Are Sports Fair?

Trans Inclusion in Sports: Part 2

In Part 3, I’ll share information about what we know from the research on gender and sports participation (spoiler alert: being trans does not inherently make someone better at sports) - but I think it’s important to first tackle the premise on which anti-trans sports policies are built: fairness.

When I introduce this topic in class, I ask students to list the different things that might give someone an advantage in sports (asking them to put aside gender for the time being). Often they start with things like hard work and “God-given” talent. They will usually list physiological characteristics, like height, weight, stature, and physical ability. Sometimes someone will bring up Michael Phelps’ body producing half the amount of lactic acid of typical humans, which purportedly provides a genetic advantage as his body can recover from exertion more quickly.

It takes a little longer for most students to start listing social factors. Factors like geography, which might influence your access to participate in certain programs. The schools that you attend, which could impact not only your access to programs but also the quality of the training available to you. And a big one: your socioeconomic status, which impacts the resources (time, money, and access) you have to spend quality time training in a sport. In fact, according to a 2022 scientific review study commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES), “social factors like coaching, time to train, and access to equipment contribute to performance far more than testosterone.” Yet such factors are “consistently overlooked in policy-making” around sport participation.

Sport is often described as a “level-playing field” - a metaphor that is also used to describe the myth of a meritocracy in the rest of our lives. But the reality is that everyone has a different starting line. A combination of factors determine what that starting line is and whether a person will be able to overcome any hurdles in their way. In other, words, sports are NEVER truly fair. So why do we care about "fairness" when it comes to gender? We'll get to that in Part 4.

Check out the other posts in the series, and head to Athlete Ally's Resource page for more ways to support trans inclusion in sports.