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title: "Trans athletes in sports"
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<h1 class="p-name">Trans athletes in sports</h1>
<p>288 words, ~2 minute read. <span v-html="data[`site/${pageData.page.value.relativePath}`]" /></p>
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Sports are meant to be competitions with winners and losers, which means intrinsically that one has to be better than the other. But we've determined certain advantages as "fair" ones and others as not, without fully acknowledging how fairness is just a [Social Construct](/garden/social-constructs/index.md).

When Michael Phelps won gold medal after gold medal, no one complained that his naturally webbed feet were an "unfair" advantage, or put him in a separate league like we do for [Gender](/garden/gender/index.md). But when Caster Semenya, a cis woman with naturally higher levels of testosterone than other women, wanted to compete in track and field internationally she was told she'd need to take testosterone reducing medicine (until she years later [won the case](https://apnews.com/article/caster-semenya-sex-eligbility-court-ruling-0ad6f46e1357659f8cc315dde7b01faf) in Europe's human rights court, with caveats). If you have ADHD you're allowed to take performance enhancing drugs, but otherwise not. Coffee and protein could clearly be classified as performance enhancing drugs but for the fact we've socially defined PED as narrowly avoiding those substances. These are arbitrary rules that only seem fair to some people, because there is no objective fairness. So when trans athletes are attacked both when they compete with [those of their assigned gender](https://www.advocate.com/election/texas-gop-colin-allred-transgender) at birth as well as when they compete with [those of their preferred gender](https://www.texastribune.org/2021/01/30/texas-republicans-transgender-students-sports/), it's clear the motivation behind it all is not really about fairness in sports, but about making trans people go away. And yet, trans athletes tend to be an issue where even many socially leftist voices will discuss how "complicated" this issue is and even spread the idea that anti-trans policies are required in order to preserve fairness, such as The Young Turks as described in [Why I Left TYT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6DiIQWb0DE).

Being trans should not mean you are banned from competing or relegated to a division for just trans people. The argument is usually that trans individuals are either currently receiving or used to receive larger amounts of testosterone than those they'd be competing with. But the competition isn't about who has the more testosterone. Well, the argument continues, testosterone levels may be indicative of increased muscle growth. But muscle growth also isn't what the competition is about. It can be argued to indicate performance at the actual sport/activity the competition is over, but at this point isn't it too many layers of imperfect abstractions and assumptions? The person who wins is less tied to their actual ability and who happens to come out on top on each of these specific estimations.

There are many advantages one might have in sports, but contrary to a true meritocracy, our arbitrary distinctions on allowed vs disallowed advantages exposes the biases of our society, which are often racist, sexist, and transphobic. Therefore, appeals to "fairness" are explicit endorsements of those biases, namely bigotry.

I also support idubbbz discussing his support for trans athletes in [100 percent women](https://youtu.be/qfUsuQ8rfu4), coming from the context of a boxer who has ran boxing competitions.