In response to the heated debate over transgender inclusion in athletics, researchers at one university have proposed a solution that could quickly turn the world of amateur and professional sports upside down.
A group of bioethics professors at the University of Otago in New Zealand have published a new opinion piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics that calls on sporting organizations to completely abolish the current system of separate male and female sporting competitions, and replace it with a single genderless system that would be more inclusive of transgender individuals.
In their article, the researchers complain that cisgender woman have long been the subject of discrimination in sports, as there has not yet been a single gender class that allows them to compete against other athletes in a fair manner. The researchers go on to identify current gender norms of separate male and female sporting events as one main reason for the lack of transgender inclusion, and call for the abolition of gender binary sports.
“It is important to both extend and celebrate diversity, while maintaining fairness for cis-women in sport,” the professors wrote. “To be simultaneously inclusive and fair at the elite level the male/ female binary must be discarded in favour of a more nuanced approach. We conclude that the gender binary in sport has perhaps had its day.”
In a separate analysis of the researchers’ opinion piece, Michael Cook of the bioethics news outlet BioEdge suggests that in addition to establishing a single genderless sporting organization, sporting officials could also create a type of “handicap system,” similar to the current system used in amateur golf competitions. Cook suggests that potential athletes could be granted a handicap score based on socioeconomic status and current self-identified gender identity, and could even go as far as to measure an athlete’s testosterone and blood hemoglobin levels as part of a physiology handicap.
While current guidelines for appropriate human physiology in sporting competitions are largely related to bans on the use of illegal performance enhancing drugs, there have been previous discussions over whether or not certain athletes have an unfair advantage due to certain physiological or physical factors that arise which athletes can not control.
John Patrick (@john_pat_rick) is a graduate of Canisius College and Georgia Southern University. He interned for Red Alert Politics during the summer of 2012 and has continued to contribute regularly.
