You may not have considered a couple of strange things about the failed anti-trans ballot measure pertaining to school athletics. It would not have stopped women (girls) with XY chromosomes born with a rare Difference of Sexual Development (DSD) condition from competing in women’s sports, something supporters of the measure seem to care about. And it would not have prevented school athletics programs from tweaking competition categories to allow transgender girls to compete against other girls—which in my book is totally fine.
But neither the supporters nor the opponents of the measure seem eager to admit those basic facts, because apparently they would rather wage the gender culture wars than actually craft sensible athletics policies.
Let’s begin with a dose of reality. Once biologically typical boys hit puberty, their bodies flood with testosterone, which facilitates muscle growth and other changes. The bodies of men and women vary dramatically in this respect, with men typically having 300 to 1,000 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood and women having 15 to 70 nanograms (says Mount Sinai). Other things equal (please do note the qualifier), in any contest involving strength, men have the advantage over women.
Most people fall inside those norms. There are some exceptions. Women with XY chromosomes and a DSD can be born with a vagina and, with treatments, even grow up to get pregnant and have a child (as I’ve reviewed). One paper I pulled up suggests that women with XY chromosomes can have testosterone levels typical of men. And transgender women (born with XY chromosomes and male genitalia) can take hormone therapy to reduce their testosterone levels, “with a practical target in the female range” of 30 to 100 nanograms per deciliter (says Boston University; this overlaps with the range given by Mount Sinai). The question becomes, how should athletic competitions handle such diversity?
Transgender politics
Some people claim, or at least imply, that there is no problem here, that a “transgender woman is a woman,” full stop, and that proclamations of identity as transgender always are sufficient to establish that someone is transgender, and nothing else ever is relevant. The only relevant consideration, in this view, is the gender that someone declares. So, if a six-foot-six, 240 pound person born with a penis and XY chromosomes, and with male-normal levels of testosterone, self-declares to be a transgender woman and wants to compete in sports with other women, that’s no problem. That’s the hard-edge view, and not, say, what the Olympics adopts as its standards for transgender athletes. Most transgender-friendly people (including me) will say something like transgender women athletes should be able to compete against other women only if they’re on hormones to bring down their testosterone to women-normal levels.
At the other end is the view that transgender girls, and girls with XY chromosomes, never should be able to compete against other girls, no exceptions. So, for example, if an underweight prepubescent transgender girl wants to compete on the girl’s team, that should be forbidden, says this view. That is the view of the backers of Initiative 160. As Complete Colorado journalist Sherrie Peif reported, the intention of the measure was to “bar biological males from participating in girls’ sports.” But that is not, in fact, what the language of the measure would do.
Initiative 160, whose backers failed to collect enough signatures to make the ballot, says that a “public athletic program for minors,” if it creates gender or sex-based competition categories, must let “only female students, based on their biological sex at birth . . . participate on any team or in a sport or athletic event designated as being for females, women, or girls.” The measure looks to the “birth certificate if the certificate was issued at or near the time of the student’s birth.”
Curiously, the measure requires that a girl with a DSD and XY chromosomes, designated a “female” at birth, must only compete with other girls, regardless of testosterone levels, if the sport separates participants based on sex or gender.
That’s weird because Erin Lee, a spokesperson for Initiative 160, made a big deal on Twitter/X about the woman Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, reposting comments claiming that Khelif is a “male” and a “man” and suggesting that she is transgender. Notwithstanding the casual defamatory remarks that Lee reposted, Khelif was born a woman and has identified as a woman her entire life. There is no good evidence that Khelif has a DSD or XY chromosomes, although Putin’s crony Umar Kremlev has claimed as much based on purported but unreleased tests conducted by the scandal-plagued International Boxing Association.
But if, for sake of argument, Khelif did have XY chromosomes, and if the Olympics were governed by the rules that Lee advocates for Colorado youth, then Khelif would be allowed, indeed required, to compete only against other women. One might be tempted to think that Lee is motived by something other than logical consistency.
A different path
Had it made the ballot and passed, Initiative 160 would have required school athletics to “designate” a sport as for girls or boys or as “coeducational or mixed.” In other words, there’s nothing within the measure to prevent athletics programs from just declaring all sports as coeducational, then potentially coming up with alternative competition categories.
Come to think of it, that’s what sports organizations should do anyway. Just because many sports have always separated the boys from the girls doesn’t mean they should continue to do so.
Here is just one possibility for older students in competitive sports where strength matters. Rather than separate the boys from the girls, a school athletics program could declare itself to be “coeducational” with competition categories based, not on sex or gender, but on testosterone levels. A student who has, say, 100 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood or less is in Category A, while a student who has 101 nanograms or more is in Category B. To prevent selective targeting of individuals, challenges to self-reported presumed levels might require testing of the all participants, or at least testing of the challenging athlete as well.
This set-up would put girls with male-typical levels of testosterone (for whatever reason) in with the boys, and it would put transgender girls with female-typical levels of testosterone in with the girls. And offhand that seems like a reasonable approach. I’m not saying that’s necessarily the best way to handle competition categories, but it seems like a plausible first stab.
At least as far as athletic competitions go, we should all be able to declare a truce in the gender wars and develop competition categories that are at the same time inclusive and reflective of real physiological differences.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
