Women's Cycling, where Biological Male, wins Women's World Championship (UCI) for age 35-39 Masters when representing Canada

VN: Let’s drill down into the topic of the unfair advantage. Much of the discussion revolves around testosterone and the idea that athletes who are born male have more testosterone than those who were born female. That inherently gives transgender women an unfair advantage.

RM: The myths around testosterone are very deep, and I do a lot of research around this. Some people think testosterone is only found in males and that estrogen is only found in females, and that is not true. Everybody has both. On average, males have more testosterone than females and females have more estrogen than males. In a recent study by Stephané Bermon and Pierre Yves Garnier, they tested over 2,000 IAAF world championship track and field athletes and found that 1/6 of the male athletes were in or below the female range of testosterone, so a disproportionate amount of elite males have very low testosterone. This study showed there is absolutely no relationship between testosterone in terms of performance in males. The relationship they found in women was weak and sporadic.

When people think of testosterone and athletic performance, they think of doping with exogenous testosterone — testosterone that comes from outside the body. Compare that to endogenous testosterone, which occurs in the body. While chemically they perform roughly the same way, there is ample evidence that shows exogenous testosterone, compared to what you naturally have, produces big performance advantages. That’s why it’s considered doping. There is no evidence that having a higher produced value of endogenous testosterone has any performance advantages at all. The evidence does not bear that out. So that is the second myth: the more testosterone you have, naturally, the better you are. So trans women might be male early on, and that on average such bodies have more endogenous naturally testosterone, therefore they’re stronger because of that. We have evidence that is just not the case.

Also, we have evidence, thanks to Dr. Joanna Harper, that when you take someone who has a given level of endogenous natural testosterone, and you reduce that — through such things as like hormone suppression therapy, or the loss of a testicle, or menopause — when you lower someone’s natural testosterone their performance goes down. The body is used to a certain level, and when you drop it, the body performs worse because your body isn’t getting what it’s used to. But that’s also why when you add more exogenous testosterone, your body isn’t used to it so your performance goes up.

VN: Yes, but what about the eyeball-test argument? The fastest male marathon runners are faster than the fastest females; the top male weightlifters can carry more than the top female lifters, etc?

RM: Right, and I’m not denying there is currently a performance gap between elite male and female athletes. But there’s two questions here at the same time that have a complicated interplay. One: Why is there that gap? People like a simple answer. Men have more testosterone, so therefore, it’s because of testosterone. But our bodies aren’t simple; they’re complex and messy and beautiful. We see that 1/6 of elite male track and field athletes have lower than the average female testosterone yet they perform at a higher level, so it’s not just about testosterone. We’ve seen that the gap in performance between elite men and women is closing in every sport. As the men are improving and new records are being set, the women’s records are being set faster. The gap is closing. Its misleading to take the current gap an say that will always be the case. We’re seeing it close in some ultra-distance sports.

But people are mostly focused on power events where big muscle matters and this eyeball test that you talked about. One of the problems you talked about is that elite athletes are in a sense freaks. We all have a genetic advantage that makes us good in the sports we’ve selected. And that typically ignores the wide range of types of bodies of people of that type. So we like to point to Caitlin Jenner and say look how big she is, that’s unfair to women. That ignores the 5 foot 1 kid who can’t throw a ball. It’s not the case that all trans women are these big six-foot-tall, 200-pound powerlifters. I happen to be a 6 foot tall, 200-pound powerlifter, but that’s beside the point. So it also ignores the range. We have no evidence at all that the average trans woman is any bigger, stronger, faster than the average cisgender woman.

… I’m sometimes misquoted as saying the performance advantage is irrelevant. It’s not, per se, that the advantage question is irrelevant. Its that the way that we think about human rights, in that legal and ethical standards of when it’s OK to override a person’s human right, is that the performance advantages aren’t high enough. If you look at elite athletics, every single elite athlete has some kind of genetic mutation that makes them amazing at their sport. Michael Phelps, his joint structure and body proportion, make him a like a fish, which is awesome. But we shouldn’t say that he has an unfair competitive advantage. The question is not whether there is a competitive advantage, the question is whether there is an unfair advantage. Sports is about competitive advantages. We have coaching and equipment and training, nutrition, rest all of these things are meant to produce competitive advantages over other people. Just because there is a competitive advantage doesn’t make it unfair.

Is being trans just another natural physical characteristic that, if — and this is a gigantic “if” — it provides an advantage, should we treat it like just being tall? We do not regulate height. In many sports height provides a massive competitive advantage. I’m six-foot. I’m too short to be an elite volleyball athlete. If you compared a five-foot woman to a 6-foot-4 woman, the tall woman will have such a competitive advantage that the shorter woman won’t be able to compete in volleyball or basketball. But we don’t consider that massive advantage unfair. Is being trans just another way to be a natural person who maybe gets an avenge for it that we should treat like being tall?

But I was not ready for the culture shock of university, a small, selective liberal arts college. On the first day of orientation after moving into my new dorm, we had a floor meeting in which we introduced ourselves by name, location, fun fact, and preferred pronouns. “Remember, you cannot assume ANYONE’S gender identity!” I felt silly having to tell a room of 40+ people that I prefer she/her pronouns, yet many people, at least five or six, who looked obviously male or female announced that they preferred the opposite pronouns. No one flinched or stuttered or acted like this activity was superfluous–though one international student asked me later, privately, why we had to do that. One person even announced that “some days” she would prefer to be called she, but other days would be going by he. Everyone nodded along, as if, of course, this makes sense.

There were many boys wearing eyeliner but those were boys. There were girls wearing eyeliner that were also boys. Boys with small beards that were actually girls. And everything in between. ...

There is no doubt in my mind that there is a social contagion among college students. At my school, it is trendy to be transgender, and to people who feel like they don’t fit in, particularly with other people of their biological sex, choosing to transition to the opposite sex, and become a member of the opposite sex, may certainly seem like a more viable option than continuing to feel rejected while trying to fit in. But a lot of this culture surrounding trans teens and college students is aggressively narcissistic and cutesy — selfies captioned “i love being nonbinary,” “you’re gay no matter who you date,” and “baby’s first binder!” At best these random, new identities are invented to fit an aesthetic. At worst they are aggressively anti “straight white men,” apparently the worst species on earth and the ones responsible for all hardship, as they threaten professors and other students who dare to hint at an observation that doesn’t sound affirmative of transgender identities.

While I have tried my best, and initially succeeded, in believing the narratives of the transgender experience, it struck me at college that this phenomenon is so widespread, so political, and so trendy, that I am now completely dubious. I am not allowed to speak honestly and openly on this subject without being defamed as a conservative, a transphobe, intolerant, and anti-feminist. As someone who is not trans, I am not allowed to think or talk about trans issues unless I am agreeing with a trans person. Because I can’t know what it’s like to feel born in the wrong body.