Trans People and Sports: Everything You Need to Know

Image by Matthew Warren from Pixabay

I have been writing about transgender people and issues for over twenty years now. For most of that time, I never felt the need to pen a piece about trans athletes, in part, because it’s fairly straightforward. Most of the advantages that men have in sports stem from having higher androgen levels than women, which leads to increases in muscle mass and hemoglobin. This is why taking “steroids” (read: synthetic variants of testosterone) is banned in most sports. Trans women who are on gender-affirming hormone therapy tend to have female-typical levels of androgens and lose said muscle mass and hemoglobin accordingly. Sports organizations such as the IOC (International Olympic Committee), NCAA, and so on, have long had policies in place to monitor trans women’s androgen levels in order for them to be allowed to compete in women’s events.

Of course, one can always split hairs and/or speculate about other potential advantages (addressed below). But the fact that no trans woman has ever dominated in any women’s sports league or category shows that we are not “taking over” or “destroying” women’s sports.

So you may be thinking: If that’s really the case, then why do I keep seeing all these political ads and social media posts about trans athletes? Well that, my friend, is what we call manufactured controversy.

Here’s the real story: Anti-trans activists have been trying to roll back trans rights and trans people’s participation in the public sphere for many years now. They’ve tried to ban us from using public restrooms, accessing trans-related healthcare, and so on. Initially, these attempts largely failed because of how blatantly unjust they are. Then around 2020–2022, anti-trans activists finally found a wedge issue that began working for them: trans people and women’s sports.

Why did this issue resonate with the general public in a way that previous attempts did not? It’s likely due to a combination of factors. First, outside of “gender critical”/TERF circles, most people do not view trans-inclusion as negatively impacting or impinging upon the lives of cis women. However, in sports, where individuals directly compete against one another, the idea of someone who “used to be a man” being included in the women’s category is more likely to strike some people as unfair, especially for those who are unaware of the aforementioned effects of hormone therapy.

Second, the topic of sports may conjure up thoughts about locker rooms. Straight people have long expressed baseless fears about sharing locker rooms with lesbian, gay, and bisexual athletes, so it’s not surprising that similar fears are now being projected onto trans athletes. In a separate essay, I review the evidence demonstrating that trans people and trans-inclusion policies do not pose any threat to girls and women in sex-segregated spaces.

Third, while healthcare and public restrooms are clear necessities, people tend to view sports as superfluous (dedicated athletes would surely disagree with this). Thus, banning trans people from such events may strike the average cis person as more of a minor inconvenience than a social injustice.

But the thing is, the anti-trans activists pushing these sports bans aren’t actually interested in “protecting women’s sports.” Rather, they are looking to set a precedent. As journalist Katelyn Burns puts it in her recent article on the rash of Republican political ads on this issue:

Characterizing trans girls as boys in a sports context would lead one to characterize them as such in other contexts, too. After all, if trans girls are really boys when they’re playing sports, then they would also be considered boys in the bathroom, boys in medical offices and, thus, denied access to female hormones. If trans girls are boys when they’re playing sports, then trans women should be considered men in all contexts. Contrary to the assertion from conservatives that their aim is to protect the integrity of sports competition, their focus on the trans athlete issue has never really been about fairness. The goal has been to establish a precedent that leads to the complete marginalization of trans women and girls.

As a middle-age trans woman, this is not an issue that personally impacts me. In fact, most trans people I know do not engage in competitive sports. And if you offered the trans community as a whole some kind of deal, where we got to keep our healthcare, legal protections, and our rights to exist and participate freely in society provided that we sacrifice our ability to play sports, many would probably jump at that chance, despite how much it would devastate the trans athletes among us.

But let’s be clear: Nobody is offering such a deal. Trans sports bans are not intended to be some kind of concession or compromise position. Rather, they are a stepping stone toward further bans and restrictions. This is why trans people almost unanimously oppose them. And it’s why you should to.

That’s everything that the average person needs to know about the issue of trans people and sports. So you can stop reading now if you wish.

