Imagine a situation where some country – let us say China, since they’re not historically averse to training Olympic athletes from childhood – was found to have provided masses of testosterone to its female weightlifters from the ages of 12 to 25 while training them to enter the Olympic weightlifting competition later in life.
In such circumstances, we would have an international sporting scandal. After all, there is no doubt that such doping would fundamentally alter the development of the female body in such a way as to confer a lasting, irreversible competitive advantage over other female competitors, who had gone about their training and development in the usual, normal, way.
In fact, a female athlete who is found to unnaturally increase her testosterone levels will be banned, without any mitigation, if she is found to have done so, because it is considered doping.
So how, then, can it possibly be fair for a New Zealand athlete, who was born male, and developed into a fully grown man, to compete in the women’s weightlifting in the forthcoming Olympics?
Laurel Hubbard transitioned from male to female as an adult. At the age of 20, she (as he) set national records in men’s weightlifting in New Zealand. She has a male body, and all of the physical advantages a male body confers.
Women’s sport is separate from men’s sport for the simple reason that we recognise those physical advantages. We would not expect the top female athletes to compete against the top male athletes because, all things being equal, the male athlete would win every time. The two would not be competing on a level biological playing field.
Little of this, of course, has to be explained to most people. Instinctively, most of us understand how incredibly unfair this is to female athletes, many of whom will have worked for their whole lives for the chance to appear and take part in one Olympic games. Now they find themselves being asked to compete against somebody who, had she not changed the gender by which she identifies, would fairly be competing against men.
While most of us get this, some people persist in making arguments for Hubbard’s inclusion anyway. For example, they say, physical characteristics provide an inherent advantage all the time – so why should it be different here? What they mean, of course, is that a tall, naturally heavier man would never make a good racehorse jockey or Formula One driver – sports dominated by the diminutive amongst us. Those short people would make poor basketball players. People born and raised at altitude tend to be better long-distance runners, because their body is used to thinner, less oxygenated air, and so on. So, does it matter, they argue, if one weightlifter was born a man? How is that different, they wonder, to a weightlifter who spent her whole life living at extreme altitude, and developed more lung capacity as a result?
But it does matter. It matters because we have male and female sports to begin with. We recognise that in general, across the spectrum, men will be stronger and more powerful than women. And while the strongest and most powerful woman may be on a par with an average man, a slightly above average man will beat her most of the time. In this case, then, we are not really promoting excellence: Laurel Hubbard, by all accounts, was an entirely average male weightlifter. Suddenly, by virtue of changing gender, she is a potential medalist. Laurel Hubbard, if she does win a medal, won’t be winning it by virtue of being an outstanding female athlete. She will win it by virtue of being an average formerly male athlete competing against women.
This whole farce makes a joke, and a nonsense, out of women’s sports. If it is allowed to continue, then those who are naturally born women will find themselves, increasingly, standing on the lower step of a podium, beneath a person who was born a man and decided to change their gender later in life.
There are real costs, too. At least one woman has already been negatively impacted:
This is Kuinini ‘Nini’ Manumua, the woman who was ultimately displaced by inclusion of Laurel Hubbard.
She’s 21, and it would have been her first Olympics. pic.twitter.com/l8RH0q0njz
— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) June 21, 2021
This is not a matter, by the way, of insisting that Laurel Hubbard is a man. As far as most fair minded people are concerned, if Hubbard wants to live her life, and be known, as female, then fair enough. But that right to be recognised should not come at the expense of actual women and girls. Nor should it come at the expense of making us afraid, or reticent, to challenge nonsense like this. The reason we have male and female sports is based entirely on biology. Laurel Hubbard might be spiritually female, but biologically, she is 100% a man. That alone should, in any sane world, disqualify her from the women’s Olympics.
That it does not makes you wonder if, in fact, this is a sane world.