Daniel DeMontigny
For more than a century, women have been seeking equity in the opportunity to participate and be recognized in sports institutions that have always been dominated by men. For feminists, the establishment of women’s sport, an institution protected by the biological separation of the sexes, would have been essential to the emancipation of women. For the sake of equality and social justice, transgender rights advocates demand that they be included in sports, from high school to the Olympic Games, depending on the gender they identify with. The arguments are largely based on a belief, widely held by academic circles, that sexual identity is not a matter of biology but rather a social construct. According to Doriane Lambelet Coleman, Professor of Women’s Law at Duke University, the introduction of « biological » men into women’s sport would greatly diminish the ability of biological women to reach the podium.
Biological differences between the sexes and in sports are important and irrefutable, according to a review of the endocrinology literature of 2018. Hormones are the regulators of these differences. Testosterone is the hormone that determines the psychological and physical separation of the sexes, from pregnancy to adulthood, but especially differences in performance in sports, especially among women. In boys, it will gradually increase to 15 times that of girls at puberty. This increase will produce important changes in several tissues and organs: the volume and composition of the muscles, the density and the structure of the bones, the stature, the volume of the lungs and the heart, the hemoglobin which transports the oxygen, the amount of fat and its distribution on the body, and the absolute ability to metabolize sugars.
These important differences will confer a 10 to 12% advantage on boys’ athletic performance on girls. Female genetic athletes have particular characteristics and issues related to estrogen production by the ovaries, at puberty and following intensive training: the pelvis will be wider, the size and density of the bones will be less (the men are 7 to 8% larger on average), the amount of fat will be higher and its distribution on the body, different. These factors would affect athletic performance, which would be delayed for teenage girls compared to boys. A marked decrease in estrogen, due to the irregularity or absence of menstruation, common in elite female athletes, affects bone mass, and consequently, there would be a higher incidence of bone injuries compared to men. During regular menstruation, the level of iron, which carries oxygen (hemoglobin), will be lower (anemia) and will affect the cardiovascular performance.
Sports institutions require those who want to participate in women’s sports to « dope » with testosterone blockers to bring themselves back to the biological threshold of women. If it is true that blocking this hormone reduces muscle volume and hemoglobin, restoring the equality of transgender women with biological women according to transgendered activists, it remains that the architecture of the bones, the size of the athlete, and the absence of ovaries are irreversible and give a clear advantage in most sports. According to Éric Vilain, a geneticist and adviser for the IOC, replacing « biological sex » with that of « gender identity » « would be a disaster for women’s sport … a sad end to what feminists have been clamoring for long time ».