What Lia Thomas Could Mean for Women’s Elite Sports

ATLANTA — The women on the Princeton University swim team spoke of collective frustration edging into anger. They had watched Lia Thomas (a transgender woman who swam) swim for them. The University of Pennsylvania has won meet after meet, defeating Olympians and breaking records.

Robin Harris, executive director at the Ivy League Athletic Conference, met the team on Jan. 9.

Many swimmers described the private meeting under the condition of anonymity. They detailed the biological benefits that transgender female athletes have. To ignore these, they said, “was to undermine a half-century fight for female equality in sport.”

Ms. Harris has already stated her support for transgender athletes, and decried transphobia. She said in an interview that she had answered that she would not change rules midseason. “Somehow,” a swimmer recalled, “the question of women in sport has become a culture war.”

The battle over whether to let female transgender athletes compete in women’s elite sports has reached an angry pitch, a collision of competing principles: The hard-fought-for right of women to compete in high school, college and pro sports versus a swelling movement to allow transgender athletes to compete in their chosen gender identities.

Although the number of transgender athletes on top teams is small — a precise count is elusive as no major athletic association collects such data — disagreements are profound. They focus on science, fairness, inclusion, and cut to core differences between gender identity (or biological sex).

Echoes from those debates echo outward from weight lifting rooms and tracks to swimming pools, to cycling courses, rugby pitches, and to Olympics, where officials must make a decision about how wide to allow transgender women to enter.

Sebastian Coe is the Olympic champion runner, and the head of the International Association of Athletics Federations that governs world track. He considers biological difference to be inexorable. “Gender,” he said recently, “cannot trump biology.”

The American Civil Liberties Union provides a counterpoint. “It’s not a women’s sport if it doesn’t include ALL women athletes,” the group tweeted. “Lia Thomas belongs on the Penn swimming and diving team.”

The rancor is stifling dialogue. Ms. Thomas attends meetings. It was met with stony silence, muffled boos, and muffled cheers. Trans activists call college female athletes who talk about frustration and competitive disadvantage transphobes and bigots. They fear being attacked and are reluctant to speak.

Ms. Thomas chose silence. In March, after The 500-yard freestyle at the N.C.A.A. was won by her. women’s championship in Atlanta, she skipped a news conference. She has of late spoken only to Sports Illustrated, saying, “I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team.”

Even nomenclature can be controversial. Descriptive phrases such as “biological woman” and “biological man” might be seen as central to discussing differences in performance. Many trans rights activists believe such expressions can be transphobic. They claim biology and gender identity are social constructs.

Some trans activists attempt to silence critics. They call them TERFs, which stands as trans-exclusionary radical women. A spokeswoman for a gay rights group urged a reporter not to “platform” — that is not to quote — those she said held objectionable views, including Martina Navratilova, the retired tennis legend, a champion of liberal and lesbian causes. Ms. Navratilova argues the transgender female athletes have insurmountable genetic advantages.

“So I’m a ‘TERF’ — OK, that’s the way you want to go?” Ms. Navratilova said in response. “I played against taller women, I played against stronger women, and I beat them all. But if I faced the male equivalent of Lia in tennis, that’s biology. I would have lost. And I would have been livid.”

Former Allies are so divided that reconciliation seems impossible. Half of Ms. Thomas’s University of Pennsylvania team sent a letter to the school, released by a lawyer, saying the swimmer had “an unfair advantage.” Brooke Forde, an Olympic silver medalist with Stanford, however, supported Ms. Thomas. “Social change is always a slow and difficult process, and we rarely get it correct right away,” she stated.

Griffin Maxwell Brooks, a trans nonbinary diver at Princeton who competes on the men’s team, released a TikTok video accusing “cisgender women” of leveraging “misogyny to perpetuate transphobia.”

Not long afterward, a Princeton eating club barred a female swimmer from joining, saying her “transphobia” might bring it disrepute, according to a Princeton swimmer.

Finally, inescapably, America’s hyperpartisan politics has electrified this debate. Librarians have been instructed to remove books that contain transgender themes. According to data from the Human Rights Campaign (an L.G.B.T.Q.), 18 Republican-dominated legislatures have imposed restrictions on transgender participation at public school sports in recent decades. advocacy group.

A few Republican leaders refused to be beaten. Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah vetoed a ban on transgender girls competing in girls’ sports; the Legislature overrode his veto.

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas demanded that agencies investigate parents and doctors who help children transitioning. Greg Abbott demanded agencies investigate parents and doctors who assist children in transitioning, which he termed “child abuse.” In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would “reject lies” and refused to recognize Ms. Thomas as the winner of the 500-yard freestyle championship.