But of course, some will surely have further questions, concerns, and talking points they wish to assert. So what follows is my attempt to address as many of these ancillary issues as I can, either in my own words or by pointing readers toward articles that more thoroughly consider them. In the final section—“Who Precisely Are We Singling Out and Why?”—I believe I add something new to this conversation that I haven’t seen addressed before.

Research Studies and Reviews on Trans Athletes

Here is a list of research studies and reviews on trans athletes. They generally find that trans women lose the athletic advantages they once had after hormonally transitioning and/or that their current performances are generally aligned with those of comparable cis women.

Harper, Joanna, “Race Times for Transgender Athletes,” Journal of Sporting Cultures and Identities 6, no. 1 (2015): 1-9. https://doi.org/10.18848/2381-6678/CGP/v06i01/54079

The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES), “Transgender Women Athletes and Elite Sport: A Scientific Review” (2022). https://cces.ca/transgender-women-athletes-and-elite-sport-scientific-review

Safer, Joshua D., “Fairness for Transgender People in Sport,” Journal of the Endocrine Society 6, no. 5 (2022): bvac035. https://doi.org/10.1210/jendso/bvac035

Cheung, Ada S., Sav Zwickl, Kirsti Miller, Brendan J. Nolan, Alex Fang Qi Wong, Patrice Jones, and Nir Eynon, “The Impact of Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy on Physical Performance,” The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism 109, no. 2 (2024): e455-e465. https://doi.org/10.1210/clinem/dgad414

Hamilton, Blair, Andrew Brown, Stephanie Montagner-Moraes, Cristina Comeras-Chueca, Peter G. Bush, Fergus M. Guppy, and Yannis P. Pitsiladis, “Strength, Power and Aerobic Capacity of Transgender Athletes: A Cross-Sectional Study,” British Journal of Sports Medicine 58, no. 11 (2024): 586-597. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2023-108029

When people are skeptical about an issue, they will sometimes say “there’s not enough evidence” or “we need more studies before proceeding.” I am all for more research on this, as are most trans athletes, but that’s not a reason to ignore the evidence we’ve accumulated thus far. And if you genuinely do believe that more research is necessary, then you should be very worried about the recent rise of trans sports bans—after all, we cannot compare trans versus cis athletes if the former group is no longer allowed to participate in sports in the first place.

The Impact of Trans Sports Bans

Despite the aforementioned evidence, plus the plain-as-day fact that trans women are not dominating women’s sports (in fact, if anything, trans people are grossly underrepresented in sports), anti-trans campaigns have exerted pressure on governing bodies to further restrict trans people’s participation.

For instance, in 2022, World Aquatics (formerly FINA, which sets the rules for swimming and other water sports) added the requirement that trans women cannot have “experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 or before age 12”; in 2023, World Athletics (formerly the IAAF, which sets the rules for international track and field events) released a similar policy. Given the fact that few trans children have both supportive families and access to gender-affirming care by that age, plus many trans people don’t even become fully aware of their trans identities until adolescence or even adulthood, this rule change essentially bans the vast majority of trans women from ever competing in the women’s category.

On top of this, in the United States, twenty-five states have passed legislation restricting or banning trans people from participating in K–12 and sometimes college sports—the specific details of said laws can be found in this report. Notably, every single one of these states has also passed additional anti-trans laws—in fact, they almost perfectly line up with this map of states that have passed bans on gender-affirming healthcare. This proves my previous point that women’s sports is not a distinct concern but rather part of an overall strategy to usher in laws and policies that roll back trans rights.

It is important to stress that this onslaught of recent policies and laws has not slowed down the outrage over trans athletes—if anything, it has only increased since. Once again, this suggests that said outrage is primarily aimed at trans people’s existence rather than our (now significantly diminished) participation in sports.

There is a human cost to this backlash. I encourage you to read this article about how a campaign targeting a trans high school volleyball player turned her family’s lives upside down. Notably, the girl in question transitioned young and never experienced a “male puberty,” but this didn’t stop her from being demonized by her community, Florida state officials, and the media.

