Lia Thomas, Trans Rights, and the Future of Elite Sports: 3 Takeaways From My MIT Panel

I had the privilege last month to moderate a panel on transgender athletes at the Sloan Conference at MIT. Sloan is the big sports analytics conference that takes over the Boston Convention Center every year, with dozens of presentations and discussions on the intersection between data and sports. My panel had three others on it: Ross Tucker, a sports psychologist from South Africa; Joanna Harper, who is considered one of the foremost researchers in the field; and Katie Barnes, who covers trans issues for ESPN. Since trans participation in sports has recently become Topic #1 in legislatures and in places like the New York Times and Fox News Opinion pages, I thought I would share a few of my takeaways from the discussion.

Katie Barnes made a version of this point at the end of our discussion, and I thought it was the most important point of the day: “We're seeing a tremendous amount of openness around bills passing that affect different slices of the experiences in public life of trans people and of LGBTQ people more broadly and doing so with relative impunity.”

If anything, she was understating matters. What is happening right now in America on the state level is horrifying. It is open season on the trans community.

It is worth reading—if you haven’t already—the letter Texas Governor Greg Abbott wrote to the head of the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services. In it, he says that Texas intends to classify what is known as “gender-affirming care” for trans youth as child abuse. Gender-affirming care includes things like puberty-blocking medications and hormone injections. Abbott writes:

Wait. What??

Abbott goes on to describe what sounds an awful lot like a witch hunt.

To put it mildly, this is nuts.

It is one thing if people want to debate the merits of gender-affirming care. But this isn’t the State of Texas weighing in on the argument. This is Texas using its most punitive enforcement powers to terrorize parents who are trying to help their children navigate a deeply confusing and consequential set of questions and challenges.

This kind of thing is not only going on in Texas. The last few years have seen a surge of anti-trans legislation from states. Meanwhile, there are studies being published in academic and medical journals that begin like this: “Data indicate that 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth.”

There is a crisis going on in the transgender community, and it’s a lot bigger than the question of whether transgender athletes can or can’t compete in sports.

A few weeks ago, the governor of Utah attempted (and ultimately failed) to veto an anti-trans athlete bill in his state. And his main point was this same argument. By his count out of 75,000 kids who compete in school sports in Utah, a grand total of four are openly transgender. And of those four, only one competes for a girl’s team, which is, obviously, the problematic category of transgender athletic participation.

Cox writes: “Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what this is all about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are part of something.”

He continues: “Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few, I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live.”

He’s absolutely right. The big debate this spring over transgender athletes was triggered by the swimmer Lia Thomas. Thomas used to compete for the Penn men’s team, but she transitioned last year. She competed this spring for the Penn women’s team and promptly won the 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA championships by a significant margin. Even in a world where more and more trans people come out of the closet, it is unlikely that what happened with Lia Thomas is going to be a common occurrence. There are no other trans women who have ever competed at that level in women’s swimming. Or, for that matter, who have ever won an NCAA title in any event. Given the amount of jumping up and down over trans athletes on both sides of this issue, you would think this is one of the biggest social crises in America. It isn't.

Many Americans—and I would even go so far as to say most—are appalled by the wave of anti-trans legislation sweeping the country.

At the same time, many of those same people have difficulty accepting the idea that someone who has grown up biologically male—who has the heart and lungs and musculature of a man, and 20-odd years of the benefit of male hormones—should be allowed to compete against cisgender women, who have had none of those accumulated physiological advantages.

These people do not think of these two positions as mutually exclusive. What’s happening in Texas is a violation of basic human rights. But what should be done with trans athletes—in particular trans women who want to compete with cisgender women—is as much a practical and empirical question as it is a debate over principle. The male/female categories for sporting events were invented 100 years ago, at a time when no one thought the division of athletes along those lines was either complicated or controversial. The world has changed. Those categories now fit awkwardly at best to the world we live in today. How do you ensure a level playing field when someone from one category crosses over and joins another category—when the second category involves people with markedly fewer physiological advantages than the first?

