It was only appropriate that the sport of swimming banned transgender women on this week of the 50th anniversary celebration of Title IX — the landmark legislation that opened the door for female athletes to have the same rights as their male counterparts.
After all, women’s rights is what this issue should have been about from the beginning before it was allowed to be hijacked by the political right and the woke left; before it became a high-profile battle between right-wing politicians such as Gov. Ron DeSantis who pander to their bases and left-wing liberals at the ACLU who tell us to ignore biology and science in the name of unregulated inclusion.
Caught in the middle were those trailblazers who have spent their entire lives fighting the good fight for women’s rights in the athletic arena: women such as tennis legend Martina Navratilova; legendary swimmer and Olympic Hall-of-Famer Donna de Varona, who co-founded the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF) in 1974 for the purpose of making sure female athletes were treated fairly and equitably; and iconic former University of Texas women’s athletics director Donna Lopiano, a pioneer in the early days of Title IX.
Then there is Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who I wrote about a couple of months ago. Using her Duke law degree, she has long been one of the nation’s foremost legal advocates for women’s sports. She’s a three-time Olympic gold medalist in swimming and one of the nation’s leading Title IX attorneys. As a rape victim, Hogshead-Makar was pushing the U.S. Olympic Committee to protect its athletes from sexual abuse long before Dr. Larry Nassar’s heinous crimes surfaced. Her non-profit organization, Champion Women, provides legal advocacy for girls and women athletes who have been abused, harassed or minimized in any way.
Hogshead-Makar has been one of the key figures in the decision earlier this week by FINA — swimming’s international governing body — to essentially ban transgender women from competing against biological women in elite-level swimming competitions. This comes in the wake of Lia Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer who made history in March as the first transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming championship in the 500-yard freestyle.
“Too many articles describe FINA’s decision as doing something bad or harmful to transgender people,” Hogshead-Makar says. “I think FINA’s decision is another step in the evolution of giving women equal opportunities in sports.”
It should be noted that FINA’s new 24-page policy also includes proposals for a new “open competition” category to accommodate transgender women who want to compete although it won’t be in the main women’s division. There is one extremely unlikely exception: transgender swimmers who transition before they reach puberty will be allowed to compete against biological women.
Why puberty?
Because that’s when biological boys get a massive influx of natural testosterone that girls don’t get. As I’ve written before, research tells us that post-puberty males, depending on the sport, have about a 10-to-20 percent advantage on females because of this inpouring of natural testosterone. In sports where strength and explosive power (weightlifting, sprinting, etc.) are key factors, the advantage can be up to 50 percent.
The only regulations the NCAA and International Olympic Committee could come up with was to arbitrarily mandate that transgender women undergo hormone-suppressing treatments for one year before competing. However, even those organizations have admitted such a mandate is random and is not really based on any science. Many notable physiologists, including internationally recognized sports scientist and physiologist Dr. Ross Tucker, say the evidence is clear that “legacy” advantages of male puberty remain long after one year.
“Lia Thomas is the manifestation of the scientific evidence,” Tucker told the New York Times. “The reduction in testosterone did not remove her biological advantage.”
Common sense tells us that, of course, it’s this post-puberty testosterone that gives biological men, by most athletic measurables, more speed, power and strength than biological women, but FINA officials did not leave it up to common sense. They did it the right way. They commissioned a working group with three components — an athlete group, a science and medicine group and a legal and human-rights group — to take a deep dive into the issue.
It was the scientific and medicine group — composed of “independent experts in the fields of physiology, endocrinology, and human performance, including specialists in sex differences in human performance and in transgender medicine” — that reportedly had the most impact on the transgender ban overwhelmingly getting 85 percent of the vote.
Obviously, nobody with any compassion wants to see transgender women excluded from competing, which is why we should all applaud FINA for moving forward and coming up with an alternative category to include transgender athletes.
But make no mistake about it, we should also applaud FINA for tackling this politically volatile issue and protecting the sanctity of women’s sports.
FINA’s ruling was about biology, not bigotry.
It was obviously spawned by Thomas, who competed on the Penn men’s team for three years before transitioning and setting multiple program records with the women’s team. Before Thomas and the recent influx of other transgender athletes, there was really no urgent need for a decision, but now there is.
“There’s a reason why sports is sexually segregated,” Hogshead-Makar says. “We don’t racially segregate or religiously segregate sports, but we do sexually segregate them. Why? Because it’s needed to give women equal opportunities.”
More than a half-century ago, when Title IX was being debated as a way to outlaw sex-based discrimination at federally funded institutions, there was actually some discussion by the male-dominated sports establishment about having unisex teams for each sport — one basketball team, one swimming team, one track and field team, etc. The cave-man thinking was that if women were good enough to beat out the men and make the unisex team, then they weren’t really being discriminated against, right?
Thankfully, more enlightened thinking prevailed and it was decided that women needed their own teams and own divisions because there are vast physiological differences between biological men and biological women.
On the 50-year anniversary of Title IX, FINA painstakingly and rightfully came to the same conclusion.
