Trans athletes: "If I have to pull down my pants, it's not my competition."
The Republican Party in Ohio (United States) is proposing a law that would require any female athlete deemed unfeminine to undergo an examination. The examination includes intrusive procedures such as tactile checks for the presence of the uterus and clitoral measurements.
Share
Transphobic hatred directed at college swimmer Lia Thomas has sparked furious reactions in American society. The most radical of these is in the state of Ohio, where a proposed law would allow genital inspections of school athletes as young as 10 , thus promoting a witch hunt involving teachers, families, coaches, and fellow competitors. By perpetuating a non-inclusive binary view of school sports, this legislation is being drafted that would violate the most basic rights of all children .
The Ohio Republican Party claims to be protecting girls by proposing a law that would require intrusive examinations of any female athlete suspected of being unfeminine (tall, muscular, with short hair, early puberty, dark-skinned, excelling in their sport, etc.). This would involve procedures performed by medical personnel on minors, such as examining the outer and inner labia, tactilely checking for the presence of the uterus, measuring the clitoris , and calculating testosterone levels in the blood.
Transgender athletes
If any athlete is deemed a target of stigmatization, they will be required to provide a medical certificate verifying their sex, though it remains unclear who will pay for it. Ohio colleges and universities that ignore the regulation will face criminal charges. Phillip Robinson , a state representative, stated on the June 6th floor that, in the past six years, only eleven transgender athletes had joined Ohio student teams. Not a single family had filed a complaint. Therefore, this is yet another instance of a culture war waged by the far right against the bodies of the most vulnerable. A relevant statistic is that one in five transgender youth commits suicide in this state. The bill still requires Senate approval before reaching the governor for enactment.
The Spanish Inquisition holds the dubious honor of having invented these kinds of examinations. In 1587, the Holy Office arrested and examined the transgender surgeon Eleno de Céspedes . A large number of experts confirmed that Eleno had possessed a uterus since birth. The problem is that, just eleven years earlier, Céspedes had obtained a medical certificate confirming the existence of a penis in his anatomy, a certificate issued by none other than the urologist of Philip II. In the 16th century, the condition known as "hermaphroditism" was not legally recognized, so Céspedes was formally accused of bigamy. There was documentation of his first marriage to a man, and at the time of his arrest, he was married to a woman.
The story of swimmer Lia Thomas
The target of the new Inquisition of 2022 is Lía Thomas , a transgender student at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the few institutions in that country that does not offer athletic scholarships. Thomas's sin, like Céspedes's, is having left the eradicators of dissent a record of her previous life.
Thomas joined his university's men's swim team in 2017. During the 2018-2019 season, he recorded the fastest times in the 500, 1000, and 1600-yard freestyle events as part of the men's varsity team. He transitioned in 2019. The National Collegiate Athletic Association stipulates that, in order to change divisions, transgender athletes must wait one year and undergo specific hormone testing.
In the 2021/22 season, Thomas joined the women's league. In 2022, she jumped from the 65th-ranked men's field to the number one spot in the women's 500-yard dash. In the 200-yard dash, she climbed from the 554th-ranked men's field to the fifth-ranked women's field. And that's where all the attacks began.
The attacks and the cases
It has been said of her that she has undermined half a century of struggle for equality in sport . Despite being just a college athlete, she has been attacked by athletes of the caliber of Martina Navratilova and has already provoked significant changes in the International Swimming Federation. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson asserted that it was cheating to field someone with a biological advantage, assuming that any athlete born male will always be superior. Carlson seems unaware of the times we have won in mixed-gender tournaments. Among them, my favorite is from 1975, when boxer Jackie Tonawanda knocked out Larry Rodaina in the second round. Fox News repeats like a mantra that Lia Thomas's testosterone levels should ban her from sports. They are also unaware that many female athletes possess naturally stratospheric levels of testosterone. We have the paradigmatic cases of sprinters Dutee Chand and Caster Semenya .
Hormones and elite competition
In 2011, the International Association of Athletics Federations ( IAAF ) established that female athletes must have testosterone levels below ten nanomoles per liter of blood. At the London Olympic Games (2012) four athletes between the ages of 18 and 21 , from countries in the Global South, were stigmatized for their high testosterone levels. Subsequently, they underwent various medical procedures in order to continue competing (feminizing vaginoplasty, clitoral reduction, estrogen therapy, and removal of internal testicles).
In 2014, Dutee Chand was removed from the 100-meter dash after being accused of hyperandrogenism, meaning she had excessively high levels of testosterone, androsterone, and androstenedione for women. Chand refused any interventions or therapies, stating that she had no reason to.
In 2015, she appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland and succeeded in changing the IAAF protocols. However, she was unable to pave the way for champion Caster Semenya, as the restrictions on testosterone levels returned in 2018. Her case is still pending before the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Semenya's privacy was violated when The Daily Telegraph, in a manner reminiscent of the Inquisition, published that the athlete had internal testicles. Both this newspaper and the IAAF would do well to understand that the gendered division of sport is as simplistic as it is unrealistic.
The role of hormones in elite competitions is nothing new. It remains unclear whether the practice known as abortion doping was used in the mid-20th century by Soviet countries. This doping supposedly consisted of impregnating female athletes shortly before competitions because, during the first three months of pregnancy, the body produces an excess of red blood cells loaded with hemoglobin and secretes various hormones such as progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone. After the competitions, the athletes were then subjected to abortions.
Discrimination and segregation
Be that as it may, two things are clear about this whole affair. First, Paul B. Preciado is absolutely right when he says that the true driving force of modern capitalism is pharmacopornographic control, whose flagship product is hormones —their measurement, increase, and decrease. Second, the history of elite sports is riddled with discrimination. Until World War II, there were segregated leagues; access for the working class to high-performance centers is anecdotal; even today, women's league teams earn considerably less than their male counterparts, with the notable exception of the United States women's national soccer team, which won equal pay in court.
High-level competition is an activity practiced by few, yet it generates enormous sums of money. Even the university league in which Lía Thomas competes moves huge amounts in sponsorships, although the athletes don't see a single cent. They are students exploited with the promise of promotion to elite sports , something most don't achieve, as the intensity of the training easily leads to debilitating injuries. If we're going to let our private parts be inspected for the sake of a ruthless business or (worse still) the promise of access to it, I'd rather play sports with my friends in the park. I choose to play and not compete with other non-normative bodies: the fat ones, the old ones, the hairy ones, those of us with mustaches, the clumsy ones, those who are winded after two sprints, those who wet themselves when they jump, those who have whatever they want between their legs, and those of us who go through life uncertified.
*This article was originally published on Pikara. To learn more about our partnership with this outlet, click here .
We are Present
We are committed to a type of journalism that delves deeply into the realm of the world and offers in-depth research, combined with new technologies and narrative formats. We want the protagonists, their stories, and their struggles to be present.
SUPPORT US
FOLLOW US
Related Notes
We Are Present
This and other stories don't usually make the media's attention. Together, we can make them known.