When I was preparing for the Sloan session, I asked a ton of people to give me their perspective on this issue. Virtually everyone I spoke to was adamantly in favor of trans rights and against the participation of trans women in women’s sports. The Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle reached the same conclusion regarding the parents, teammates, and others who spoke up in opposition to Lia Thomas’s championship win: “I’ve now written two columns about Thomas, and it is striking how many people — almost all of them liberal — have spontaneously erupted when I told them what I was writing about. All made the same complaint: It’s not fair.”

Now, you may disagree with the way many Americans have chosen to divide up their support for trans rights and freedoms. My point is simply: many, many people are divided on these questions. And if the trans community is currently losing the political argument in America, it may be because they are trying to attach a civil rights crusade that has strong public support to a niche debate that has limited public support.

The discussion we had at Sloan was instructive on this point. We had two people on the panel—Katie Barnes and Joanna Harper—who might be called trans-rights activists, and one, Ross Tucker, who has been critical of the current policies regarding the participation of trans women in elite sport. But we didn’t have a philosophical debate over rights. We had, instead, a quite technical discussion about how this complicated effort to level the playing field between trans women and cis women is supposed to work. You can’t just let trans women sign up for women’s sports the minute they have decided to transition. No one thinks that would be fair. The consensus is that trans women have to make some concession to their innate biological advantage. That concession, at the present time in many sports, involves taking testosterone-suppression medication for roughly a year and a half, such that testosterone levels fall below five nanomoles per liter (which represents a roughly 75-percent decrease from typical male levels).

Here’s the point in the conversation where Joanna Harper talked about what we know happens when a trans woman suppresses her testosterone.

Hormone therapy will not turn transwomen into cisgender or typical women. Understand that this is an advocate for trans participation in sports speaking. But what she's saying is that the process of trying to create a level playing field is tricky. Hemoglobin falls. But physical strength doesn’t, and nor—obviously—do height and weight. Even the standard of asking trans women to lower their testosterone to below five nanomoles per liter is problematic: that’s still two and half times higher than the levels in the overwhelming majority of cis women.

So what does this mean? It means that it is silly to push the idea—as conservatives seem to want to do at the moment—that people should only be able to compete in the gender category they were assigned to at birth. If the effects of testosterone suppression are so variable, every sport is going to have to come up with its own way of handling the issue.

Hemoglobin is the protein in the blood that carries oxygen. So if male hemoglobin falls to female levels with testosterone suppression, that means the playing field for trans women and cis women in endurance sports is going to be pretty level. But strength doesn’t fall much, so the decision facing power sports is going to be very different.

The 100-meter dash is going to be a hard case. But the 5000-meter run might not be. Basketball is a hard case. But competitive shooting, which depends on neither strength nor endurance? Super easy.

On the other hand, Ross Tucker makes a very compelling argument that with contact sports like, say, rugby, there’s a real safety issue that needs to be sorted out, first and foremost. If a 6-foot-4, 250-pound trans woman wants to play a contact sport with lots of cis women, does that create an unacceptably elevated risk of concussion or injury? Good question. Sports like rugby and ultimate fighting and hockey are going to have to sort that one out—and the conversation they’ll need to have is going to be very different than, say, the conversations that will have to take place in Nordic skiing.

I could go on. There’s an additional level of complexity added by the level of competition. Millions of dollars can be on the line in a high-prestige Olympic event, so getting this process right really matters. But do we care if occasionally a little child who was born a boy but identifies as a girl wants to play on the girls’ soccer team? There are people who try to pretend that the two cases—Olympic sports and some random 9-year-old’s intramural soccer team—are the same. They are not. If we are to be intellectually honest, we must admit that it is foolish to espouse a principled position on trans participation in sports. There is no principle here. Only a lot of hard decisions. And there is certainly no position here. Only positions.

The funniest moment in the Sloan discussion was when I asked Katie Barnes to describe what Lia Thomas would have to do to qualify for the Olympic trials.

So the issue goes to something called the Committee on Competitive Safeguards, which promises to review the policies from the national governing body.

Barnes went on. And on. And remember, she was doing the best she could to be economical.

And on. And on.

The people running the swimming world are not dumb or insensitive. But they are—like everyone else—trying their best to sort through something that isn’t easy. I think we all need to calm down. And be patient. A debate in the absence of understanding is not actually a debate. It’s just a shouting match. I think we have enough of those in America at the moment.

[Photo: Mike Comer/NCAA Photos via Getty Images]