Republicans have become the party of anti-trans agitation. Throughout the 2024 campaign, their ads demonized trans participation in public life. Their wedge issue of choice? A distorted view of women’s sport.
Trump led the way. He voiced lies about transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and about a San Jose State volleyball player who may have been outed as transgender by her teammate. His rancor didn’t stop at transgender athletes: He spread hateful misinformation about nontrans Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, too.
Even though Democrats did little to challenge transphobic Republican talking points, some commentators now argue that supporting transgender and gender nonconforming athletes is a mistake. This is the wrong conclusion. The weaponized obsession with policing women’s sports is new — it is manufactured, it is spiteful and it should be disarmed.
Republicans have exploited rhetoric about restricting women’s sport, but they did not invent it. They join a reactionary chorus of current and former athletes, academics and athletes’ parents.
We must reject the trans-exclusionary story these figures peddle about women and sport. It hurts trans, intersex and gender nonconforming people and it deflects attention away from the issues that do threaten women and girls in athletics. There is every reason to foster alliances — not enmity — between all women athletes, in the interest of combatting gender-based injustice in the sports world and beyond (Just listen to Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe).
Sex is not common sense
What do I mean by the trans-exclusionary story? We can start close to home. Thomas L. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law Doriane Coleman is prominent in the movement to restrict women’s sport according to a binary interpretation of the category “sex.” She has written a book about the topic, “On Sex and Gender: A Commonsense Approach,” as well as numerous op-eds and articles. In 2019 she testified to congress. She is a frequent podcast guest. Unpacking the problems with her thinking can help us understand what is misguided and hurtful about this narrative.
The core of Coleman’s argument, as she presents it in this work, is that “the basic facts [of sex and gender] are universal and timeless.” For her, sex is “dimorphic,” immutable and easy to determine. Gender is separate from sex; not all women are female. And because of innate sex-based performance inferiorities, in the world of competitive sport, it is only fair for females to compete against other females. This is why she believes that transgender women and women with intersex conditions threaten “extraordinary harm.” Their participation in elite sport, she asserts, sacrifices competitors with a “female’s body” as “collateral damage” and it is “bad for women and girls when we pretend otherwise.”
The problem with this story begins with the meaning of sex. As historians of science like Beans Velocci and Jules Gill-Peterson and biological anthropologists like Alexandra Kralick show, sex is not such a simple thing. Is sex fixed before birth, or at puberty, or can it change? What matters in determining sex: genitalia, hormones, chromosomes, internal organs, reproductive capacity, appearance or bones? “The more scientists have studied sex,” Velocci argues, “the more contradictions the category has come to contain.”
Coleman’s work does not reckon with this complexity. She describes her work as “sex smart,” yet fails to engage with research that challenges “common sense” beliefs. One consequence is the undercount of people born with intersex traits, people whose bodies don’t fit tidily in categories of male and female. In the sports context, these people are often described as having “disorders of sexual development” (DSD).
In her book, Coleman claims that the incidence of people with intersex conditions is “truly tiny,” “only about 0.02 percent of humans.” The source for this is a bit muddled, but the nearest citation is of an advocacy group called Intersex Human Rights Australia (IHRA). IHRA staunchly argues that “the actual numbers of people with intersex variations are likely to be as much as 1.7 percent,” 85 times higher than what Coleman asserts. Coleman admits that her numbers are “contested by some,” and that “it’s been suggested … that 1.7 percent (not 0.02 percent) [of humans] are exceptional.” But she fails to substantively engage the arguments of scholars who advance the higher percentage, and she dismisses the reasons why IHRA advocates for the higher number as a “philosophical gambit.”
On fairness in sport
When human bodies defy binary sex — as many do — sport governing organizations inevitably run into difficulties policing the female/not female line. One solution is to trust people when they say who they are. We could listen to Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya, for example, who explains that although she has been diagnosed with an intersex condition because of how her “internal organs are structured,” she is a woman and “an elite female athlete.” The borders of “female” are subjective because sex as a category is not coherent.
Transgender athletes also challenge efforts to segregate sports by sex. Gender-affirming treatments bring about complex bodily changes, exposing how chromosomes are not destiny. And further, trans perspectives illuminate how categories of sex and gender are anything but neutral descriptions of reality — they are ideological and historical technologies of population management.
What does this mean for fairness? Coleman insists that there is a “biologically driven performance gap between males and females” and so people who have experienced the “constructive effects of the Y chromosome and male puberty” cannot fairly compete against people who haven’t.
The evidence is more dubious. Athleticism can’t be reduced solely to quantifiable factors like testosterone. Every athlete’s body is a patchwork of genetic capacities — some are boons, others handicaps. Many of these qualities have nothing to do with sex, and indeed, women may have underrecognized advantages in some events. As such, there is ample disagreement about how to foster “meaningful competition” in women’s sport.
