Sex and Sports
by Daniel A. Kaufman, The Electric Agora:
The politics swirling around the question of gender identity are developing so quickly and furiously, both in the US and the UK, that it is difficult to keep track, but my interest here is the current brouhaha over Rachel McKinnon’s gold medal win in the UCI Masters Track World Championship and the questions it raises about women’s sports. (McKinnon is a trans-woman.) In particular, I’m interested in an argument that McKinnon has made, in response to those who have deemed her victory unfair. (McKinnon also has hurled accusations of bigotry and “transphobia,” to which I will pay no attention, given that they are dialectically irrelevant.) That argument, roughly, is as follows:
To suggest that there is something unfair about biological males, who identify as women, competing in women’s sports, because as biological males, they enjoy any number of physical advantages over their female counterparts, would force us also to deem it unfair for females who have greater natural height, strength, endurance, etc. to compete with other females, which is obviously absurd. (McKinnon also points out that she has lost races to female cyclists in the past.) (1)
As I said, I’m not really interested in the particulars of McKinnon’s case (or even in the question of trans-people in sports), but in the implications of the argument she has made with respect to it. Specifically, I don’t see how McKinnon’s argument is not effectively a case against sports being sex-segregated at all. That is, I don’t see how the argument that invokes natural advantages/disadvantages within a sex as a relevant analogy to natural advantages/disadvantages between sexes can only apply to trans people. If the argument is a reason to think that Rachel McKinnon should be able to compete against female cyclists, then I don’t see why it isn’t also a reason to think that Rafael Nadal should be able to compete against female tennis players. McKinnon’s argument that one should limit this to trans-women, because they are women – she points out that all of her legal documents have her down as a woman – is easily ignored, insofar as sports are sex-segregated, not gender-segregated. And the argument that trans athletes are a special case, because the hormone treatment they receive renders them weaker/stronger than their non-trans sex-counterparts also seems unavailable, given the argument we have been discussing. (It is worth noting that McKinnon opposes testosterone limits on trans-women athletes. (2))
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