Governor DeSantis’s declaration carried no legal power. It was a reminder that difficult conversations are not lost to the shouting.

The Science Debate

Michael J. Joyner, a physician at the Mayo Clinic Rochester, Minn. studies the physiology and performance of male and women athletes. He sees in competitive swimming a petri dish. It is more than a century old and the sexes have similar practices and nutrition regimens.

Prepubescent girls are more competitive than boys because they grow faster than boys. Puberty takes away this advantage. “You see the divergence immediately as the testosterone surges into the boys,” Dr. Joyner said. “There are dramatic differences in performances.”

The records for elite male swimmers are on the average 10 percent to 12% faster than those for elite female swimmers. This advantage has held for decades.

This is not a mystery. Men are soaked in testosterone from the time they are born. This process is accelerated by puberty. On average, men have wider shoulders, larger hands, longer torsos and more lung and heart capacity. Muscles are more dense.

“There are social aspects to sport, but physiology and biology underpin it,” Dr. Joyner noted. “Testosterone is the 800-pound gorilla.”

The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which oversees college sports, requires that a male athlete who is transitioning to a female athlete undergo a year of hormone suppression therapy to lower testosterone levels. The N.C.A.A. This was done in order to decrease the biological advantage that males have.

This was followed by Ms. Thomas.

Peer reviewed studies have shown that top-tier trans women are still ahead of top biological women even after testosterone suppression.

When Ms. Thomas entered women’s meets, she rose substantially in national rankings. She was 32nd for men in the 1,650 yard freestyle. In women’s meets, she was 8th and won a race.

She had ranked 554th in the men’s 200-yard freestyle; she tied for fifth place in this race in the women’s 2022 N.C.A.A championship.

And she ranked 65th in the men’s 500-yard freestyle but won the title as a female.

“Lia Thomas is the manifestation of the scientific evidence,” said Dr. Ross Tucker, a sports physiologist who consults on world athletics. “The reduction in testosterone did not remove her biological advantage.”

Although testosterone levels are important, they do not always predict performance in every sport. Chris Mosier, a 41-year old elite athlete, was born in 2015 and transitioned to male in 2015. He had no testosterone-fueled developmental advantage. Yet he has beaten elite racewalking biological men.

“Athletic performance depends on a lot of factors: access to coaches and nutritionists and technical skill,” Mr. Mosier said. “We are making broad generalizations about men being bigger, stronger, faster.”

Most scientists however view performance differences among elite male and female athletes almost as immutable. The Israeli physicist Ira S. Hammerman in 2010 examined 82 events across six sports and found women’s world record times were 10 percent slower than those of men’s records.

“Activists conflate sex and gender in a way that is really confusing,” noted Dr. Carole Hooven, lecturer and co-director of undergraduate studies in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. She wrote the book “T: The Story of Testosterone.” “There is a large performance gap between healthy normal populations of males and females, and that is driven by testosterone.”

Allyson Felix was the sprinter who won the most medals at the world championships. Her lifetime record in the 400m was 49.26 seconds. In 2018, 275 high school students ran faster.

Renée Richards was a pioneer among transgender athletes. An ophthalmologist and accomplished amateur tennis player — she played in the U.S. Open and ranked 13th in the men’s 35-and-over division — she transitioned in 1975 at age 41. She joined the women’s pro tennis tour at age 43, ancient in athletic terms. Ms. Richards made it to Wimbledon’s doubles final, where she was ranked 19th worldwide. She then retired at 47.

Ms. Richards stated that she does not believe it is fair for transgender females to compete at the elite level.

“I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me,” she said in an interview. “I’ve reconsidered my opinion.”

Joanna Harper, a transgender female runner who competes, and a Ph.D student at Loughborough University in Britain studying elite transgender athletic performance, agreed that testosterone gives transgender women athletes some advantages.

She spoke out about the inexorable psychological and emotional pressures that transgender athletes face.

“Is it so horrible,” she said, “if a handful of us are more successful than they were in men’s sports?”

Reka Gyorgy (2016 Olympian, swimmer at Virginia Tech) offered a kind of response. She finished 17th in the preliminary round of the 500-yard freestyle at the N.C.A.A. championships — a slot short of making the finals. She wrote an open letter, affirming her respect for Ms. Thomas’s work ethic.

She was less forgiving towards the N.C.A.A.

“This was my last college meet ever and I feel frustrated,” she wrote. “It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the N.C.A.A.’s decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete.”

This decision prevented her qualifying for All-America honors.

Title IX and Fight for Equality

To wander the stands last March at the women’s swim championships at Georgia Tech and ask about Ms. Thomas was to draw shakes of the heads from parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of swimmers. Many people stressed that transgender individuals should have the same rights as Americans to housing, employment, and happiness.