It bears repeating that including transgender women and women with DSD in women’s sports is not the same as including men. Case studies show that transgender athletes encounter “very complex athletic advantages and disadvantages … when they switch teams.” When it comes to athletes with DSD, some scientists argue “we simply don’t have enough data” to assume unfair advantage.
Meanwhile, fairness is about more than biology. Bodies don’t compete in “some socially-neutral vacuum.” Athletes targeted for supposed deviation from femaleness face harassment, threats and violations of their privacy. Many nontrans women — especially women of color and queer women — are accused of being transgender because they do not conform to restrictive gender norms. The suspicious posture that Coleman models will only lead to more attacks on women athletes.
Honest reckoning with gender and sports performance must look beyond the individual bodies of competitors. It must be realistic about how trans-exclusionary arguments give cover for anti-trans hostility.
A failure of empathy
Coleman does sometimes lay out a more nuanced case for exclusion and inclusion. In “On Sex and Gender,” she distinguishes between policies for competitive and non-competitive sport, and she has been publicly critical of blanket bans on transgender athletes. But a drawback to Coleman’s inclusiveness is that the kinds of accommodations she argues are necessary to allow transgender girls to compete “when prizes, podiums, championships, and records are at stake” — namely hormone therapy — are becoming less accessible to trans youth across the country.
Pragmatically, then, Coleman continues to argue for banning transgender youth from the parts of sport that, elsewhere, she positions as fundamental to sport’s value: a chance to win at the top level, to do more than “try out for the team and go home with a participation ribbon.”
Coleman argues that if transgender women or women with DSD succeed, “female” athletes will be “robbed” of “the opportunities to be role models for little girls who need to see strong, victorious females so that they can dream big dreams themselves.” Why is it so obvious that girls would reject being inspired by transgender champions like CeCé Telfer or Lia Thomas? These are awesome women athletes. And what about little transgender girls (and boys), or girls with DSD? Have they no right to witness people like them succeeding, and to succeed themselves?
This is a failure of empathy that defines the trans-exclusionary position. It goes deeper: Coleman positions transgender and intersex women as threats, but she waves off the threats these communities face.
Take her discussion of bathrooms and locker rooms. In “On Sex and Gender,” Coleman cites a U.N. report to argue that it makes sense for “females” to be wary about “male sexual violence in places where they go to relieve themselves.” This report makes no claims that transgender women are a threat to other women in bathrooms. (Empirically, such claims are baseless.) While she has stated that she supports transgender women utilizing women’s bathrooms, Coleman insists that “we need to respect” the fears that some other people may hold that transgender women in women’s bathrooms and locker rooms threaten women’s “physical safety and privacy interests,” that these fears are “protective instincts” we should not dismiss.
Who do these instincts protect? Trans people routinely face violence when trying to use the bathroom – the notion that they are a danger is part of what endangers them. Justifying anxieties about imagined bathroom assaults is inconsistent with Coleman’s claims that she’s “an ally to trans people.” It is irresponsible to adopt positions that impact trans people without considering what community trans organizations tell you about that advocacy.
The trans-exclusionary story ignores the real harms women athletes face
Unlike the craven legislators who draw upon her work, I believe Professor Coleman cares deeply about women’s sport. But I also think she has made herself available, using the prestige of the institution for which we both work, to nefarious forces that would see trans people disappear. Sport continues to be a cornerstone of escalating anti-trans legislation. Duke administrators should be clear-eyed about the trans-exclusionary impacts of these positions.
It does not have to be this way. The policies that Coleman advocates target a “vanishingly short” list of athletes – transgender athletes are in fact “underrepresented.” Like sports scientist Joanna Harper, I believe we “should try to find some method that maximizes the possibility that all women can enjoy equitable and meaningful sport.” The obstacles to this vision are not transgender women or women with DSD. The preoccupation with restricting the category “female” ignores the serious, structural and intersectional patterns of sexist harm that impact huge numbers of women and girls.
Trans and nontrans women athletes both face gender-based violence. They confront sexual coercion and harassment, constrained economic opportunities, rigid gender norms, inadequate legal protections. The disregard, complicity and cruelty of sporting authorities. Femicide. These are the forces that menace women athletes. Anti-trans policies do nothing to address them. Instead, these policies weaken what could be the grounds of robust, coalitional anti-violence organizing.
The trans-exclusionary story undercuts what is beautiful and joyous about sport, replacing potential allyship with anger and resentment.
Joseph Hiller is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Anthropology with a Certificate in Feminist Studies.
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