The International Cricket Council has become the latest sports body to ban transgender players from the elite women’s game if they have gone through male puberty.
The ICC said it had taken the decision, following an extensive scientific review and nine-month consultation, to “protect the integrity of the international women’s game and the safety of players”.
It joins rugby union, swimming, cycling, athletics and rugby league, who have all gone down a similar path in recent years after citing concerns over fairness or safety.
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It’s worth noting that “scientifically a male” is genuinely a more complicated phrase than it might initially seem at first, because trans people generally do more than just socially transition, changing their name and clothes. Sex differences are primarily mediated through sex hormones, and radically changing one’s hormonal profile, as happens with hormone therapies, causes very real biological effects. A trans woman, while being stronger than your average cis woman, will lose a meaningful amount of muscle due to the lack of testosterone (and will also generally develop better cardiovascular health, again due to the lack of testosterone). Depending on the sport and the individuals in question, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that there are cases where some amount of residual muscle doesn’t necessarily confer a particularly large benefit such that a blanket ban is warranted.
Agreed. That said, I’ve yet to see a major sport league that bans transgenders in women’s divisions without at least some empirical research existing that demonstrates an unfair advantage.
I mean both chess and pool have recently banned transgender women from competition.
So the push is not purely an evidence-driven one. In fact there is a very loud political faction trying to remove transgender women from all events, from the highest levels all the way down to park fun-runs.
My bad, I actually wasn’t aware of that. That’s fucking ridiculous.
Isn’t that ridiculous, given that women have empirically proven to be better swimmers in most cases that most men. And I’m certain the reason for banning transgender women from chess is because they realize these people are smarter than the average bear. And more likely to outclass their opponents every time. And you know what? They’re right about that.
Can’t pretend I’m particularly familiar with the specifics, but to be clear, I do think it is absolutely possible, and indeed likely, that there are situations where a genuine advantage is present, and I think the line really needs to be drawn by each individual sports body.
I understand the idealism of wanting there to be no real restrictions, but you need some regulations, if only to prevent the bad-faith asshole who decides to identify as a woman for the day of a competition. As time passes and more studies are done, we’ll be able to draw more evidence-based lines that more accurately balance accessibility and fairness.
My only real point here is just to say that this phrase “biological/scientific male” is way way messier than a simple binary category like that might suggest. A huge amount of tissues in the body of some level of sex differentiation, and that differentiation also varies a lot based on the stage of development that their exposed to hormones. A trans person isn’t going to change their skeleton with hormones, but there are other things that do meaningfully change to get closer to the other sex. A trans woman’s breasts, for instance, are genuinely just as “biologically female” as any cis woman’s.