British Rowing (BR) announced on Thursday a change to eligibility policies which will ban trans women from competing in the ‘female’ category. According to the new policy, only individuals assigned female at birth will be able to compete under British Rowing’s jurisdiction and/or be selected to represent Great Britain, or England, in international events. The move, which will take effect from 11 September 2023, comes after what BR claims has been an ‘extensive and ongoing research and consultation with stakeholders, the rowing community, academics, and other relevant organisations and NGBs since 2021’.
The previous BR policy allowed trans women to compete in the ‘female’ category if their testosterone levels were consistently below 5 nanomoles per litre for a period of at least 12 months and for the duration of their sporting career. This policy left BR in contravention of World Rowing’s new rule to exclude trans women from the ‘women’s’ category, which came into effect in March 2023.
Transphobia rhetoric and scaremongering about trans women ‘threatening’ women’s sport have been rife across all sports. Earlier this year, Sebastian Coe, head of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), announced that World Athletics would ban trans women from female category events to ‘prioritise fairness and the integrity of the female competition before inclusion’. In rowing, Dr Mary O’Connor, a member of the US women’s rowing squad from 1980, said that ‘We don’t create categories based on race or ethnicity or religion. We create them based on biological facts. That’s why we have age and weight categories in rowing’.
But taking a look at the evidence, this scaremongering is largely baseless.
So what is the scientific evidence?
Firstly, we need to dispel the myth that athletes would transition purely to gain an advantage in elite sports. In the UK, current waiting times for a first appointment with a gender identity clinic are close to 5 years.
Perspective is also important. Trans people make up a tiny proportion of people who play sport. It is simply not the case that throngs of people are taking up arms against women’s equality and fairness.
Then to the question of physiological advantage – do trans women possess a physical advantage over cis women, even when taking testosterone suppressants?
Some studies have pointed to advantages held by trans women if they went through puberty before transitioning, specifically residual strength and muscle mass.
- A 2021 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that trans women maintain an athletic advantage over their cis peers after one year of hormone therapy. This advantage was in higher muscle mass.
- However, the haemoglobin levels of trans women, determining oxygen transport in the blood, were comparable to cis women.
- Joanna Harper, a medical physicist in Portland, Oregon, also questioned this research. For example, there was a lack of data on participants’ individual training habits and there was no coordination between when subjects started hormones and when they took their annual fitness test.
- V. Cassola et al. (2011)’s research, which was used to justify the Rugby Football Union’s exclusion of trans women, was based solely on average height and weight measurements from white cis women, ignoring the fact that athletes usually have different body types to the average population and only considering white athletes.
Crucially, measurements of haemoglobin levels and muscle mass have not comprehensively been correlated with trans women’s athletic performance, making a lot of the evidence about physiological advantage speculative.
Other evidence has found trans women possess no advantage over cis women in elite sports.
- A report by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (2023) found that trans women do not have an advantage over cis women when competing under existing rules. The report found little evidence that factors relating to male puberty – lung size and bone density – produced an advantage in trans athletes. Instead, there is strong evidence that suggests ‘elite sport policy is made within transmisogynist, misogynoir, racist, geopolitical cultural norms’.
Given all of this, there is no clear evidence that trans women possess an advantage in rowing compared to cis women. Alarmist rhetoric has been a proponent of the external debate around this topic and this has in turn been a symptom of a toxic culture war that has devastating effects on trans people.
An open letter produced by the charity Mermaids in 2022 to Sport England, Sport Scotland, Sport Wales, and Sport Northern Ireland, urged UK sporting bodies to ‘oppose trans-exclusive approaches, and start from a point of inclusion’; ‘Trans, non-binary and gender diverse young people should not be forced to choose between who they are and playing the sport they love’.
BR has stressed it is ‘committed to promoting an environment in which rowing is accessible and inclusive and to ensuring that we provide opportunities and enjoyment for everyone.’ Only ‘competitive activity’ – events run under the auspices of BR and involving official timing, results, qualification, or rankings for participants aged 12 and over – is covered by the new policy changes.
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865
https://cces.ca/sites/default/files/content/docs/pdf/transgenderwomenathletesandelitesport-ascientificreview-e.pdf
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