In 2018, rugby player Grace McKenzie thought competitive sports were no longer an option for her. As a transgender woman, McKenzie said she didn’t think she’d be allowed to play after transitioning, and she was heartbroken because she has been a lifelong athlete. However, she was extremely surprised when she was invited to a practice with the Golden Gate Women’s Rugby Club in San Francisco. She went and “never looked back,” because “the entire team was extremely welcoming and inclusive.”
Now, however, her sport has become less welcoming to elite players. On October 9th, World Rugby, the sport’s governing body, released new guidelines that ban transgender women from playing rugby internationally because of “player welfare risks.” McKenzie described the move as “a slap in the face.” The updated regulations are among the most exclusionary policies for transgender athletes instituted by an international federation in history.
In September 2020, a group of Republican senators introduced a bill that would make it a federal civil rights violation for transgender women to compete in women’s athletics. At the state level, the Department of Education threatened to withdraw funding from Connecticut school districts that permit trans girls to compete with cisgender (non-transgender) girls. Idaho attempted to ban trans women and girls from playing women’s sports. Several high-profile female athletes, including the runner Paula Radcliffe and the tennis star Martina Navratilova, have also recently condemned the inclusion of trans women in women’s competitions.
Why? The two sides of the ongoing debate over whether transgender women should compete in women’s sports are inclusion vs competitive fairness.
People who oppose transgender women competing in women’s sports say that they are given an unfair advantage over cisgender women due to their higher testosterone levels and different muscle and body fat distribution. Testosterone regulates many different functions in the body, including the maintenance of bone and muscle mass. It is also argued that athletes who transition to a woman after puberty will have a greater muscle-to-fat ratio compared to cisgender female athletes.
On the other hand, people who stand for transgender inclusion in sports believe that a complete ban, such as the one imposed by World Rugby, sets a dangerous precedent. Billie Jean King, a cisgender female tennis player, says, “There is no place in any sport for discrimination of any kind. I’m proud to support all transgender athletes who simply want the access and opportunity to compete in the sport they love.”
The Olympics permit trans women to compete in the Games only if they maintain a certain testosterone level for 12 months before the competition. However, even this period of hormonal therapy may be inadequate. A December 2020 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that transgender women maintain an athletic advantage over their cisgender peers even after a year of hormone therapy. “For the Olympic level, the elite level, I’d say probably two years is more realistic than one year,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Timothy Roberts, a paediatrician and the director of the adolescent medicine training program at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri.
Complicating matters further, medical and ethical questions arise about whether any woman should be required to lower testosterone levels at all, just to play sports. The United Nations has called required hormone suppression “unnecessary, humiliating, and harmful.”
Guidelines regarding transgender athletes represent “sport’s unsolvable problem,” said Ross Tucker, a South African exercise physiologist who is helping World Rugby develop its eligibility rules. He said it seemed impossible to balance the values of competitive fairness, inclusion and safety because they conflict. “Therefore, you have to prioritize them,” Tucker said. “That’s the problem. One group prioritizes inclusion. Another group says they want fairness and safety on the playing field.”
