Opinion piece by Doriane Lambelet Coleman

Two dozen U.S. boys under 17 swim faster than Katie Ledecky in her best event.
After an ugly controversy erupted at the Paris Olympics, the critical question in elite women’s sport still needs an answer: Who should get to participate in the female category?
At the Games, two formerly obscure boxers found themselves at the center of a global firestorm over whether genetic tests should bar them from the women’s division, even though the International Olympic Committee required a passport, not testing, to participate. Olympic officials confirmed that the two athletes are not transgender but sidestepped the question whether they have an XY disorder of sexual development, or XY DSD.
However the facts in their cases resolve, it’s clear that sports authorities need to agree to a consistent standard. As a former elite athlete and a consultant to sport governing bodies on their eligibility rules for the female category, I believe that competition in elite women’s sports must be based on sex — not legal or gender identity. This issue, and the related question of participation by trans women athletes, needs to be addressed well before the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, so that we don’t keep making old mistakes.
In 2019, the Court of Arbitration for Sport found a “striking overrepresentation” of athletes with XY DSD on the female podium, going back decades. XY DSDs are male conditions.
Here are a few recent examples just from Olympic podiums in track and field: In Tokyo in 2021, an XY DSD sprinter took silver in the women’s 200 meters. In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, three XY DSD athletes swept the women’s 800-meter podium. In London in 2012, the same athlete who won gold in Rio rose from silver to gold after the winner was caught doping.
To solve the problem, World Athletics and World Aquatics, among others, have established detailed, science-backed rules for participation that rely on genetic and hormonal markers. The controversies of past Games didn’t affect track and field or swimming in Paris.
To understand why this is the right approach, it’s important to go back to basics.
Elite sports exist to identify and showcase the best athletes — male and female — and to produce economic, political, developmental and health-related benefits for stakeholders and society.
Because of biological sex differences in strength, power and endurance, depending on the sport and event there’s a performance gap of 10 to 50 percent between the best males and the best females. Separating athletes in competition on the basis of sex is the only way to account for the female half of the population. No other sorting tool works to achieve this inclusion goal — not height, weight or any other physical characteristic.
To see that this is true, play with a competition results database and look at what happens to female athletes when rankings are combined: by early-to-mid adolescence, female competitors disappear from the upper echelons.
The essential example is Katie Ledecky, who is said to be “better at swimming than anyone is at anything.” She just won an unprecedented fourth straight Olympic gold medal in her best event, the 800-meter freestyle. Her world record time in that event — 8:04.79 — shows up at No. 26 among the best American 15- to 16-year-old boys.
Some leading trans advocates reject the relationship between biology and performance, arguing that the explanations are sociological: Female athletes have succumbed to gender stereotypes, or are under-resourced, or are just “slower” — meaning not as good.
They’re right that sexism remains a problem in sports as in life, but they’re wrong that biology isn’t the primary driver of the performance gap. As Serena Williams famously said, “Andy Murray would beat me 6-0, 6-0.” Beyond the disrespect embedded in their arguments — often levied against the best female athletes on the planet — people who understand sports know that Williams in her prime couldn’t beat Murray in his regardless of how she was raised, supported or trained.
Activists also question whether trans women and XY DSD athletes are comparable to cisgender males. For example, Athlete Ally, an LGBTQ+ athletic advocacy group, has said: “There is no evidence at all that the average trans woman is any bigger, stronger or faster than the average cisgender woman.” Others, such as triathlete Chris Mosier, go further, claiming that “recent evidence overwhelmingly shows trans athletes do not have an advantage simply because they are trans.”
These statements mischaracterize the relevant evidence.
If they haven’t had female gender-affirming medical treatment, trans women athletes and XY DSD athletes come into the arena with the male sex-typical traits that are well-established athletic advantages: testes that produce testosterone in the distinct male range, androgen receptors that have no trouble reading testosterone and bodies that are masculinized through the phases of sexual development in the ways that matter for sport.
The evidence also shows that trans women who are competitive athletes and who’ve taken feminizing hormones see a drop in performance — more in events centered on endurance and less in those centered on power and strength — but the drop doesn’t eliminate their male advantage.
The evidence shows, for example, that after almost three years on hormones, swimmer Lia Thomas, who is a trans woman, retained 46 percent of the standard male advantage in her best post-transition event, one in which the margin of victory at elite level is often less than 1 percent. That 46 percent advantage, available to her because of her natal sex, is why she went from 65th in the collegiate male rankings to first in the collegiate female rankings.

