It’s not often that this column points to another column as its subject matter. But I’ve just read an opinion piece by swimmer and journalist Diana Nyad that was such a breath of fresh air — on a usually overheated topic — that I can’t resist pointing it out.
Nyad’s piece in the Washington Post last week was titled “Celebrate trans athletes. But give cisgender women a fair shot at victory.”
Diana Nyad is an athlete herself — a long-distance swimmer — as well as a journalist. She is the first and only person so far to swim from Cuba to Florida without the aid of a shark cage. It was her fifth try and took her 27 and 1/2 hours. In previous years, she swam across the Bay of Naples and around the island of Manhattan.
I always thought she was an Olympic swimmer as well, and she had trained to be, with the 1968 Summer Games as her goal, but a bout of endocarditis put an end to that particular dream.
But perhaps thanks to her achievements as both athlete and journalist, Nyad manages to cut through a lot of fog:
“To be clear,” she writes, “trans women are women. Full stop.” But she goes on: “We must also be clear that trans women who have gone through male puberty acquire physical advantages female puberty does not provide.”
Nyad is specific:
“When we compare elite men’s achievement standards to women’s, the gap in most sports is a huge 10 to 12 percent. It’s testosterone that drives that performance gap.” That’s why there are separate categories for men and women in the first place, and endless testing for the substance in women athletes.
“But hormones,” she says, “aren’t the only factor….More red blood cells store and use oxygen more efficiently. Wider shoulders mean a leverage advantage and narrower hips make for more efficient movement dynamics. Longer legs and arms, bigger hands and feet, can more easily handle a ball or cover a field.”
What’s more, these advantages remain even if the person who achieved them then decides to transition:
“A transgender woman who has transitioned from a testosterone-driven to an estrogen-driven system loses speed and muscle mass, yes, but puberty’s ‘legacy advantages’ do not change…the physical disparity remains too great for true equal performance potential.”
In other words, those longer bones are there to stay.
I have wondered about these issues for years ever since I read about the South African runner Caster Semenya, who was raised and always thought of herself as a girl and ran in women’s events, winning many. But eventually she was challenged on the basis that testing revealed she is intersex, with both an X and a Y chromosome, and so has testosterone levels naturally occurring in her body that are higher than whatever “normal” would be for females.
What’s the girl to do? In Caster’s case she was “born this way;” she didn’t make herself intersex. Yet at one point the IAAF (International Amateur Athletic Federation) even required her to take hormones to lower her body’s testosterone level — for years! — which made her sick and which feels, to me at least, like a crime.
Another similar athlete of international fame is a runner from India named Dutee Chand.
How can we strike a balance that is fair to such athletes, yet also fair to everyone competing against them? There are many opinions on this subject. American soccer star Megan Rapinoe was especially eloquent (also in the Washington Post), advocating for the rights of all trans athletes to enjoy sport:
“Sports taught me so much more than is seen on the field,” she wrote, “and brought me so much joy. Every child deserves to have that experience.”
But Rapinoe has no answer for the plain old XX females who must compete against these folks.
I suspect part of the reason is that Rapinoe’s sport, soccer, is a team enterprise; and a women’s team with one or two members who are trans, or maybe intersex, is probably no more unfair to compete against than would be a high school team which just happened to include the young Shaquille O’Neal or David Beckham or Megan Rapinoe.
It’s different when every runner or swimmer individually is up against every other runner or swimmer in the world.
This is where Nyad spoke the most sense to me. She suggests the creation of a third classification for athletes: “Open: Cisgender, transgender, intersex — all are welcome.”
This is brilliant. It may not solve every problem, but it’s the best idea I’ve come across yet, and I want to give Diana Nyad the credit.
A third category is something the sports world, even the Olympic Committee, can figure out.
