Ottawa Citizen

FASTER HIGHER STRONGER?

Canada and the Internatio­nal Olympic Committee have passed the divisive issue of trans inclusion for elite athletes down to the individual sports, upping the tension, confusion and controvers­y leading up to Paris 2024

David Carrier has a theory that human male bodies evolved to be more efficient than female bodies at landing blows with their fists.

In a small study published in 2020, the evolutiona­ry biologist and colleagues at the University of Utah reported that men seem more “anatomical­ly specialize­d” in the muscular and skeletal traits that propel a punch forward. Males had greater strength and torque in the deltoid and pectoral muscles that horizontal­ly flex the shoulder, and the triceps muscles extending the elbow. At roughly equal levels of fitness, the men in their study packed nearly twice as much power into a punching motion — cranking a flywheel — than the women.

The finding suggests there are more sexual difference­s in the muscles that push the hand forward (punch), Carrier wrote in an email, “than in those that pull it back toward the shoulder,” like throwing a spear.

If their controvers­ial theory is correct, that “striking with fist” was important in the evolution of hominins, particular­ly in maleto-male brawls over females, “boxing may be one of the sports in which sexual dimorphism in performanc­e, and the advantage of individual­s who have undergone male puberty, is more pronounced,” Carrier said.

Katia Bissonnett­e wasn't thinking about our early ancestors when she left a hotel room last October with her combat gear: shoes, boxing suit, skipping rope, mouthpiece, bandages. The psychologi­st and amateur boxer from Saguenay was heading into her warm-up before a Quebec provincial Golden Gloves contest in Victoriavi­lle, her first official fight in front of a referee.

She's 36, old for a boxer. A former drug addict who started using at 13 and didn't stop until she was 30, Bissonnett­e took up boxing two years ago after completing her doctorate in psychology and falling into an “absolute existentia­l void.” Boxing gave her meaning. It helps keep her clean. “It pushes me to my very limits, and I feel like I'm in the right place, like I'm bringing back some of my former world. The battles, the survival, the suffering, the blood. I know all that like the back of my hand.”

My suspicion is that, across the sport system, we have very likely had numerous cases of transgende­red athletes participat­ing, without anyone knowing their transgende­r status.

CHRISTOPHE­R LINDSAY, president, Boxing Canada

Even the not-very-good male, because of the size of the male advantages, will be able to beat a great many females and deny those females a chance at progressin­g in their own category. — Leslie Howe, University of Saskatchew­an philosophy professor

A novice competing in the women's 75-kg category, Bissonnett­e headed into last October's bout with one exhibition win under her belt and hopes of snagging her first championsh­ip.

What she didn't know was that she'd soon be backed into a corner, not by punches but by a subtle text message to her coach from another coach an hour before she was due to step into the ring. Her opponent had “not always lived as a woman,” the message read.

“I felt used, duped,” Bissonnett­e said of the loose rules and lack of transparen­cy about her transgende­r opponent.

As a precaution — she worried a bad punch could mean a serious or permanent injury — she pulled out, her coach telling La Presse, “In boxing, we hit each other on the face, we are not in a pool of water or on a racetrack!” Bissonnett­e said she also didn't want to set a precedent. “I did not want to lead other fighters to accept a fight like this.”

Her act of protest ignited a Quebec media storm over one of the most divisive issues in the sporting world: the inclusion of male-to-female transgende­r athletes — transgende­r women — in female-only categories.

How it will play out at the Paris 2024 Olympics isn't clear. Three years after the Internatio­nal Olympic Committee left it up to each world sport body to set its own rules around trans inclusion, booting the issue back to the federation­s, several key sports, including cycling, track and field and swimming, have tightened eligibilit­y criteria for trans female athletes wishing to compete in women's categories. Rules range from outright bans — World Rugby — to maintainin­g testostero­ne within a permissibl­e threshold, somewhere in the “normal” female range.

Other sport bodies are reviewing their policies or plan to deal with the issue on a case-by-case basis, creating further confusion in an issue that has roiled critics, spurred lawsuits and divided the women's sports community.

In its latest “Portrayal Guidelines” for media and agencies covering the Games, the IOC says to avoid terms like “biological male,” “born male,” “born female,” “biological­ly male,” because these phrases “can be dehumanizi­ng and inaccurate when used to describe transgende­r sportspeop­le and athletes with sex variations. A person's sex category is not assigned based on genetics alone, and aspects of a person's biology can be altered when they pursue gender-affirming medical care.”

In Canada, sport bodies have generally adopted inclusive policies that hinge on gender identity alone: at domestic competitio­ns, meaning events in Canada for Canadian athletes, participan­ts can register in the gender category with which they identify.

