The International Athletics Federation (Iaaf) launches this Friday a controversial ban, in which it prevents transgender athletes compete against women in this discipline. That decision sparked an enormous debate, in which the issue of inclusion began to collide with biological issues.
Athletics joins in this type of restriction on swimming, which banned the subject last year. Everything arose as a result of the appearance of Lia Thomas, the first transsexual athlete to win a test in Division 1, the most important of the NCAA, the organization of American university sports.
Lia Thomas, transgender swimmer.
The discussion reached political spheres. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did not recognize Thomas and proclaimed the second, Emma Weyant, the winner.
“The NCAA is basically making efforts to destroy women’s track and field, they’re trying to undermine the integrity of the competition and they’re crowning someone else the women’s champion and we think that’s wrong,” DeSantis, who is a Republican, said. “They are putting ideology before opportunities for female athletes.”
The Olympics have already opened the door to transgender athletes
The Olympic Games already had its first transgender participant. Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand participated in the 87 kilogram category. She was left off the podium. She was admitted following the International Weightlifting Federation’s decision to allow them to compete if her testosterone level was below a certain threshold. Until 2013, Hubbard had competed as a man.
The debate was reactivated a few days ago with the performance of the Italian athlete Valentina Petrillo in the Master of Paralympic Athletics, in Italy: he pulverized the 200-meter mark. Valentina identified as a woman since 2017. Before that, she was married as a man. His original given name is Fabrizio. Also, he has a son. She had already tried to compete in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics, but the Italian athletics federation did not support her.
Instagram: @Valentina_Petrillo
Athletics also had required testosterone levels to allow for the presence of transgender athletes. But that limit ceases to exist from tomorrow to go to the prohibition. “Gender cannot trump biology. The integrity and future of women’s sport, if we don’t do it right, is very fragile,” said IAAF president, former athlete Sebastian Coe.
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The controversy over the IAAF measure
Deisy Olarte, a transsexual woman and former deputy director of LGTBI affairs at the Bogotá Secretary for Social Integration, is also a basketball player. In her youth, when her sexual identity was male, she played in the Cundinamarca youth team and trained in the minor divisions of the Pirates team. Now, at 42, she plays in inter-neighborhood women’s tournaments.
“We are not looking for sporting superiority. What we want, as a cause of our rights, is to achieve equality in everything. We also have the right to practice and exercise sport, and in a professional manner”, he explains.
She adds: “In this specific sports issue, factors such as biotype, genetics, physicality come into play… That has a debate that is just beginning. Why isn’t trans men talked about in sport? Here there is also a machismo, because we trans women are told that we enter with some advantages over cisgender women, without taking into account that trans people generate, for example, processes of body transformations that modify our body mass and other hormonal processes that change aerobic and anaerobic capacities”.
Miguel Alexánder Niño, a sports doctor who has worked in different disciplines in the country, including the Colombian soccer team, explains that, from a physiological point of view, transgender athletes do have an advantage over those who were born women.
“It is obviously a hormonal, chemical and physiological issue. They are human beings in which their gonads are male and their genetic load is also male. His levels of hormones, which we call anabolic, which help develop muscle mass, build tissue, and develop strength and power, correspond to a male hormonal load. Fundamentally, the two main hormones are testosterone and androsterone, and all their metabolites, which are the ones that have a physiological effect,” he noted.
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Niño said that many transgender athletes inject themselves with female hormones to counteract this.
“This effect is transitory. That effect wears off and there will always be an advantage. There are sports that would not have any problems, archery, figure skating, shooting, they do not depend on maximum strength, power or speed, ”he pointed out.
“In sports in which power, explosive force or maximum force are decisive, they cannot be compared there. An example: boxing; if we put a 70-kilogram man against a 70-kilogram woman, it would be a great recklessness and a great advantage for the man, in the case of a transgender athlete, the difference would be the same, ”he added.
Are there enough studies on the subject?
For Olarte, there is still no rigorous in-depth investigation that has produced certain data that allows us to affirm that there is sports supremacy between trans and cisgender women in similar conditions of age, weight and sports training.
“I am not aware of scientifically proven studies that compare ten trans women with ten other cisgender women of the same weight, height, and sports training in team and individual sports, for example, to affirm that there is such superiority. I have played basketball all my life and now I do it in inter-neighborhood women’s tournaments. I am 1.80 meters tall and weigh 80 kilograms and I have met girls who are the same or heavier and taller than me and they ‘take me’, and I have lost many games”, says Deisy.
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Mariana Martínez, a Social Work student at the Institución Universitaria Tecnológico de Antioquia, is also a trans athlete: He is part of the volleyball team that plays in the tournaments of the Colombian Association of Universities (Ascun). Mariana does not agree with the prohibition.
Mariana, in a training session with the team from the Institución Universitaria Tecnológico de Antioquia.
Courtesy Technological University Institution of Antioquia
“The issue has to do with estrogen levels. If someone crosses the limit, then they cannot compete. But if not, then there would be no reason not to. In my case, I always carry my results in my suitcase. Sometimes a referee asked me for them, but usually that doesn’t happen. Sure, people think that because you are trans you are stronger and play better, but I have met other stronger and more talented women.he declared.
Joanna Harper is a Canadian transgender athlete who began her transition in her late 40s. She competed as a man in her youth. She did a master’s degree in Medical Physics and developed several studies on athletes like her.
Harper, in one of his studies, proposed a solution: in addition to setting eligibility criteria according to each discipline, he believes that they should not be divided in a binary way, but according to their testosterone measurements. “It will take us about 20 years to get any real data on trans women in elite sports,” Harper told the BBC.
Jose Orlando Ascension
sports deputy editor
With reporting by Gabriel Meluk and Andrés Felipe Balaguera Sarmiento