Thomas isn’t an aberration: Where before-and-after data are available on different athletes, run the math and you find a similar pattern.
There’s also lots of evidence explaining why feminizing hormone therapy doesn’t fully mitigate male advantage, especially in athletes. Mainly, it’s that structures throughout the body such as bones and airways don’t change, and trained muscle remembers.
Scientists and trans advocates aren’t wrong to be interested in the physiological shifts that do take place. But these changes don’t alter the big picture because in sports, performance is about the whole body.
Even a trans girl who doesn’t experience male puberty holds athletic advantages from experiencing male sexual development in childhood. The 3-to-5 percent prepubertal performance gap is well documented.
Plus, she’ll never experience the athletic disadvantages associated with being female: hips that shift down and out and a different hip-to-knee or quadriceps “Q” angle; a performance plateau at sexual maturity and monthly cycles that — beyond menstruation itself — result in predictable periods of depleted energy; ligament laxity and mood disturbance; and sometimes there’s pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding.
As Team USA’s Elle Purrier St. Pierre put it at the Olympic trials in June, in the midst of her first postpartum period — her son had been born a year ago — “Women are awesome!” because of and despite sex differences.
Pretending biology isn’t what it is gaslights female athletes. It also undermines the feminist project that’s key to the female category’s raison d’être.
An essential piece of this project is the commitment federations such as World Athletics have to one-for-one sex equality, meaning equal prize money and an equal number of spots in finals, on podiums and in championship positions for female athletes as for male athletes.
These federations are also committed to growing the commercial value of female athletes and their events. And because they operate across the globe, in many places where sex discrimination — here defined as the subordination of women because they’re female — remains prevalent, they rely on the power of their optics — female-bodied athletes in competition and on the podium — to express female physical strength and encourage the transformation of social norms. For the first time in Paris, for example, the women’s 4×400-meter relay closed out the track and field events and the women’s marathon closed out the Games.

The female podium is a scarce resource that’s been set aside for female athletes precisely because of our distinct female biology. It’s the way we’re included at elite level. It’s also invaluable in its power to promote female winners and inspire others. Putting male-bodied athletes in championship positions, standing over female-bodied athletes — as Thomas did at the NCAA Championships in 2022 — or even excluding female-bodied athletes — as three XY DSD athletes did in the women’s 800-meter race at the Olympics in Rio — is counter programming.
The advocacy community has different commitments. Some just want to ensure that trans and DSD athletes can join the team that matches their legal or gender identity. Others, such as Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, the CEO of Canadian Women and Sport, go further: “Until the sports system … moves beyond having these two categories — male and female — in sport, women’s sport is going to be the best place, we believe, for transgender girls and women to play.”
This won’t work for most elite female athletes who are in the game to win, not just to participate. They have no interest in eligibility rules that dilute their opportunities and risk the future of the institution.
It won’t work for supportive governing bodies either. Their trajectory has them increasing, not decreasing, the commitment to female athletes and women’s sports. As Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, explained in relation to his federation’s mission, “It is absolutely vital that we protect, we defend, we preserve the female category.”
Ultimately, there’s always a place in elite sports for athletes who qualify as elite according to the physical taxonomies that apply to everyone: age, sex, skill and sometimes weight. No one is excluded who belongs according to these universal criteria.
Beyond this, progressive federations are working to ensure that gender-diverse athletes aren’t only eligible for, but also welcome in, their sex class. There’s more work to do on this score in men’s sports, which don’t have the same history as women’s sports of welcoming gender diversity in their ranks, but that’s also changing with the times. Some federations are even testing out new “open” or “nonbinary” categories — although that’s often over the objection of activists who see the female category as “the best place” for all gender-diverse athletes.
Given institutional commitments to the female category, these federations are doing what they can also to support gender-diverse athletes. Time is short for others, including the IOC, to join them.
Doriane Lambelet Coleman is the Thomas L. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke University. Her new book is “On Sex and Gender: A Commonsense Approach.”
Source: The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/16/womens-sports-transgender-dsd-olympics