I was going to write about racing a 1500m run this week, but my track meet was canceled due to smoke from regional wildfires. Instead, I’m sharing a nuanced idea about a controversial topic: trans athletes. It’s really been a hot topic lately, but it’s not new to me. Here’s what’s been going on in recent days, and why I think it’s the wrong argument, and my nascent idea about how to handle it.
Sophie Cunningham said transgendered women shouldn’t play in the WNBA. Aryna Sabalenka backed the WTA’s new gene testing policy. Coco Gauff, this week, said the whole thing is nuanced and that she hates watching it get used as cover to attack people. Everywhere I look, someone with no direct experience in the matter is offering a confident opinion about people they’ve likely never met and a situation they’ve never lived through. I’m not sure what all their motivations are. I can tell you mine. And unlike 99.99% of people, I’ve actually coached a trans athlete.
Those athletes I mentioned were just answering questions put to them. And they’re in difficult positions where everything they say gets scrutinized and dissected. But I think it’s the wrong question.
We keep asking who belongs in the women’s category and who belongs in the men’s category, as if sex is the thing we actually care about when we watch sports. I’m not sure it is. And I have a kernel of an idea that not only gets at what we do care about, but also offers a pathway to more fun for everyone.
I think what we care about in sports is good competition. A close race. A fight decided in the final round, not the first. A game-winning shot at the buzzer. An overtime thriller. A photo finish.
Sex has been how we have been sorting people into groups for sports, but it’s worth remembering how we got here, and it wasn’t some careful logical approach. A quick skip through history:
In ancient Greece at least, women participated in running, javelin and even wrestling.
The Medieval Age saw women’s participation in sports decline as Christianity spread and reinforced the notion that women were too weak for athletics.
By Victorian times, elite women who had leisure time did sports like tennis, croquet or golf – sports that were “feminine.” Here or there you’ll find working class women tried sports, even boxing, but it wasn’t the norm. Women were even banned from the first Olympics in 1896.
It wasn’t until the 1970s women were grudgingly given a separate, lesser lane. Title IX is only a few decades old. The explosion of women’s sports since then happened because women demanded the right to compete. And once the door opened, an enormous number of people turned out to have been waiting for their shot. The demand was participation, not categories.
I have some direct experience here. I’ve coached a trans athlete. You may know I’ve coached middle school and high school track off and on for twenty years. Before one season, a parent contacted me and said her child, who I had known as a girl for two years prior, was going by a different name now, and asked me to use they/them pronouns while her child was figuring things out.
My response: Okay.
That was it. That was the whole reckoning. The only effort that was different from other kids was because the district where I coached required students to participate in sports based on sex. I felt that left things pretty wide open, actually. So, I checked in with this athlete on a weekly basis to ask which category they wanted to race in, and that’s where I put that athlete. Simple as that.
The kid still showed up to practice, still ran the same workouts, still cared about the same times on the same watch. Nothing about coaching them changed except a name and a pronoun.
I bring that up not because it proves anything about elite sport, but because it’s the closest I’ve come to this question in real life. And in real life, it was never the crisis the chattering class online makes it out to be.
Which is why I think the current fight is focused on the wrong question.
Sex tells you something about the distribution of athletic ability across a population. It tells you almost nothing about the two specific people standing next to each other on a starting line. Two women can have wildly different testosterone, muscle mass, VO2 max, lung capacity…whatever you want to measure. Two men can, too.
We’ve been using a big broad population level fact to make an individual-level decision, and acting surprised when the edge cases don’t make that a clean choice.
So, here’s the reframe I want to put on the table, not as a solved policy, just as a way of thinking that doesn’t require anyone to hate anyone else.
What if we stopped sorting competition by sex and started sorting it by the traits that actually predict a competitive event?
Call it a “performance passport” for now, I’m still working through my thinking on this. But here’s the gist: You get measured on the handful of markers that matter for your sport, and then you compete against the people like you, regardless of what’s on your birth certificate.
I don’t think this is particularly new or radical, actually. In fact, sport already has a version of this logic.
Masters track uses age grading. Your raw time gets compared against the best performance achievable for your age and sex, and you get scored as a percentage of that. A 58-year-old woman running a 6:40 mile can outscore a 24 year old man running a 4:15, age graded, because relative to what’s actually achievable for each of them, hers is the better run. Nobody screams that that’s unfair. It’s just a math problem, and we accept that a great performance means something different depending on the body producing it, and we built a system to measure that instead of arguing about it.
Obviously, I haven’t sorted out the specifics of how this works. It would be pretty huge, though because it means more opportunity for more people and more competition. More good competition, actually. It might have opposition from existing forces in sports that wouldn’t want to share the pie. But imagine the opportunities both culturally and financially if we had even more people who could participate and how much fun that would be.
Imagine you’re a 45-year-old woman who enjoys track, but you’d never jump into a meet because you know you’re “old and slow.” But what if there was a category where you could compete against people who had the same VO2Max, BMI, estrogen/testosterone levels, or whatever we come up with in the passport. You’d have a blast. And, I’d wager, so would an audience. I suspect the doors would fling open in many sports for more people. More women to celebrate, more men, more trans people, more everybody. More viewers, more apparel companies, equipment companies, media outlets, etc. Wow.
What I want out of sports, and out of this argument, isn’t a ruling on who’s allowed where. It’s the same thing Title IX opened the door to: more people finding out there’s a place for them. That grows a sport. Gatekeeping doesn’t.
The current fight treats this like there’s a fixed number of lanes and someone has to lose theirs. I don’t think that’s true. I think we’ve been measuring the wrong thing and tearing one another apart about it, when another way of thinking about it could be sitting right there.
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