The Olympic Games: The Fight for Trans Inclusion in Sports

“They treated me like a guinea pig.”

Olympic History of Hormone and Sex Regulation

Trans people, more specifically regulations surrounding to what extent legislators can discriminate against them, have been a regular, recurring topic in 2021. 

This year also featured the rescheduled 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, both of which boasted new records for openly LGBTQ athletes, with some of the first openly trans and nonbinary athletes and winner. In regard to the Olympics and trans folks, there is a storied history dating back to the 1930s of regulating sex for competition, which in today’s day often feel extremely rigid in regard to our current understanding of sex and gender. 

Ultimately, these regulations of hormones, and barring female athletes who pass a certain threshold, have worked to bar cis, intersex, and trans athletes from competing in the games. 

The CNN report “Running As Equals” takes a deep dive into these regulations. In 2019, World Athletics (formerly the International Association of Athletics Federations or IAAF) banned some athletes from competing in international women’s middle-distance races unless they used medical intervention to lower the naturally occuring testosterone levels in their bodies, targeting athletes competing in women’s events and those with differences in sex development. World Athletes considers “acceptable” testosterone levels for female athletes to be no more than 1.68 nanomoles per liter.

Along with a breakdown of how the Olympic regulations came to be, it shares the stories of two athletes. One of the featured stories was that of Annet Negesa, an intersex runner whose natural testosterone was too high to compete in the London Games, who ultimately underwent surgery (which she believed was a treatment for naturally high levels of testosterone and ended up as a procedure removing her internal testes, which she says she did not consent to), and was left with ongoing trauma and pain.

“They treated me like a guinea pig,” Negesa says.

And we saw the regulations, and the rhetoric they enforce, in full effect this year: two cis athletes Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi for Namibia banned from competition for their naturally high testosterone levels, and the rigid ideas surrounding sex surely affect openly trans athletes, like the outcry of calls to ban qualifying trans weightlifter Laurel Hubbard from competing as the first openly trans woman, even though she ultimately failed her three attempts at the 87+ kg snatch and did not press forward.

These conversations only compound the record number of anti-LGBTQ, specifically anti-trans, bills introduced this year in states across the country, many working specifically to keep trans kids from playing in sports that match their gender. The laws operate under the same assumption, that testosterone levels equate to superior athletic performance, though time and time again, experts have testified that science does not support this assertion.

“The science of whether testosterone in real life is actually providing an advantage in competition is not clearly established,” says Dr. Eric Vilain, a pediatrician and geneticist who studies sex difference in athletes, in an NPR interview from earlier this year. 

“But more disturbingly is that all these rules at the elite level have affected women—not all women, but women with a Y chromosome. And often, it’s triggered by women who look different. So I’m a little disturbed to hear that these issues at the elite level are now reaching the middle and high schools and colleges.”

With the sudden onset of these bills and GOP outcry that this is actually an issue, this is less about the actual fairness and dynamics of trans people playing in sports that align with their gender and more about controlling a narrative surrounding trans people. This rhetoric leaks into the masses, where the majority of people in the U.S. may not have direct experience with or personally know trans people, and base their feelings off these arbitrary assessments.

The Worst Year for Anti-LGBTQ Bills in the U.S.

Anne Lieberman is the director of policy and programs for Athlete Ally, an international nonprofit organization working to dismantle the structures of oppression that isolate, exclude, and endanger LGBTQ people in sports in four major ways: LGBTQ education, policy advocacy work, research, and athlete activism. 

Lieberman says the influx of bills didn’t come from nowhere and are essentially bathroom bills reimagined, with the messaging to society that trans women and girls are inherently threatening and do not belong in public spaces.

“This strategy, on the part of the opposition, was a very creative one because they know how pervasive sports is in all communities,” Liberman says. “And so, you’re taking a very beloved pastime and weaponizing it, also, essentially preying upon people’s common sense understanding of how bodies work, and I say, common sense because there is just a deeply held belief—and it is inherently sexist, but it is what we are working against—that cisgender men will always be bigger, stronger, faster than cisgender women.”

Lieberman says the opposition is intentionally equating trans women with men, which comes with dangerous misgendering and violent rhetoric, alongside the media, which they say especially targets Black, trans women, adding a deeply racist angle to the inherent sexism, misogyny, and transphobia these red states push with their anti-trans bills.

“That already confuses people, because most of the country hasn’t ever met a trans person or doesn’t think they’ve met a trans person, and so it’s much easier to be sucked into these narratives about ‘big, scary trans people’ because they have no frame of reference, so there it’s kind of like the perfect storm,” Lieberman says, calling this legislative session “without exaggeration” the worst the country has seen, in terms of anti-LGBTQ bills.

