boys and girls, men and women?
Are there good reasons to ensure that biological females (people with female bodies) are included and visible in competitive sport, and if so, does it matter how they are visible? For example, is it enough that they are given an opportunity to participate at some point in development sport, or is it important that they are competitive for the win so that we see them in championships and on the podium?
In general, the goals of the identity movement are to ensure that people who are trans and intersex are fully and equally included in society’s important institutions on the basis of their identity, not their (reproductive) biology. In cases of conflict between the goals of the identity movement and sports’ traditional goals for girls’ and women’s sport, what should our priority be: equal opportunity in sport for girls and women or the ability of each individual to participate in sports on their own terms?
Should our priorities depend on the sporting context, for example, is or should the priority be different in elementary school, junior high school, high school, college, and professional sport?
If we want to have it all – to respect everyone’s gender identity and still to support girls’ and women’s sport by making a place for athletes with female bodies in competition – what’s the best way forward? What’s the best compromise position? Ultimately, this is the most important question for sports policymakers in this period.
A. Is it acceptable to include everyone but still to classify on the basis of sex, like we do already on the basis of weight in wrestling and boxing? For example, could the Olympic Committee have required Bruce Jenner - before he became Caitlyn and transitioned physically - to compete as a man in the men’s decathlon?
B. Would it have been more or less acceptable to have required Jenner to compete in the men’s decathlon, but not to prescribe how she expresses her identity as a woman?
C. If Jenner before her physical transition had wanted to compete in the women’s heptathlon, would it have been acceptable for the Olympic Committee to have required her first to transition physically, at least her testosterone levels, so that – although she would still be competing with a lot of developed male traits useful for athletics – all competitors would compete on equal footing in terms of steroid levels?
D. If none of these options strikes the right balance between the two important competing interests, is there another option that does?
https://law.duke.edu/sports/sex-sport/comparative-athletic-performance/