By Nigel Becker

Who should play girls’ and women’s sports?

That was a major issue of contention during the Center for Ethics and Human Values’ Civil Discourse Forum, “Should Transgender Athletes Be Permitted to Compete According to Their Gender Identity?” The Sports and Society Initiative co-sponsored the April 5 event.

Three speakers shared their perspectives on the inclusion of trans athletes in sports competitions including Kim Jones, co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS); Dr. Naomi Scheinerman, assistant professor of Bioethics at OSU and Dr. Joanna Harper, a post-doctoral scholar at Oregon Health and Sciences University.

Transgender female athletes possess innate advantages which give them an unfair advantage over cisgender female competitors, Jones said.

“Men and women are built differently in almost every way, and its impacts are enormous for women across the globe and across all cultures,” Jones said. “The fundamental question we are asking right now is: do women and girls deserve access to fair sport, and the answer is yes or no.”

Jones drew on her own experiences as a tennis pro and mother of an Ivy League swimmer. She also cited research demonstrating cisgender men’s advantages over cisgender women in strength and speed, as well as drawing on her own experiences as a tennis pro and mother of an Ivy League swimmer.

“Usain Bolt is not faster than FloJo because FloJo didn’t try hard enough,” Jones said.

Cisgender female athletes are victims of “emotional blackmail” by trans athletes, Jones said. She then compared the situation to men who threaten to harm themselves if their wives leave them.

Scheinerman framed the debate as whether the exclusion of trans female athletes from female sports constitutes justified discrimination, “an appropriate means of achieving a legitimate aim.”

She said that the exclusion of trans athletes is premised on three flawed points: biological determinism, which claims biology is responsible for all sex differences, a lack of attention to social conditions, such as a greater emphasis on sports for boys — which could explain male athletes’ advantage — and a failure to consider other sources of athletic disparities.

“There’s also lots of barriers we need to work on, racial injustices and other systems of oppression that lead people to not participate in sports,” Scheinerman said.

Harper discussed scientific research on trans athletes. In 2015, she published the first study examining trans athletes in 2015, and has authored another that’s awaiting publication. However, she said much more research needs to be done.

“Currently, when I advise governing bodies, I suggest that any policy they make today needs to be a living document that will be modified as we get more data,” Harper said.

During the second half of the event, the speakers fielded questions from Civil Discourse student fellows Kayla Anderson and Muheeb Hijazeen, as well as the audience. Topics included transgender men’s participation in sports, whether there should be separate leagues for trans athletes and whether the debate over trans athletes has distracted from other issues impeding equality for women’s sports.

Relative to their share of the population, transgender athletes are underrepresented in many sports, Harper said. Just one-twentieth of one percent of the women competing in NCAA sports are transgender, whereas trans people are one percent of the U.S. population.

“Trans women are not dominating women’s sports and are not likely to at any time in the future,” Harper said.