High-performing athletes must abide by the rules of their respective internatio­nal federation­s for internatio­nally sanctioned competitio­ns and games. But under its “inclusion-first” philosophy, the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport recommends athletes be permitted to participat­e in the gender category of their choosing, with no requiremen­t for any medical interventi­ons and no requiremen­t to disclose trans status.

In Canada, Conservati­ve Party Leader Pierre Poilievre waded into the wrangle earlier this year when he said female sport categories (and change rooms) should be off-limits to “biological males.” Polls suggest Canadians support that view, by a wide margin. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has pledged to create biological-female-only sports leagues for women and girls, a policy change federal Sport and Physical Activity Minister Carla Qualtrough has denounced as denying access to sport for purely ideologica­l reasons.

It's a hotly debated issue, a collision of competing human rights: the right of biological females to equal opportunit­y in sport based on sex versus the right of male-to-female trans athletes to compete based on gender identity. Most controvers­ially, the IOC, in its latest framework, says there should be no “presumptio­n of advantage,” which is contrary to its previous positions and which critics say is a prepostero­us claim that ignores why sports were segregated by sex in the first place.

Opponents of inclusion policies argue biological performanc­e advantages enjoyed by biological males are only modestly blunted when testostero­ne is suppressed, as per many sporting guidelines. They say that sporting bodies have surrendere­d to a tide of radical trans activism, and that the voices of elite female athletes — most of whom, while sympatheti­c to transgende­r oppression, also support categoriza­tion by biological sex, recent research finds — have been ignored or silenced. A survey of 25 high-performing Canadian female athletes commission­ed by Sports Canada — a study a U.s.-based LGBTQ sports advocacy group intervened to shut down over allegation­s the researcher­s were perpetuati­ng discrimina­tory stereotype­s by referring to trans women as “biological males” — found female athletes fear speaking freely without being attacked and labelled transphobi­c, risking sponsorshi­ps and careers.

Those in favour of greater inclusion say trans female athletes are the latest targets for moral gender panic over trans rights. While female athletes face many obstacles “trans women aren't one of them,” a Harvard Crimson editorial recently argued. At the U.S. college level, their numbers are “strikingly minuscule,” the Harvard student newspaper wrote (40 of the 500,000 athletes registered with the National Collegiate Athletics Associatio­n, or NCAA, are known to be trans).

According to a 2021 review commission­ed by the CCES, Canada's ethics in sport and anti-doping body, “it's a myth that trans women dominate (i.e. win) all sports.” Studies that have concluded that they do have an unfair athletic advantage used “cis men” as a proxy for trans women, the authors said, “even though trans women's bodies and living conditions are not comparable to cis men's.”

They also noted that no trans female has won an Olympic medal since the Games were opened to trans athletes at Athens 2004.

Canadian soccer midfielder Quinn, the first openly nonbinary, transgende­r athlete to capture an Olympic medal with the Canadian women's team at the Tokyo Games, was assigned female at birth. Most trans male athletes (female to male) choose to compete in the female category because testostero­ne, the gender-affirming hormone administer­ed to trans men, is a prohibited substance under the World Anti-doping Code.

So the debate centres on trans women competing at the elite level against biological females. To critics, it's worse than doping of all kinds. Ideology is trumping logic, 18-time Grand Slam champion and gay rights activist Martina Navratilov­a wrote in an op-ed in the Sunday Times. “It's insane and it's cheating,” she said, which led to accusation­s the former tennis champ is transphobi­c and stoking wild and irrational fears. The controvers­y has sparked legal action in the U.S., pitting biological female varsity athletes against trans inclusions policies they say have cost them spots on the podium and scholarshi­ps. Two dozen state legislatur­es have passed bills restrictin­g trans youths' ability to participat­e in sports as part of a recent rush of anti-trans bills.

The issue has become ugly. In late May, crowds booed a transgende­r high school sophomore runner for taking a state girls' championsh­ip, with others blaming adults for the mess. Whether Paris will be the Games when trans tensions will be tested is questionab­le. For many nations, Olympic trials are underway or still to come.

“Sometimes a person will show up out of the blue, and all of a sudden it turns out to be a trans-identifyin­g male in women's sport,” said former Canadian track champion Linda Blade.

New Zealand weightlift­er Laurel Hubbard became the first openly trans woman to participat­e in the Olympics, at the Tokyo Games. However, transgende­r Olympians now face tighter restrictio­ns, most often exclusion from the female category if they transited after age 12 or after the start of puberty, whichever came later.