Athlete Advocacy Across Borders

Lieberman cited information from Athlete Ally’s collaborator, The Equality Federation: as of August 18, there have been 374 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in 2021, including 183 anti-trans bills, 93 athlete bans, and 51 medical care bans.

Lierberman and Athlete Ally spent the bulk of this year looking at and directly fighting these attacks on trans people within our country, but the rhetoric extends beyond borders, into these massive, worldwide playing fields, like the Olympic Games.

“I think the other way in which we see some of these issues being so connected or similar,” they say, “it’s just the conversation on trans inclusion in sport, and you know, we do some work with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and even when I was just in Texas … hearing some of these testimonies from people who were trying to ban trans kids from playing sports with their friends, people would incorrectly cite Olympic policy.”

Working internationally allows organizations like Athlete Ally to contact legislators locally, bringing up these testimonies warping Olympic policy to their aims and urging leaders to be accurate and responsible in how they relay information.

Lieberman expands, “That’s also because we have such a deep knowledge of international, national, and local sport policy, we’re able to kind of connect the dots, especially the local level and say, ‘Hey, if somebody says anything about this IOC policy,’ like, ‘no, this is actually how it works,’ and to help with some of the kind of nuance of the sports conversation that somebody who wasn’t working in sports wouldn’t know.”

Lieberman cites the World Cup bidding process as another example of how working internationally connects to these issues at a local level. Cities looking to host the World Cup must submit bids to explain why, but FIFA has a “rigorous framework,” according to Lieberman, embedding human rights into their processes to decide how a city’s environment will be inclusive for all spectators, not only in terms of LGBTQ people but with an abundance of factors in mind.

“FIFA has said that they don’t want to post World Cup games in cities in the U.S. that openly discriminate against anybody, including LGBTQ+ people and including trans people, so a lot of what we do is that connecting and convening role, and to really translate sports and translate, like how to leverage some of these mechanisms,” Lieberman says.

They give the example: Equality Texas could say to a legislator, “If you want money to come into the city for hosting the World Cup, you won’t be able to pass this anti-trans law.”

The Fight Presses Forward

These conversations surrounding trans athletes, and the legislation fighting against them, are clearly dense and multifaceted. So, how do we move forward and continue working for a fair system that doesn’t work toward exclusion and violence against trans people?

Lieberman says the movement as a whole is well-coordinated on this issue specifically and has been able to draw upon a variety of different resources, both at the state and national level, rallying people from all areas of life to come out and testify against these bills.

A specific focus of Athlete Ally is that fourth way they work to dismantle these oppressive systems: athlete activism. 

“When you look at the number of pro athletes who are really speaking in opposition to these bills, there are many more people in opposition to these bills than the people who are using their desire to protect women’s sports as a thin veil for the transphobia,” they say, “and so, for us, it’s really about, how do we continue to organize these folks, and help them use their platforms to speak out in support of trans kids? And really, again, at the end of the day this is about kids who want to play sports with their friends.”

Lieberman asserts, if these powers were truly this concerned about protecting women’s sports, then they would listen to active women athletes—not retired Olympians or players of the past—and the things they are actually asking for: mental health support, sponsorship deals, pay equity, to name a few.

“Nowhere in that list is ‘keep trans athletes out of sports,” Lieberman says. This is not a baseless claim: Athlete Ally is also working to elevate their work with partners like Women’s Sports Foundation, who have been doing research on gender equity and sports since their inception and not a single report mentions trans athletes as some kind of threat to women’s sports, according to Lieberman

Lieberman says they are assured after witnessing the response to their work with people consistently looking to learn more about what they can do in regard to trans inclusion in sports.

“They’re horrified that, you know, kids are being used as political punching bags and bargaining chips, and people who have spent their lives, especially cis women athletes, you know, dedicating their lives to sport, have said, ‘Not in my name. I don’t want people saying that this is what women athletes want, because we’ve always been a stronger, more impactful global sports community when we are inclusive and empowering to everyone.’”

Lieberman says that we all have a role to play, and every person’s activism can look different. Someone who may not be comfortable testifying might instead get a group of friends together to watch a documentary on the topic, like Hulu’s Changing The Game, or set up a monthly recurring donation to organizations fighting these bills.

Lieberman urges, “I want everybody to know that we all have a role in fighting this, and a lot of times it’s calling out a transphobic comment, just like I think more white folks understand now that they need to be calling out casual racism, and racism period, and microaggressions. It’s all of this work is connected, and I always love to quote one of my favorite activists of all time Fannie Lou Hamer, which is, you know, ‘Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,’ and until we really have that mindset, we’re not going to be able to move forward as quickly and as deeply as I think many of us want to.”