Indeed, most of the aforementioned bans squarely target young children. These aren’t athletes who are competing for gold medals or world records, but simply kids who want to participate with their peers in sporting events. If you enjoyed playing sports when you were a child, just imagine how devastated you might have been if that was suddenly taken away from you.

Illogical and Downright Sexist Trans Sports Bans

While concerns about trans athletes competing in women’s swimming or track and field may seem reasonable on the surface to those unfamiliar with the research, these protests and bans have since expanded to trans women competing in women’s darts, pool, sailing, and even chess. These events don’t require much (if any) physical strength—rather, they rely primarily on intelligence, strategy, and/or technique.

Indeed, the notion that cis women are “naturally inferior” to trans women, or even cis men, in chess or pool seems downright sexist! This is further evidence that trans sports bans have little to do with “protecting women” from “male advantages,” but are primarily about removing trans people from cis people’s purview.

Relying Exclusively on Anecdotal Evidence

Because the research studies are not on their side, and because there is no actual evidence that trans women are “dominating” or “taking over” women’s sports, the anti-trans activists who push this argument rely entirely on anecdotal evidence—this tactic is widely understood to be a logical fallacy.

Specifically, they will point to any instance in which a trans athlete has won, or placed, or even merely participated in an event and cite that as an example or harbinger of women’s sports being destroyed. But they won’t stop there. Many times, they’ll share photos of cis women who just so happen to be bigger or more masculine than their competitors and falsely claim that the athlete in question is “transgender” or “really a man.” Which brings us to . . .

What About That Olympic Boxer?

You are probably referring to Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who won a gold medal in the 2024 Summer Olympics. Despite allegations from JK Rowling, Elon Musk, and conservative pundits that she was a “man” and/or “transgender,” Khelif was born and raised female. So no, not trans. This article provides a good overview of what happened. And if you bought into claims that she “failed a gender test,” you should read about the shady Russian organization that started those rumors. I also discuss this incident in my recent essay Why Does “Transvestigation” Happen?

What About That College Swimmer?

You are probably referring to Lia Thomas, who was vilified in 2022 after she won a NCAA 500 yard freestyle race (in fact, the aforementioned World Aquatics policy change seems likely to be a direct response to her winning this one event). This article dispels much of the misinformation surrounding her situation, including the fact that her swim times were in line with other cis female swimmers and significantly slower than the times she posted pre-transition when she raced in men’s events. In other words, she lost the advantages she previously had after hormonally transitioning.

If you’re thinking, “No, I’m referring to that other trans woman—the one who does dominate women’s swimming!” Well, that’s Katie Ledecky, who is actually a cis woman. In the wake of public outrage over Lia Thomas, false accusations began to spread that Ledecky was also trans (not unlike what happened to Imane Khelif).

What About That High School Wrestler?

Anti-trans activists will often share photos of a teenage boy wrestling teenage girls as a supposed example of trans people “dominating” or “destroying” women’s sports. But in this case, he really is a boy! Specifically, a trans boy (i.e., assigned female at birth) named Mack Beggs. He wanted to wrestle other boys, but his Texas wrestling league wouldn’t acknowledge his gender identity, so the only way he could compete was in the female category—you can read more about his story here.

If you insist that trans women are “really male” and therefore should be forced to compete against men, then that implies that trans men are “female” and should compete against women, regardless of their androgen levels and masculine appearances. For years, trans people have tried to point this problem out, but to no avail, as anti-trans activists seem unable or unwilling to comprehend this.

In fact, no matter who the athlete in question is—whether it’s a gender-nonconforming cis woman, a trans man, or an actual trans woman—they invariably respond the exact same way, by decrying “That’s a man! See, trans people are destroying women’s sports!”

Transmasculine Athletes

There have been numerous trans men—Chris Mosier, Schuyler Bailar, and many others—who have hormonally transitioned and successfully competed in the men’s category. They tend to be invisibilized in these debates because their existence undermines anti-trans activists’ premise that people who are “born female” are unable to fairly compete against people who are “born male” under any circumstances.

