The argument: The arguments against trans women playing in women’s sports runs the gamut between “trans women have an unfair advantage because of natal testosterone when they were younger” to Trump’s position that “trans women are actually men who are either delusional or lying to get an unfair advantage”. There’s also a secondary argument that it’s not safe for a cis woman to play against a trans women.
The reality: Testosterone promotes muscle growth, and on average post-pubescent men are both stronger and taller than women. Exactly how much of an advantage that is depends on the sport, and since we’re talking about two shifted but overlapping bell curves the difference is more consequential for elite athletes. The same physical advantages apply to trans women who have socially transitioned but haven’t taken puberty blockers or hormone therapy, but the science gets a lot murkier when you compare cis women to trans women who have medically transitioned (i.e. are taking estrogen). Trans women lose muscle mass once they start estrogen, though trans women who started blockers and/or estrogen after puberty started may retain some advantage. Exactly how much of an advantage is hard to say since we’re talking about a very small population (trans athletes) and characteristics with a large variance, but it’s almost certainly less of a predictor than say having tall parents.
Perhaps the cleanest case study you could hope for is Lia Thomas, an openly trans woman swimmer who competed in the NCAA for UPenn. She didn’t medically transition until she was twenty and was already a top athlete by then, and since she’s a swimmer we can directly compare her race times both before and after transition and to other athletes. The results: Thomas’s times were about 7% slower after she transitioned, roughly in line with the differences between men and women for the same distance. She did well in her post-transition year and even came in first in the 500 yard freestyle at the NCAA championship, but she didn’t dominate the competition or break any records — that honor went to cisgendered Kate Douglass who broke 18 records that meet. As Erin Reed put it, “The backlash to trans swimmer Lia Thomas is ridiculous. Pre-transition, she was 10s behind the male record. Post-transition, she is 10s behind the female record. She lost 30s in transition. Nobody had a problem before. Its almost like the only difference is that she’s trans.”
But there’s a more fundamental flaw here. The crux of the fairness argument is that the whole point of having a separate league for women is to make the sport more competitive, like weight classes in boxing, so trans women are “playing down” when they play against other women. But that’s not historically accurate: women’s sports teams weren’t formed to make sports more competitive, they were formed to allow women and girls to participate at all in an activity that until that point had been exclusively available to men. Throughout the 19th century the prevailing thought was that women were fragile creatures, and that unladylike sports (or for that matter too much education) “desexed” them and led to infertility. So with most organized sports closed off to them, women began forming their own separate leagues in the early 20th century. These organizations and their successors, founded by and for women, promoted universal participation in sports (“every girl in a sport and a sport for every girl”) and explicitly rejected the “win at all costs” attitude and exploitation of amateur athletes that was already common in men’s sports. Over the next century the existing men’s-only organizations like the IOC, NCAA and the AAU slowly and grudgingly added women’s divisions, prodded by the fear of having to contend with a rival organization if they didn’t. But the idea that strength, aggression and competition are inherently male traits and that any women who exhibits them is somehow masculinized never fully went away (despite attempts to dress female athletes in frilly and/or revealing uniforms).
This history gives some insight into what I think of as the three paradoxes of gender fairness in sports:
- Almost all physical advantages like height, body shape, lung capacity and natural strength are considered fair and even celebrated in sports so long as they’re endogenous (i.e. not from doping or equipment). Why are women with naturally high testosterone the exception? And if high testosterone is so much of an advantage that it should be singled out, why are men with higher than usual testosterone not banned as well?
- Why are trans women banned from women’s divisions in games like Chess where physical strength doesn’t come into play at all?
- Why is it unsafe for a women to compete against a man due to strength differences, but not unsafe for a man of similar height and build?
All three “paradoxes” make sense when viewed through the 19th and early-20th century lens where women aren’t supposed to be strong, aren’t supposed to be competitive, and certainly aren’t supposed to be able to compete against men — and any that break this image might not be “real” women at all.
To be clear, I’m not saying that there are no differences between male and female athletes, nor am I saying that all or even most sports should be sexually integrated. Even small differences in average strength or size have a disproportionate effect at the highest levels of competition, so it makes sense to segregate professional and high-end amateur competitions like the Olympics on the basis of sex. Depending on the sport the requirement that transgender female athletes medically transition before competing might also make sense at these elite levels for the same reason. But that raises a fourth paradox of the fairness argument: if trans women would dominate high-end sports, where are they? There are currently only a handful of transgender athletes in women’s sports even playing at any level, much less dominating. Maybe it’s just because of transphobia, and maybe if women’s sports was more accepting of trans athletes then suddenly all the top players would be trans women. But I don’t buy it, and it’s certainly not a problem now.
Segregating teams by sex often makes sense in non-elite athletics as well. Women in coed leagues often face discrimination, with male teammates and competitors either assuming they’re not as skilled as they are or getting mad and aggressive if they are. Men are also on average more aggressive than women, both culturally and because of increased testosterone. Segregated teams solves both problems. But these are also reasons to include trans women (especially those who have undergone hormone treatment) in women’s sports, because both culturally and hormone-wise they are women.