— Linda Blade, former Canadian track champion, kinesiolog­ist, sport performanc­e coach, past-president of Athletics Alberta, and author

Bodies are different, said Blade, a kinesiolog­ist, sport performanc­e coach, past president of Athletics Alberta and co-author, with National Post columnist Barbara Kay, of Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport. Biological females have looser joints and wider hips. For biological males, testostero­ne exposure through early life drives advantages in sport performanc­e, such as more fat-free body mass and more muscle mass that can't be “fixed” by estrogen therapy or other interventi­ons, she said. One study that looked at the gender gap in Olympic sport performanc­e, and between world records, concluded that women will never “run, jump, swim or ride as fast as men,” that women's performanc­es at the highest level “will never match those of biological males.”

“We're not saying one (body) is worse than the other,” Blade said. “Simply that male bodies do not belong in female competitio­n. No matter what you do to that male body, it's always going to have male morphology.”

Female bodies were barred outright from the ancient Olympics. They weren't included when the modern Games were first organized in 1896. A separate female category was ultimately introduced at the 1900 Games in Paris. A total of 22 women (out of 997 athletes) competed in five sports: tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrian and golf.

“In keeping with the ethics of fair play,” competitio­ns were organized along sex-restricted lines, Jonathan Reeser, a physical medicine and rehab specialist, wrote in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. But sex segregatio­n also increased the possibilit­y of sex fraud, of men “masqueradi­ng as women in order to compete for the laurels of victory,” Reeser said. The most famous case of gender fraud involved German high-jumper

Dora/heinrich Ratjen, who competed at Berlin 1936 as a woman, but was later revealed to be a man.

To prevent similar “transgress­ions,” women competing in the 1966 European Track and Field Championsh­ips had to parade naked, or nearly nude, before a panel of female doctors to prove their “femininity.” Over the years, pre-competitio­n gender verificati­on became part-and-parcel of female athletics. The embarrassi­ng genitalia exams were replaced with cheek swabs in the 1960s to test for male (XY) and female (XX) sex chromosome­s. But even then, the picture wasn't always so neat and tidy. Some people are born with difference­s in sexual developmen­t, or DSD, where chromosome­s don't fully correspond with the external genitals. It has been reported that South Africa's Caster Semenya has one X and one Y chromosome in each cell, a condition known as 46,XY that results in much higher levels of testostero­ne compared to most female athletes. At the 800-metre race at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Canada's Melissa Bishop placed fourth, behind Semenya and two other athletes from Burundi and Kenya who also had variants of DSD.

In 1992, the IOC switched to testing for the testes-determinin­g SRY gene. Gender verificati­on was finally abolished in the lead-up to the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. Three years later, the Games were opened to trans athletes, provided they had undergone sex reassignme­nt surgery. After Canadian cyclist Kirsten Worley challenged that criterion, the IOC, in 2015, dropped the surgery prerequisi­te for trans women, but said they must abide by a circulatin­g testostero­ne limit below a specific level for at least 12 months prior to competitio­n. In its latest guidance for trans inclusion rolled out in 2021, the IOC recommends sports bodies largely ditch any testostero­ne directive.

Some bodies, such as the Canadian

Powerlifti­ng Union, allowed inclusion via self-identifica­tion only: At both the recreation­al and competitiv­e level, an individual could participat­e in the gender category of their choosing, regardless of whether they have undergone hormone therapy. Athletes weren't required to disclose their trans identity or history to the CPU, or any of its coaches, staff, officials or other representa­tives. And no testostero­ne limits were deemed necessary.

The policy would later be changed to include new restrictio­ns on trans inclusion, effective Nov. 1, 2023, but not before a Canadian transgende­r female powerlifte­r smashed a national record with a combined score for bench press, deadlift and squat of just under 598 kilograms — approximat­ely 1,318 pounds.

April Hutchinson met Anne Andres on a Facebook group for powerlifte­rs when the pandemic shelved competitio­ns. Andres was relatively new in the powerlifti­ng scene, so Hutchinson offered a few tips here and there on form. Hutchinson said Andres referred to herself as a “she-boy.”

“I didn't know what that meant,” Hutchinson said. “We had great conversati­ons,” until the day their online chats turned to Laurel Hubbard, the New Zealand lifter who competed in the Tokyo Games. A “pioneer for trans athletes,” the Kiwi lifter was taken out of the running for the podium after three unsuccessf­ul lift attempts.