There have also been nonbinary athletes, such as Quinn and Nikki Hiltz (both of whom competed in the 2024 Olympics) who are allowed to compete in women’s categories as they are not taking exogenous androgens. Some transmasculine people take low-dose testosterone—that is, not nearly at the levels the average cis man experiences, but enough to have some positive effects from a gender identity perspective. Current regulations often leave such athletes in limbo, where they are unable to realistically compete in men’s categories, but are disqualified from competing in women’s categories due to said hormone therapy.

Intersex Athletes

Many of the debates regarding trans athletes stem from a mythical belief that there are two entirely discrete sexes and that trans people “artificially transgress” that distinction. But this isn’t actually the case. As I detail in my Trans People and Biological Sex: What the Science Says video (especially the “Sex Is Multifaceted” and “Sex Is Variable” sections), sex is not a simple singular entity, but rather a collection of sexually dimorphic traits that both naturally vary and may not all align in the same direction within the same person. Individuals who naturally fall outside of what’s considered “standard” for male or female in some way—whether it be sex chromosomes, hormones, anatomy, or physiology—comprise 1–2% of the population and are collectively described as “intersex” or having “differences in sex development” (DSD).

There is a long history of sports governing bodies engaging in sex verification to supposedly prevent cis men from infiltrating women’s sports (which has never actually happened), but with the inevitable end result of excluding intersex women (who may or may not possess any significant advantages). Past regimens have involved genital inspections and chromosome screenings, but nowadays they tend to focus on athletes’ testosterone levels. For more on this history, you can check out recent books by Joanna Harper and Michael Waters. But if you’re looking for something freely accessible, I highly recommend the six-episode podcast Tested: a surprising history of women’s sports, which delves into the recent implementation of these hormone-based restrictions and the many scientific and ethical questions surrounding them.

In brief, just as sports governing bodies were facing increasing pressure to restrict trans women’s eligibility to compete in women’s sports, they also significantly restricted intersex women’s eligibility. In 2018, World Athletics (back when it was called IAAF) lowered the highest allowed testosterone levels in women from 10 nmol/L to 5 nmol/L, but only for certain events—this change was described as arbitrary and potentially discriminatory, as it seemed to specifically target gold medalist Caster Semenya. Then in 2023, as part of the aforementioned policy change that banned trans women who’ve experienced “male puberty,” World Athletics further lowered the testosterone limit to 2.5 nmol/L and applied it to all women’s events. This had the effect of purging even more women from competition. The human toll of these policy changes, as well as the flawed research and faulty logic driving them, are detailed in Tested (especially in episodes 4 and 5); see also: Karkazis et al. (2012); Karkazis & Carpenter (2018); Pielke et al. (2019); Bowman-Smart et al. (2024).

While androgens may confer some advantages (as seen with trans women whose athletic performances are significantly reduced after shifting from male-typical to female-typical hormone profiles), they are not the only factor involved here. The average cis male athlete—despite his significantly higher testosterone levels—wouldn’t come close to winning a women’s Olympic swimming or sprinting event. Similarly, while some women with DSD win gold medals from time to time, many lose to non-DSD women on a regular basis, and even those who excel (like Caster Semenya) do not achieve athletic performances in the range of their elite male counterparts.

Just as there is natural variation in the amount of androgens that an individual woman or man may produce, there is also natural variation in a person’s capacity to respond to said androgens. For instance, while androgens facilitate facial and body hair growth, there are plenty of women who are hairy and men who are not hairy. While high levels of testosterone during puberty will lead an individual to become taller than they would if they experienced lower levels, there are plenty of tall women and short men. The same most certainly applies to androgens’ impact on muscle mass and hemoglobin. (I explain the nature of such complex traits in my Trans People and Biological Sex: What the Science Says video.)