The rhetoric: Since there are so few trans female athletes to begin with, anti-trans activists have had to get creative to stoke outrage in the general populace. One example is Imain Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu‑ting of Taiwan, two cisgender women who won gold for welterweight and featherweight boxing the 2024 Summer Olympics. Both had been accused by the Russian-led International Boxing Association in 2023 of being “biologically men” due to undisclosed tests, an accusation that the IOC dismissed both due to lack of evidence and because the IBA had already been suspended due to alleged corruption. The accusations spread again at the Olympics when Angela Carini of Italy lasted only 46 seconds against Khelif, afterwards stating “I got into the ring to fight. I didn’t give up, but one punch hurt too much and so I said enough.” (She later apologized to Khelif.) The UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls later tweeted “Angela Carini… and other female athletes should not have been exposed to this physical and psychological violence based on their sex” (just a reminder that we’re talking about Olympic-level boxing here), and the Italian Prime Minister finished off with “I think that athletes who have male genetic characteristics should not be admitted to women’s competitions … from my point of view it was not an even contest.” So far that’s the same old bogus accusations that top-performing female athletes “must be men” we’ve heard for over a century, but at his February speech before Congress President Trump aimed it at transgender athletes instead, declaring without regard to reality that both athletes were “transitioned”.
Another cause célèbre of the anti-trans movement is Payton McNabb, who as a high school senior in 2022 suffered a concussion after being hit by a volleyball that was spiked by an opponent that McNabb claims was transgender. The British tabloid Daily Mail reported that the ball was spiked at an estimated 70 mph (a claim repeated by the National Review), and later reported “Ms McNabb was left with brain damage and paralysis on her right side, which ended her dreams of getting a volleyball college scholarship and has made it difficult to walk without falling.” They also added that “The 5ft 11in trans player cackled in delight, Ms McNabb said, after sending her to the floor. As did other players in the opposite team.” Within months McNabb became a spokesperson for for the conservative Independent Women’s Forum (who recently produced a 15-minute YouTube video about the incident called “Kill Shot: How Payton McNabb Turned Tragedy into Triumph”), was being interviewed on Fox News and testifying before the North Carolina state legislature, and most recently was a guest at Trump’s speech before Congress where he repeated that the concussion caused a traumatic brain injury that partially paralyzed her right side and ended her athletic career. It all sounds awful, in a made-for-TV movie kind of way.
At this point I could point out that we only have McNabb’s word that the girl who spiked the ball is transgender (she hasn’t come forward, and really who could blame her). Or that McNabb played varsity basketball less than three months after her injury, followed by varsity softball where she boasted an impressive 0.429 batting average. Or that NHFS guidelines forbid playing sports if you still have symptoms from a brain injury. Or that in the recent IWF video McNabb says after she was hit the entire gym went silent, which brings into question the whole “cackled in delight” quote that was attributed to her earlier.
But I’d like to just focus on the spike itself — which the Daily Mail claims was estimated at around 70 mph and quoted an anonymous observer describing it as “abnormally fast” — because we can estimate the speed ourselves from the video. The ball was spiked about two feet from the net and hit Payton either right at or just past the attack line, so about 12-13 feet horizontal. It started one or two feet above the net (which is 7’4″ in girl’s HS volleyball) and sank to about 4′ (McNabb is 5’4″ but was crouching), so about 4-5 feet vertical. The spike lasts five video frames at 24 frames/second, or 0.21 seconds. Do the math and that’s between 41 and 45 mph, which slightly above average but still well within normal range for a spike hit by a girl on a high-school volleyball team. The simple truth is that girl’s high-school volleyball is a dangerous sport, with an astonishing 6% of players suffering concussions in a single 12-month period. Payton got hit in the head with a volleyball and suffered a concussion, just like over 28,000 other girls did while playing girl’s high-school volleyball last year. The only difference is that Payton seems to have turned the experience into something of a career opportunity.
How it’s being weaponized: Half the states have passed laws banning trans women and girls from playing on sports teams that match their gender since 2020, most covering both K-12 and college level sports, and the Trump administration has issued an executive order requiring the remaining states to enact a similar ban or risk losing federal funding. This year we also saw six NCAA volleyball teams choose to forfeit rather than play against the 130th ranked San Jose State University Spartans because one of the Spartans is trans, which honestly sounds a lot like how all-white teams reacted to integration back in the 1950s.
More ominously, the State Department is using the issue of trans women in sports as an excuse to require all US visa applications to list their sex at birth on their applications, and granting consular offices authority to deny visas and/or require additional documentation if they have reasonable suspicion that the gender marker is not accurate. Though ostensibly the rule is to prevent trans female athletes from traveling to the US to compete in women’s sports (regardless of what the competition organizers want) some sections of the order are more general and apply beyond athletics.