How sexism and transphobia stop cis women from competing in sports
This is madness. Two of the world’s three fastest women’s 400m sprinters has been banned from the Olympics because of high testosterone levels.
When are people going to understand that all people are different and that it is this variation that makes life, including sports, a rich and meaningful experience?
Sports will never be completely “fair” in the sense that all are competing on completely equal terms. To achieve that they would all have to be of equal height and weight, having the same muscle mass and the same stamina, at which point all sports events would become boring as heaven.
Two of the world’s three fastest women’s 400m sprinters this year were ruled ineligible to run the event at the Olympics due to a rule capping testosterone levels in women’s events from the 400m through the mile, according to their National Olympic Committee.
Namibians Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi, both 18, “have a natural high testosterone level” after undergoing medical tests for athletes with differences of sexual development, according to the Namibia Olympic Committee.
“According to the rules of World Athletics, this means that they are not eligible to participate in events from 400m to 1600m,” according to the committee. …
It’s the same rule that affected all three Rio Olympic 800m medalists — Caster Semenya of South Africa, Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi and Margaret Wambui of Kenya — and Niger’s Aminatou Seyni, who was the world’s third-fastest 400m runner in 2019 before moving to the 200m for that year’s world championships.
Some would probably say that this is not about transphobia, but about testosterone-levels only. But it cannot be a coincidence that these policies are implemented at the same time that activists try to ban transgender women (most of whom have lower levels of T) from sports. They use the exact same arguments and the goal is the same: To ensure that all women, cis or trans, live up to the ideals of the gender police.
Jaimie Schultz writes in Sports in Society:
“Since the 1930s, sports administrators have insisted on various mechanisms to assess ‘femaleness’ for the purpose of competition in women’s sport. Most recently, the criterion has turned to testosterone. Specifically, if a woman naturally produces testosterone that registers in what sport authorities consider an ‘unnatural’ range, she must suppress that testosterone to compete in women’s events. The testosterone threshold will undoubtedly expand to include cis, intersex, and trans sportswomen, despite their respective and significant differences.
Taken together, these types of regulations are confusing and contradictory, quite possibly sexist, and most assuredly ‘wicked’, as Rittel and Webber formulated with regard to ‘wicked problems’. A historical analysis of the regulations for ‘femaleness’ in sport, contextualized with other testosterone-related policies, reveals the impossibility of sex determination, the faulty assertion that testosterone is a ‘male hormone’, and the prioritization of sporting rights over human rights.”
It is time to stop policing the bodies of women, whether they are cis or trans. This is what the unholy alliance between “gender critical feminists” and the traditionalist patriarchs leads to. Note also that most of these women are Black. Racism, misogyny and transphobia go hand in hand.
For more info:
- Science Daily: “Testosterone limits for female athletes based on ‘flawed’ research”
- Severine Lamon: “Do naturally high testosterone levels equal stronger female athletic performance? Not necessarily”
- Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, Katrina Karkazis in Scientific American: “Myths about Testosterone”
- Jaimie Schultz: “Good enough? The ‘wicked’ use of testosterone for defining femaleness in women’s sport”
Top photo of Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi (Instagram @christine.mboma and @beatrice_masilingi)
Originally published at https://trans-express.lgbt.