Some elite athletes have androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), which means that their cells are incapable of responding to testosterone, yet they are still able to compete at high levels. And as Scientific American points out:

One study of elite Swedish athletes found no association between testosterone and athletic performance, and a recent study of teenage athletes in Australia showed a strong negative correlation between testosterone levels in women and performance. Men, too, do not necessarily gain an enormous advantage from high testosterone levels: almost 17 percent of elite male athletes measured in one study had testosterone levels below the typical male range, and nearly 10 percent of them had testosterone levels under 5 nmol/L. The clear effect of testosterone supplements on the body and the average differences in muscle mass between men and women make it easy to assume that higher testosterone levels automatically confer superior athletic ability regardless of other factors. But the science shows that, at least among elite athletes, the link between testosterone and athletic performance is far from straightforward.

Who Precisely Are We Singling Out and Why?

The supposed rationale for banning women who have higher-than-average testosterone levels is that they have an “unfair advantage.” But as critics of these restrictions have pointed out, this opens up a proverbial Pandora’s box. Tested (episode 5) provides an overview of the many other unfair advantages that some athletes have over others, including rare genetic mutations and extraordinary body proportions (which is why celebrated Olympian Michael Phelps’s name often comes up in these debates, as he’s an example of both). Then there are athletes who grow up wealthy and can afford all the best trainers, equipment, and can focus fully on sports rather than needing to take on outside jobs. Shouldn’t these athletes be banned as well?

And if higher-than-average androgen levels really do provide athletes with an “unfair advantage,” then shouldn’t we also restrict men who have unusually high testosterone levels?

World Athletics and other proponents of the current restrictions will often say that sports are divided into men’s and women’s divisions, so we need to draw that line somewhere. I just laid out the evidence as to why testosterone levels are an imperfect tool in this regard. But if these organizations truly believed in this testosterone distinction, then shouldn’t they be testing all female athletes? Rather than doing that, athletes are only tested if they strike officials as “too masculine.” As Rose Eveleth, the narrator and researcher behind Tested, notes in episode 4: “In this new era of gender verification, starting in 2009, every single woman I know of from my reporting who has been challenged, and impacted by these regulations, is a Black or brown woman from the global South.” (And for the record, white women can also have atypically high androgen levels, they’re just not being flagged for it.)

If testosterone is such a clear distinguishing sex characteristic, then why did World Athletics decide to lower the acceptable threshold from 10, then to 5, then to 2.5 nmol/L over a twelve-year period, despite a lack of solid scientific evidence to support these changes? Doesn’t this suggest that this distinction is arbitrary?

And after years of promoting this (ever shifting) testosterone distinction, and allowing DSD women to compete if they take medication or undergo gonadectomies to bring down their testosterone levels, why would World Athletics suddenly decide to ban trans women who do these exact same things to bring down their hormone levels into the female-typical range? Doesn’t this new policy suggest that this isn’t really about testosterone at all?

Isn’t this about deciding a priori that certain people aren’t “feminine enough” to compete in the women’s category, then subsequently shifting the rules to disqualify them, even if said rules are arbitrary, contradictory, and/or discriminatory?

During the Imane Khelif ordeal, as conservatives relentlessly shared photos of this woman of color boxing a seemingly smaller and more feminine-appearing white woman, media personality Piers Morgan tweeted, “THE SOLUTION: If any part of your biology is male, you don’t get to compete against women. End.” Since the IOC confirmed Khelif was eligible to compete in the female category, it’s unclear what Morgan is referring to here. Her masculine jawline? Physique? Some imagined underlying “male essence”? Does possessing a single masculine-seeming feature somehow “contaminate” the rest of a woman’s body, rendering her “irreparably male”?

In conversations I’ve had with trans-skeptical people about sports, after pointing out that trans women lose the athletic advantages they previously possessed after hormonally transitioning, these skeptics always shift the focus, often to imagined height advantages as a result of going through a “male puberty.” When I point out that height isn’t always an advantage in sports—there are lots of 6’6” people in the world who aren’t good athletes, even in sports like basketball—these skeptics will nevertheless insist that size must be an advantage. Occasionally, I will indulge their line of reasoning and ask, “Well, what if we only ban the trans women who fall outside of the female-typical height range?” Notably, they never accept that concession. Instead, they inevitably shift the focus yet again, sometimes to “bones,” or “male socialization,” or what have you.

