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ABSTRACT
World Rugby (WR) announced in 2020 that transwomen should not be competing at the elite level because of safety and fairness concerns. WR and Jon Pike, a philosopher of sport advising them, adopted a lexical approach to get a grip on the three values in play: safety, fairness, and inclusion. Previously, governing bodies tried to balance these competing values. Michael Burke recently published a paper taking aim at Pike’s lexical approach.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank both reviewers: one for helpful comments, the other for providing considerable resistance. I am also grateful to the editor for very perceptive insights.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. I will not expand on this here, but see Imbrišević (Citation2022).
2. Burke spells this as two words, the adjective ‘trans’ modifying the noun ‘woman’. This implies that transwomen are women in all relevant respects, no different from ‘young women’, ‘happy women’, ‘tall women’ or ‘French women’. And if that is the case, then all discussion about inclusion/exclusion would be moot. But this is the point of contention: where do transwomen athletes belong? For this reason, I prefer to use the compound noun: ‘transwoman’. I have similar reservations about Burke’s use of the terms ‘cis women’ and ‘designated male/female at birth’. I don’t find Burke’s conjoining phrase ‘sex/gender’ helpful in the sports context, because especially here we need to distinguish sex from gender.
3. One year later (September 2021) the UK Sports Councils came to the same conclusion: ‘for many sports, the inclusion of transgender people, fairness and safety cannot co-exist in a single competitive model’. And they also recommend an Open category for transwomen.
4. Note that Burke doesn’t spell out what his conception of radical feminism is.
5. The fact that these exemptions are often not invoked has to do with ignorance, misinformation about the law—and fear of being branded ‘transphobic’.
6. Such considerations would fit in with Pike’s concentric circles.
7. A reviewer pointed out that taking cross-sex hormones affects the performance of transwomen and is a voluntary act. Female players, however, are more prone to neck injuries because of the physiological differences in neck musculature between males and females.
8. One could frame the IOC requirements differently: they are an attempt to adapt the male bodies of transwomen to the ‘standard’ body of females. The rationale would be that the sex categories presuppose having certain body-types. I hope that Jim Parry will eventually publish his paper on ‘The Standard Body in Sport’.
9. See the latest announcement from World Triathlon: https://www.triathlon.org/news/article/world_triathlon_executive_board_approves_transgender_policy.
10. Those who have been on the treatment will likely continue to do so to help their transition.
11. If the numbers of trans players go up (there is currently an explosion of young people who identify as trans in Western countries), then we might witness the introduction of ‘trans categories’.
12. On the distinction between ‘competitive advantages’ and ‘category advantages’ see Parry and Martínková (Citation2021).
13. If we had transwomen players on most teams (i.e. if it became the norm), and if female players were aware of the increased risk this poses, then, and only then, would a novice player’s consent encompass this increased risk.
14. And Burke is aware of this problem—see his endnote 8: ‘suggesting different rules for women’s rugby is not without issue. Ezzell’s research of women players in the US College system suggests that these players see the lack of rule-based distinctions between the men’s and women’s game as a ‘source of pride’.
15. It is also possible that we could have an ‘inequitable’ distribution of transwomen during a match. One side could have three or more trans players and the other none. This would, of course amplify the risk of injury for the female-only team. As a result, the existing unfairness due to trans-inclusion, which is based on male physiological advantages, is exacerbated when an action by one or more transwomen results in injuries to opposing female players. Their performance for the rest of the game might suffer, or worse, they may have to go off. Here we can see how the increased risk of injury can also affect fairness in a match.
16. I believe Burke misinterprets Francis, but I will not pursue this here.
18. Talia Mae Bettcher (Citation2017, 9), a trans philosopher, warns: ‘in blending together multiple forms of gender-based oppression under a common umbrella, distinctive forms of gender-based oppression are erased. Indeed, if not handled with delicacy, such a move could lead to the reduction of trans oppression to the oppression of women’.
19. Because they are perceived to be female.
20. On ‘Sex and gender-based discrimination exclusively suffered by women’, see Price (Citation2020, 1553f.), also Adichie (Citation2017).
21. The mitigation of physiological differences required by the IOC (and other NGB) since 2004, is proof that transwomen do not meet the eligibility criteria for the female category outright. The reversal of recent policies of trans-inclusion in other sports proves my point.
22. And Burke (2022: 12) is aware of the scarce benefits in women’s sport, in comparison to men’s sport.
23. Note that Dworkin was in favour of including transsexuals into feminism, but we don’t know how she would view the current phenomenon of transgenderism.
24. As I said before, changing the eligibility criteria to include transwomen was a mistake, resting on confusion.
25. They believe that transwomen are biological males and/or that a change of gender would make them into transwomen, rather than into women (see Germain Greer Citation2015 or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Citation2017).
26. Trans athletes and intersex athletes (better: people with DSDs) are often thrown together by supporters of trans-inclusion, but these are two fundamentally different issues, which deserve separate treatments.
30. It isn’t clear to me why we cannot live with ‘infighting’. People often reasonably disagree and there is nothing wrong with that. Uniformity of opinion is the death of knowledge and progress, as J.S. Mill reminded us.
31. Confusingly, this suggests that Burke subscribes to this view (transwomen are real women) after all.
32. See Shulamith Firestone (Citation2003 [1970], 11): ‘[T]he end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally’.
33. This is unlikely, see Coleman and Shreve (Citation2018). We would also need to look into the problem of ‘tanking’. It is odd that Laurel Hubbard failed in all three attempts to do a lift at the Tokyo Olympics. It has also been suggested that the swimmer Lia Thomas likely underperformed in some events (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10531049/How-trans-swimmer-Lia-Thomas-intentionally-suppresses-performance-pool.html).