But they spoke of the thousands hours spent by young women in their sport. They swam hundreds each day, taking care of injuries and eating well from their early years. They shouldn’t race against someone who has the biological advantages of an athlete, even though they have reached the pinnacle.

“We have a biological male taking over women’s sports,” said one mother. “I don’t understand why those on the left politically are not supporting cis women.”

After decades of struggle, equality in sports was achieved. President Nixon signed Title IX fifty years ago, banning discrimination in higher education. This opened up previously all-male classes, and led to many more scholarships and female teams.

In 1972, one in 27 girls played sports; today two in five do so, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation. The 1972 U.S. Olympic Team featured 90 female athletes and 339 male athletes. Last year’s American team in Tokyo had 284 male athletes and a record 329 female athletes.

Title IX is not being embraced by many trans activists. And supporters, not least the Biden administration, say transgender girls should be permitted on girls’ sports teams. They have advocated for a federal Equality Act that would prohibit discrimination based upon sexual orientation or gender identity in housing and education, credit, and employment.

It could place biology and gender identity on equal footing in sport. Dr. Doriane Laambelet Coleman, a Duke University Law Professor and former top track runner supports legal protections of transgender people, but sees havoc in sports. The legal rationale for keeping women’s sports sex-segregated would fall away. “We are bringing a male body into a female sport,” Dr. Coleman said. “Once you cross that line, there’s no more rationale for women’s sport.”

Many trans activists and academics are open to this. Nathan Palmer, a lecturer at Georgia Southern University, wrote in Sociology in Focus: “Nature loves diversity, but humans love simplicity. Separating males from females may be socially useful, but when the dividing lines limit and oppress, we have to acknowledge they are social constructions.”

Anna Posbergh is a doctoral candidate at University of Maryland. She is a former pole-vaulter and studies the mechanics of human movement, gender, and athletes. She believes that notions of gender disadvantage in sport are rooted in culture, and outdated views of what women can do.

“I’m beginning to question the idea of sex segregation in sport,” she said. “We need to learn to sit with discomfort.”

Some feminists and scientists see this as a step into unfamiliar territory. Kathleen Stock, a British philosopher, whose work is often grounded by her feminist and lesbian identity has created positions on transgender rights which have made her a lightning rod. She has written “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism,” and argues against the insistence that one’s gender identity is all. This is to ignore, she said, how important it is to live the experience of being a biological woman.

“We are caught up in this fever dream,” she said in an interview. “How could it be that a social construct and not the material reality of being a woman is guiding our thoughts and our physical performance?

“I find it incredible that we have to point this out.”

Search for Solutions

Lia Thomas was not only transgender to swim at N.C.A.A. championship. Iszac Henig, a transgender man, swam the 100-yard women’s freestyle for Yale and attracted little attention. His story challenges the idea that transgender athletes should swim as they are.

Mr. Henig finished in a tie for fifth in the 100-yard women’s race with a time of 47.32 seconds. Mr. Henig wouldn’t have qualified for the championship if he had chosen to swim against men.

Ms. Thomas, Mr. Henig, and Ms. Thomas both swam in the races where they had the greatest advantage. Scientists have noted that every decision is fraught with moral thorns.

Emily Bridges of Britain, a world-record-holder male cyclist, recently declared her intention to race as an American woman. This has drawn strong objections from top female cyclists, who fear losing races as well as much prize money.

By way of solution, some point to golf, where in amateur competitions, a superior golfer takes a handicap — docking herself strokes — when competing against lesser players. Applied to swimming, a panel might examine Ms. Thomas’s race times and subtract seconds and let her swim.

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a policy organization based in Ottawa, argues for an “open category” for men, transgender athletes and biological females, anyone who cares to try her/his/their hand.

For biological women, a female category would be retained. This would prevent transgender women from having to take hormone-suppressing medications.

Some transgender activists claim such distinctions would be offensive, despite the fact Mr. Henig’s decision to race people according to their former gender.

The solution, which is a balance of biology and gender, appears distant. Yet, the status quo is fraught with anguish.

Atlanta father who declined to be identified sat in the stands while Ms. Thomas performed the 200-yard freestyle. He noticed that she was taller than her competitors with long legs, arms, large hands, and broad shoulders. He was disappointed that his daughter had lost to Thomas in the 500-yard race a day prior.

The father was polite and Ms. Thomas was announced. He was clapped twice.

Ms. Thomas lost by a large margin. She slipped out the pool, grabbed a towel and walked out alone.

The father looked on and shook his heads.

“In fairness to Lia,” he said, “the emotional toll.”

He added: “I look at her and see the pressure she’s under. And I think: She’s a 22-year-old kid.”