In other words, no matter how much evidence I present or logic I apply, they remain convinced that there must be some underlying “male essence” that permanently “contaminates” trans women’s bodies through and through.

This specter also haunts the recent World Athletics and World Aquatics bans on trans women who have “experienced any part of male puberty.” So if a trans girl wasn’t able to access puberty blockers or hormone therapy until the age of 13 or 14, she can never compete in women’s categories ever again? That is patently absurd from a biological perspective. It only makes sense through a Piers Morgan lens, where “if any part of your biology is male”—even a mere one or two years of experiencing male-typical hormones—you are permanently “corrupted” and ineligible to “compete against women.”

In my book Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Fight Back (especially chapters 6 though 9), and in these two subsequent online essays, I describe what I’ve come to call the stigma-contamination mindset. Essentially, we have a tendency to view some groups of people (e.g., girls and women) as inherently “pure” and “untainted,” but capable of being “corrupted” by some outside force (e.g., maleness). This is perhaps most evident in our culture’s nonsensical beliefs regarding female virginity and the notion that women who have “too much sex” or “too many partners” become permanently “spoiled” or “ruined” (a double standard that men do not face, as they are the imagined “corrupting” force). Whiteness and straightness are also imagined to be “pure” yet capable of being “contaminated” and “corrupted” by people of color and LGBTQIA+ people, respectively.

Earlier, I mentioned my recent essay Why Does “Transvestigation” Happen?, which examines how we perceive (and misperceive) sex and gender. In Part 6 of that essay, I discuss several common perceptual biases that are pertinent to these sports debates.

First, studies show that we tend to view male/masculine traits as trumping female/feminine traits when determining a person’s sex. For instance, when Kessler and McKenna (1978) showed subjects drawings of people who had mixed sex attributes (various combinations of short or long hair, flat chest or breasts, narrow or wide hips, penis or vagina, and body hair or not), they were perceived as male 69 percent of the time despite possessing feminine traits. Even when the figure had a vagina, subjects nevertheless deemed them male 36 percent of the time due to the presence of other masculine attributes. The authors concluded: “There seem to be no cues that are definitely female, while there are many that are definitely male. To be male is to ‘have’ something and to be female is to ‘not have’ it.”

Second, studies show that white observers tend to view Black and brown women as more “masculine” and/or “gender-ambiguous” than their white counterparts—this seems to be an obvious contributing factor to why such athletes are disproportionately singled out and accused of not being “real women.”

Once you understand all this, it becomes clear that these “women’s sports” debates are not really about biology, puberty, androgens, or potential advantages. This is primarily a problem of perception. It’s about our tendency to interpret any (real or imagined) masculine trait on a woman as being the sole determinant of who she is, rendering her “inauthentically female” or “irreparably male” through and through.

It’s about our tendency to envision the category of woman as “pure” and “untainted,” one which must be protected from (real or imagined) masculine “contamination” and “corruption” at all costs.

These debates have never been about “fairness in women’s sports.” For one thing, many of the loudest voices on this issue couldn’t care less about women’s sports! Seriously, next time someone raises concerns about this issue, ask them who their favorite female athlete or women’s sports team is—this almost always leaves them stumbling for an answer.

And if this debate was really about “fairness,” shouldn’t we be concerned about all the trans and intersex athletes who are now banned from participating women’s sports? Or the numerous women of color who get singled out for scrutiny due to white people’s misperceptions of them?

In other words, debates about women’s sports are primarily about “purity,” not “fairness.” And we won’t make any progress until we first reckon with that problem.

Further Reading

In this section, I will add links whenever new developments on this issue arise, or if other writers cover aspects of this story that I haven’t address here.

I thought I’d begin with the Vice News 2023 video Trans Athletes Address the “Debate”—it includes a number of trans athletes speaking in their own voices and sharing their varied experiences and perspectives on this issue.

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