What Happens When the Trans Movement Meets Sports?

That was in 2014. Things have not grown simpler in the past five years.

In June, the Connecticut state championships for girls’ track and field were dominated by Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood. Miller, who competed with the boys’ team in the winter indoor season, won the 100-meter and 200-meter dash, setting records in both races; Yearwood took second in the 100-meter. Both are what are conventionally called “trans women,” which is to say, biologically male persons who present themselves socially as women and who wish to live as women. In accordance with state law, the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference permits student athletes to compete with whichever sex they identify with. Parents and students have petitioned to change that policy, but CIAC insists that state law would have to change first. And that isn’t going to happen.

The stories are repeated throughout the women’s sports world. In New Zealand in 2017, 39-year-old Laurel (formerly Gavin) Hubbard set four national records in women’s weightlifting after years competing in the sport as a man. Fifty-year-old Gabriella (Robert) Ludwig, who stands 6-feet-6 and weighs 220 pounds, joined the girls basketball team at Mission College. Cycling, volleyball, marathons, softball—all have seen the emergence of dominant trans athletes, smashing records and often leaving the female competition far behind.

This isn’t new. The “Barr body test”—an examination of sex at the chromosomal level—was instituted in the 1970s in response to the professional tennis career of Renée Richards (formerly Richard Raskind) who had been ranked No. 13 in the nation in men’s 35-and-over tennis, began competing in women’s tennis after undergoing a sex-change operation (the preferred contemporary nomenclature is “gender-confirmation” therapy) in 1975. Richards refused to take the Barr body test and, after being excluded from the U.S. Open and Wimbledon, filed a discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Tennis Association. That was the end of the chromosome test.

Judge Alfred M. Ascione’s opinion in the case is barking mad, entertaining reading, and an excellent foretelling of the Orwellian newspeak regime to come: “When an individual such as plaintiff, a successful physician, a husband and father, finds it necessary for his own mental sanity to undergo a sex reassignment, the unfounded fears and misconceptions of defendants must give way to the overwhelming medical evidence that this person is now female.”

Stop and appreciate that the clause “give way to overwhelming medical evidence that this person is now female” appears in a judicial order suppressing the overwhelming medical evidence that this person is male.

If Judge Ascione had written that opinion today, trans activists would be calling for his head for the pronoun in “his own mental sanity.” Trans activists are fanatical about that sort of thing: A few of them are calling for the professional head of my old friend Jeffrey Goldberg on the grounds that the Atlantic “misgendered” a trans person on its cover in a recent story about a girl who thought she was trans but changed her mind—thankfully, her parents had delayed the double mastectomy she’d demanded.

And that’s fitting, in a way: Language is mostly what this is about.

(Mostly.)

Even among nonconforming troublemakers such as myself, there is not much doubt that what the DSM now calls “gender dysphoria” refers to something real and that it is the source of terrible torment and misery to the men and women afflicted by it. Outside of a few saints and mystics who have transcended this poor potsherd and learned to regard the merely corporeal with contempt or indifference, to be so radically alienated from one’s own body and from the social and sexual realities attached to it must be something close to intolerable.

Therapy would seem to be the obvious course, the main bone of contention being that a few of us old reactionaries have our doubts that the elective amputation of healthy members and organs ought to be regarded as therapeutic by people who are not mad. The de-emphasis on genital surgery, “passing,” and secondary sexual characteristics among some younger trans people and the “gender nonconforming” is in its way encouraging: Social tolerance for people who are more comfortable with the dress, grooming, or mannerisms of the opposite sex is a relatively achievable goal in a liberal society such as ours. Social tolerance for the surgical mutilation of children is a harder sell.

But what is at work here is superstition—sympathetic magic, to be precise, which James George Frazer describes this way: “The magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it.”

