Lift That Weight

In the latest round of the gender critical discourse, Tanya Aldred of the Guardian has argued that trans women should not be able to participate in womens' events at the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. The core of her case is that "fairness is at the heart of sport". This claim is difficult to treat seriously, despite the recent collapse of the European Super League in the face of opposition to its attempts to make football less fair. As a sub-division of the entertainment industry, most popular (i.e. televised) competitions are run on the basis that the appearance of fairness is more than enough to satisfy the punters, hence the "financial doping" that Arsene Wenger once decried was not a talking point when Chelsea beat Manchester City in the Champions League final. The Olympics, with its history of legal state-sponsored advantage and illegal chemical doping, is no exception. In team games such as football, where allegiance to all but a handful of clubs entails a conscious defiance of structural disadvantage, what attracts us is not fairness but the prospect that the meritocratic order might be undone by exceptional performance or random chance: raising your game, causing an upset. It is the unpredictability that nourishes hope. 

Aldred's suggestion that a transgender woman competing in the weightlifting event is as unfair as sandpapering a cricket ball or using loaded boxing gloves is a confusion of terms. The latter are examples of cheating, not unfairness. Unless she has evidence that Laurel Hubbard transitioned purely in order to attend the Tokyo games, i.e. that she is masquerading (which would be a transphobic slur), they are in no way equivalent and should not be conflated. This is ironic given that her argument is that the decision to allow Hubbard to compete is conflating gender and sex. As is par for the gender critical course, Aldred insists that the two are distinct: that for all the superficial changes there is a boundary that cannot be crossed. As has become wearily predictable, this involves advancing an essentialist argument that wouldn't have been out of place in an anti-feminist diatribe 50 years ago: "By conflating gender and sex, I would argue we fudge the very reason we have sex categories in sport: the male performance advantage. Without a separate category for females, there would be no women in Olympic finals".

The reason we have sex categories in the modern Olympics is because they started out as male-only in 1896, in conscious emulation of the original Greek festival. The "advantage" was not men's differential performance but their social standing, and that was about class as much as gender. The ancient games were limited to freeborn males while their modern revival was for a long time limited to amateurs, which in practice advantaged the independently wealthy. Females could only participate in the ancient Olympics by a rich woman's ownership of a chariot team. In an ironic echo of this, the first woman to win a medal in the modern games was a Swiss countess in the 1 to 2 ton sailing class in 1900 (though she was an active crew member, not simply the owner of the boat). That year also saw women competing for the first time with men in the upper-class game of croquet and separately in tennis and golf. After 1900, women were gradually admitted to more sports, but under a policy of segregation in almost all cases. The only truly mixed sports today are sailing (one class) and the equestrian disciplines (dressage, eventing and jumping), where the performance of your property is a leveller.

The opening up of the games to women in the twentieth century reflected progressive trends, but - like the suffrage movement and later feminist waves - it also reflected the class-bias of the times and the hierarchy of social value. Segregation might have been fairer in terms of performance and representation in many disciplines, but its practical effect was marginalisation as the women's competitions received less support and regard. Between 1912 and 1948 the Olympics included activities in which women could have competed on equal terms, specfically the art competitions, such as architecture, sculpture and music. These were a nod to the role of the ancient Olympics in a wider celebration of excellence (arete) within Hellenistic culture. Their discontinuance after the postwar London Olympics was not because women were winning (they were under-represented among the medals due to the prevailing gender discrimination in the arts) but because the men who were winning were increasingly found to be professionals (there weren't many amateur architects by the late-40s). In other words, class and social standing, rather than meritocratic achievement, remained the deciding factor.

Aldred's argument of unfairness boils down to the idea that trans women have a "retained advantage" from having experienced male puberty. You might expect her to put in a good word for puberty blockers at this point, on the grounds that they would prevent the development of such an advantage for at least some trans women, but the subject never arises. Nor does the subject of intersex athletes, like Caster Semenya, who haven't chosen their circumstances and whose "advantage" is entirely natural (indeed, the requirement that she chemically adjust her testosterone level is an example of how unnatural sport has become in its quest for the appearance of fairness). What does arise in Aldred's article are two subsidiary arguments: the physical danger posed by trans women - "the safety issues in combat, collision and some team sports" - and the claim that in practice they exclude natal women, either by putting them off sport altogether or by taking limited competition places. 

The first argument hints at a predisposition to violence against women. Just as trans women in changing rooms are caricatured as potential rapists, so trans women athletes are considered dangerously abnormal, which echoes misogynistic claims about natal women athletes in the past. There is no evidence to suggest that trans women are a disproportionate danger in contact sports, not least because there are so very few of them. In contrast, there is plenty of evidence that size is a risk factor, but far from being a disqualification this is actually valued, for example in rugby. The second argument suggests that trans women are men taking what rightfully belongs to women. This not only ignores the corollary of trans men (are they denying natal men their birth rights?), but it also occludes those natal women who remain disadvantaged for other, intersectional reasons, such as racism and poverty. What's striking about these subsidiary arguments is the subtext of female fragility and property rights, which wouldn't have been out of place in 1896. There is a whole weight of misogynistic history here that gender critical feminism appears only too happy to collude with in the cause of policing the boundaries of womanhood.