Trans people and sport: who’s being pushed out?

Workers’ Liberty supports trans and gender-diverse (TGD) people’s rights. Some left feminists (sex based rights activists or SBRAs) see those as threatening women’s rights. This series of articles attempts to thread a path for left-wing activists to reach more agreement. This article examines sport.

I am a university and gender-affirming health clinic researcher, who identifies as a gender-non-conforming man (he/they). Nothing I write here represents my employers’ stance.

In 1977 the transgender tennis player Renée Richards won a US court case to be able to compete in women’s tennis. The precedent did not damage women’s sport, which has grown hugely since then. Yet trans people’s (especially trans women’s) participation in sport has become increasingly contested in recent years.

Although there is currently no ban on trans people in the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee may now ban any athlete who has gone through male puberty from competing in the female category. Richards herself, now over 90, has come to favour excluding trans women from top-level women’s contests. Some SBRAs now argue that trans girls and women should not participate even in school and community women’s sports, but instead have a separate category.

I will come back to Olympic and other élite sport, but the bigger issue today is not trans women pushing cis women out of sport at any level. It is trans women being excluded from everyday sport. That is influenced by their own worries and by direct stigmatisation.

Community and recreational sport is very important for many people’s physical and mental health — enabling social connection, exercise etc. In Australia, only 32% of trans people participate in sport or fitness activities (Bailey 2024) compared to 80% in the general population (Zwickl 2024). Trans women in particular often are excluded, or feel excluded from women’s sport, and face barriers including “anxiety about others’ reactions (63.9%), body dissatisfaction/dysphoria (56.5%) and fears about feeling accepted/affirmed by others (54.7%). Respondents commonly reported experiencing inadequate bathroom/ changing facilities (44.4%), exclusionary rules and regulations surrounding gender (36.7%), and invasive or uncomfortable policies or procedures (23.3%)” (Bailey 2024).

Having separate trans and gender-diverse leagues is not viable, as they would only include 1-2% of the population. There are open-gender sports, and some growing fast, but most sport, especially top-level, is organised as “men’s” and “women’s”. Trans people should not be segregated out of it.

Some people argue that trans girls and women pose a physical danger to other females even in school sport, because they are bigger and taller. But, in Australia for example, girls of Pacific Islander background are much bigger and taller, on average, than those of Vietnamese background. No harm has come from school sport not being ethnically segregated.

In school, community, and recreational sports, as distinct from elite sport, the answer is simple: let all trans women on gender affirming hormone treatments (GAHT) participate, and also trans girls who will not be on GAHT because access requires a certain age. A recent Californian high-school contest calmed “cis exclusion” fears by saying that where a trans girl won a gold medal (as one did), a second gold medal would go to the cis runner-up. That brought no complaints from either trans or cis competitors, and maybe could help towards a happy compromise.

Crossover

There is crossover with discussions about women’s sports and intersex people, who, unlike trans women, have had élite successes. There are some overlapping issues (e.g. how male-typical testosterone levels in puberty affect physical development), and both discussions echo older comments on lesbians in sport — for example tennis champion Amelie Mauresmo received scornful comments in the early 2000s from Martina Hingis, who called her “half a man”, and Lindsay Davenport claimed she played like a man. Negative attitudes draw on the long history of denigrating female athletes as being too masculine. But intersex participation is a distinct discussion from trans participation, and one I won’t cover here.

What about élite sport? There is a gap between best-male and best-female performances in almost all sports. The gap narrowed as women’s sport participation increased, but has levelled off at about 10% (less time, greater distance, etc.) in many sports. So, the argument goes, unless athletes who have gone through male puberty are excluded from high-stakes competitions, they will scoop all the prizes.

It cannot be the chief concern of socialists to advise on the running of big-money sport, which in a socialist society would fade relative to everyday participatory sport. But almost everyone agrees that high-level competitors must have been on GAHT for a minimum period, with some medical verification. (For élite sport there are already medical verifications, e.g. “anti-doping”. Rules may vary across sports, and there may be outright exceptions, e.g. for darts, where there is also a “mixed” category in which cis women compete relatively equally with cis men).

Feared

With that proviso, the feared consequences have not arrived since 1977, despite trans women being allowed to participate. There have been no trans women winners at top level, let alone the 1% or so of winners you would expect from an even field. New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard in Tokyo 2021 was the first trans woman to compete in the Olympics, and had little success. No trans woman has won an Olympic medal.

Why? Gender-affirming medical treatment (and being at least partly out of competition during medical transition) brings sport disadvantage. Studies’ findings vary somewhat, but there is much common ground about the science of GAHT and its effect on physical capacity. When trans men go on testosterone GAHT, their muscle mass increases substantially and body fat decreases significantly. When trans women go on feminising GAHT, the opposite happens — muscle mass decreases (around 5% over 12 months) and body fat increases (about 30% over 12 months). Bone structure (e.g. height) doesn’t change (Zwickl 2024).

‘ Values for strength, [lean body mass] and muscle area in trans women remain above those of cisgender women, even after 36 months of hormone therapy” (Harper 2021). But there is no sport where success is determined only by muscle mass. In overall physical and athletic performance, trans women at four years past GAHT generally show no advantage on average over cis women in performance metrics. Some small advantages appear to persist in strength measures — things like grip strength and push ups. Some studies show worse athletic performance in other aspects e.g. lung function, efficiency of breathing, and fitness. “In short: any advantage that exists [for overall performance in a sport] is likely to be small, context-specific, and not universal.” (Zwickl 2024).

The most controversial trans woman in sport recently has been Lia Thomas. She was born in 1999 and began GAHT in 2019. She was a highly competitive swimmer in male sport prior to transition, but not a top winner. She lost muscle mass and strength through GAHT. Her time for the 500-yard freestyle became over 15 seconds slower than her previous personal bests. She ranked higher in women’s competitions than previously in men’s, but won few competitions and set no record times. However, in 2022 she was banned from participating.

She seems to have done better than most trans women in the effect on her sport performance of her gender transition. That falls short of proving that trans women have a clear general advantage over other women because of having gone through male puberty.

In school, community and recreational sport, trans people face systematic disadvantage — barriers to participation which harm their physical and mental health. There is no risk that more trans people participating will “sweep the board” and push out cis girls and women. Trans girls and women should have full access.