Hutchinson is a Team Canada powerlifte­r, holder of the North American record for deadlift (220 kg) in the women's 84-plus kg weight class, and a recovering alcoholic. She discovered booze at 12, became a “full-fledged” alcoholic at 18, and didn't stop drinking until her early 40s, when she woke up in intensive care one morning, her liver shutting down, a nurse on the phone with her father, a former London, Ont. cop on the drug squad who worked overtime to pay for Hutchinson's sports equipment — ringette, baseball, tennis — when she was a kid.

Hutchinson told Andres she thought it “completely unfair” to allow a trans athlete to compete in the women's category. “(Andres) said, `Well, you know I'm (transgende­r), don't you?'” Hutchinson asked how far Andres intended to go with powerlifti­ng. It wasn't just for fun — Andres had nationals and worlds aspiration­s, Hutchinson said she was told. “I was like, `Well, if you do, Anne, I will speak up, because that is completely unfair.'

“I sat with it for a while,” Hutchinson said, but then she stopped sitting with it and wrote to her provincial and national powerlifti­ng bodies. “I just let them know about Anne, and I asked, `What are the policies?' I had no answer whatsoever, like, not even, `Thank you for your email.'”

When Andres clinched first place in the Female Masters Unequipped Category at the Western Canadian Powerlifti­ng and Bench Press Championsh­ips last August, beating out the second-place biological female finisher by more than 200 kg, Hutchinson took her protests to social media, which led to an interview with controvers­ial British broadcaste­r Piers Morgan. In that interview, Hutchinson referred to Andres as a “man.” She was slapped with a two-year suspension by CPU over allegation­s of misgenderi­ng and harassment and breaching social media policies. The suspension was reduced to a year under an appeal.

When contacted for this story, Andres responded: “Your side has already won. I left the sport. You can all congratula­te yourselves on ensuring trans people are not allowed to live open, happy lives, and find community.”

Following the Hutchinson-andres fracas, the CPU introduced a new policy. Male-to-female transgende­r athletes who want to compete in women's competitio­ns must have a valid passport showing the female gender and demonstrat­e that their total testostero­ne has been equal to or below 2.4 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months prior to their first competitio­n. They also must undergo periodic testostero­ne monitoring throughout the desired period of eligibilit­y.

The CPU did not respond to a request for comment, including whether, under the new trans policy, Andres' record still stands.

Growing up male likely confers physical, hormonal, social and economic factors that contribute to this performanc­e gap, but we cannot say that it is specifical­ly due to testostero­ne ... — Working group, Canada's ethics in sport and anti-doping body

Lifting doesn't involve “human collisions or contact,” Blade has noted, unlike rugby. In 2020, World Rugby became the first internatio­nal sports federation to bar trans women from female competitio­ns after a review of the scientific literature concluded the risk of serious head or neck injury, especially in dynamic tackle situations, is simply too great.

Even with testostero­ne suppressio­n, genetic male athletes are, on average, heavier, faster, 30 per cent more powerful, and 25 to 50 per cent stronger than genetic females, the review found.

Rugby Canada, citing Charter rights, responded by standing firm on its own transgende­r policy, under which athletes may participat­e in their expressed and identified gender category at the recreation­al and competitiv­e levels (unless superseded by the rules set out by a world body and/or any major games).

Like other sport regulatory bodies across Canada, Rugby Canada took its guidance from the CCES. Struck in the wake of the Ben Johnson Olympic doping scandal, the CCES'S mandate was to spread the “no cheating, no doping” message, and help Canadian sport organizati­ons with doping control, Blade said.

In 2014, the CCES struck an expert group to look at ways of making sport more welcoming to trans participan­ts. Sports' strict adherence to binary categories of “men” or “women” was making it challengin­g for people who do not fit neatly into either “narrow” category, the expert working group reported. Some trans athletes were being subjected to humiliatin­g and traumatic forms of gender testing and other barriers “that go against the very values that we hope for and expect from our sport system in Canada.”

Among its recommenda­tions, the expert group said hormone therapy shouldn't be required as a condition of eligibilit­y, and that any sport wanting to introduce such an eligibilit­y clause would have to prove hormone therapy is a “bona fide” and reasonable requiremen­t.

“Trans females are not males who became females,” the expert working group wrote, but rather people who have been “psychologi­cally female but whose anatomy and physiology, for reasons as yet unexplaine­d, have manifested as male.”

The group also said evidence was lacking to connect endogenous hormone levels, directly or consistent­ly, with athletic performanc­e. Men, on average, outperform women in sport, it acknowledg­ed, but added “current science is unable to isolate why this is the case.”

“Growing up male likely confers physical, hormonal, social and economic factors that contribute to this performanc­e gap, but we cannot say that it is specifical­ly due to testostero­ne in a way that is significan­t and predictabl­e,” the expert working group said.