Sympathetic magic, being a superstition, does not work, but the true believer sees in that only the need for escalation. If dressing men as women does not work, then what’s called for is surgically and hormonally manipulating their bodies until they more closely resemble those of women; when that does not work, what’s called for is a new set of social norms in which given names and legal names are suppressed and stricken from the public record. (Laverne Cox’s given name, Roderick, has been scrupulously scrubbed from Wikipedia, as have the names of Fallon Fox and many other prominent trans people; the editing record of the entry currently labeled “Chelsea Manning” is interesting to read.)

When that doesn’t work . . . etc., until we reach the current point of howling mobs calling for the criminalization of failure to conform to the mandatory etiquette. What’s next is anybody’s guess.

What’s next for sports will be interesting, too. When the Barr body test was abandoned, attention was turned to testosterone levels, which has proved a tricky question. When organizations such as the International Association of Athletic Federations started establishing rules about testosterone levels, they ran up against problems of ordinary natural variability as well as problems associated with rare congenital conditions.

Katrina Karkazis, a bioethicist, told NPR that these rules ought to be regarded as racist. “It’s a policy that primarily affects black and brown women from the global South,” she said. One particular woman, especially: Caster Semenya, a South African track star who won a gold medal at the 2016 Olympics. Semenya was subjected to sex testing by sports authorities, who pronounced themselves satisfied that Semenya is female. Leaked documents suggest that Semenya has intersex characteristics that are congenital rather than surgical in nature. The Indian athlete Santhi Soundarajan was stripped of a silver medal after a similar sex test.

The variable in that case is androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which a fetus with XY chromosomes—a genetically male fetus—fails to respond to the hormonal wash that typically brings out the male genital characteristics in the developing child. That can manifest itself in many ways, from the relatively mild to the severe.

In sport, as in jurisprudence, hard cases make bad law. And using testosterone as a stand-in for biological sex brings up some interesting questions. Some studies have suggested that young, healthy African-American men have significantly higher testosterone levels than young, healthy, white American men. (Other studies have produced different results.) Those studies were conducted in the interest of cancer research (African-Americans have far higher rates of prostate cancer) but of course are of interest in the sports world, too. The study of group variation is a fraught business—and one that reliably brings out more than its share of quacks and cranks—but, at the same time, South Korea’s national basketball team, once dominant in Asian play, has never placed higher than eighth at the Olympics and has not qualified to play in the Olympics in the 21^st century. To observe that the median height of a South Korean (5’9”) is less than the median height of a Netherlander (6’1”) is ordinarily uncontroversial. But other measurements come with more baggage attached.

More precise language might be of some help here. The word “gender” in its modern sense came into wide usage only in the 1970s, though it must have been used often enough before that for Henry Fowler to scoff at it as a “blunder” as early as 1926. “Gender” has largely supplanted “sex” as the word to describe the differences between men and women, and one suspects that this is not by accident. A great deal of the feminist project has been dedicated to discounting the relevance of biological differences between men and women (sex) and emphasizing social differences (gender).

And here the modern nomenclature may actually represent an improvement in the sense that “transgender” is probably preferable to the old and dusty “transsexual” inasmuch as social presentation is mutable in a way that chromosomes are not, at least with current technology. Sports, it would seem, is a realm in which the relevant criterion is “sex” rather than “gender.”

But to make that simple distinction would challenge the sympathetic magic that dominates the thinking and discourse of the trans-activist world. In their view, the term “trans woman” is something like the term “blonde woman,” i.e. a description of some ordinary variable associated with women at large. The competing view is that “trans woman” describes a man with certain characteristics. Much of the discourse surrounding trans issues, especially the taboos surrounding the use of unwelcome pronouns and the insistence upon the use of such terms as “trans man” and “trans woman” as conversational defaults, is designed to make such distinctions literally unspeakable.

After being dismantled by Fallon Fox, Tamikka Brents had this to say about the experience of fighting a trans woman: “I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right.”

There are those who couldn’t recognize the truth if it bit them on the ass. But some of them recognize the truth when it punches them in the face.