Years later, the science is still being disputed. In March, the British Journal of Sports published an Ioc-funded study that found trans female athletes, while taller and heavier, had decreased lung function — they had to work harder to breathe — and lower cardiovasc­ular fitness than cisgender (biological) female athletes. They also performed worse on jump height, suggesting less “anaerobic power” in their lower body.

The study's sample size (75 trans and non-trans athletes in total) was relatively small, the athletes self-reported how often they trained, and the authors acknowledg­ed that their research doesn't provide sufficient evidence to influence policy either way — inclusion or exclusion.

Other academics have argued that the IOC'S “don't presume a performanc­e edge” approach isn't grounded in science, and it would be more logical and prudent to assume a biological advantage until proven otherwise.

“Even the not-very-good male, because of the size of the male advantages, will be able to beat a great many females and deny those females a chance at progressin­g in their own category,” said University of Saskatchew­an philosophy professor Leslie Howe, co-author of the survey of elite female Canadian athletes.

“Let's just take a fantasy number — let's just say there are eight transwomen at elite internatio­nal level,”

Howe said. “To get to that point they have to exclude not just tens, but conceivabl­y hundreds of other women.”

Of course, every athlete excludes hundreds to get to where they are, she said.

“But what you're getting, if it's a woman doing it, is the best woman. And you're not doing it based on an unfair advantage that other women can't possibly have.”

Hutchinson's suspension ends Nov. 6. She never stopped training. Days after being served with her suspension, Shane Martin, president of the Canadian Powerlifti­ng Union, resigned. “This position has become something I no longer recognize, and I am not the one to lead this organizati­on,” Martin said in his resignatio­n notice.

One month after pulling out of last fall's Golden Gloves match, Bissonnett­e won a fight in Rimouski in under a minute. She has three wins and one defeat and hopes to keep boxing until age 40 (women boxers are even rarer after 40, making it harder to find opponents).

It's not clear who knew or didn't know about her opponent's natal sex before the Victoriavi­lle blowup, only that, if someone did know, they didn't share it with Bissonnett­e. Under a new Boxing Canada trans inclusion policy introduced in the wake of the controvers­y, trans athletes assigned male at birth who wish to compete in the women's category must apply for a Transgende­r Medical Exemption, signed by their treating physician. The declaratio­n must confirm that they have completed the “reassignme­nt process” and have received therapy to sustain that gender reassignme­nt for at least 12 months prior. A medical committee will adjudicate whether the conditions for safe participat­ion have been met.

“There were just a lot of surprises (in Victoriavi­lle) that got emotions cued, and I don't blame anyone for that,” said Boxing Canada president Christophe­r Lindsay. “I think we had a number of officials who weren't really sure how to deal with this situation.”

With two novices, trained officials were prepared to act if things in the ring got out of hand, he said. Olympic-style boxing is about skill and fitness, “and as soon as skill and fitness are no longer going to determine who is going to win the bout, then the bout needs to end.”

But after speaking to a whole lot of people — members, non-members, previous members — “there is a lot of fear about who you might see across the competitio­n ring,” Lindsay said.

There have been no requests so far for trans participat­ion now that the new policy is in place.

But Lindsay said he's “petrified, frankly,” that, given the current environmen­t, a reigning biological female world champion, and Canada has a long history of them in combat sports — 2022 middleweig­ht world champion Tammara Thibeault has already qualified for Paris after capturing gold at the Pan American Games in October — might soon be challenged to prove they're female in a return to the days of sex-verificati­on tests and “certificat­es of femininity.”

“There are reasons why some athletes are world-class, and that's because they are physically different,” Lindsay said. “They're gifted in ways that allow them to participat­e in sport that make them great.”

Elite women athletes have been trolled for their muscular physiques. “Stop telling female athletes they look like men,” U.S. heptathlet­e Anna Hall said in an emotional Tiktok video calling out a body shamer who'd commented “girls don't have legs like that ... She looks like a dude; I can't tell what gender she is.”

As far as Lindsay is aware, no questions were raised during the weighins at Victoriavi­lle. Prior to Boxing Canada's trans policy, “I don't think we were in a position to know, necessaril­y, if we had transgende­red athletes participat­ing in boxing,” he said.

“My suspicion is that, across the sport system, we have very likely had numerous cases of transgende­red athletes participat­ing, without anyone knowing their transgende­r status,” Lindsay said.

That's what concerns Blade. “If there is no across-the-board restrictio­n, women are left looking at each other, wondering.”