State laws are quickly materializing to prohibit athletic competition between cisgender girls and transgender girls, among other things. But nobody seems to mind girls besting boys. Another look at how society views girls and boys, and what it says to them.
by Mauve Maude
April 2, 2021
Last winter in North Carolina, a 106-pound wrestler took the individual wrestling state championship.
“I kind of dominated the match if I’m being honest,” proclaimed the Uwharrie Charter Academy junior from Asheboro, after capping a 54-4 season and winning the Most Outstanding Wrestler award for the 1A class, one year after placing fourth at state. “I’m just glad I can be a role model for people younger than me and it’s so insane to be inspiring to others. To think that others look up to me is kind of crazy.”
Video of the championship match shows Heaven Fitch, deftly taking down her opponent, blond hair tumbling into her face, while the crowd cheers her name. When the match is called for her, she raises her arms to the sky in victory and celebrates grinning ear to ear, then leaps into the arms of her coach. And with that Heaven Fitch became the first girl to win the North Carolina championship. She’s the first because she wasn’t competing against other girls. Only about half of the United States even had sanctioned girls’ wrestling programs as of last year, and North Carolina wasn’t one of them. Heaven beat every boy of her class in the state (at least every one who would compete).
“I kind of dominated the match if I’m being honest.”
Heaven Fitch, North Carolina wrestling champion
Of course, like many, Heaven’s story was quickly overshadowed by the pandemic that dominated American life within weeks of her win. But last month, World Wrestling Entertainment released an unprecedented documentary short about Heaven Fitch, being an amateur wrestler unassociated with their franchise. The film is narrated by WWE wrestler, Elizabeth Copeland (better known as Beth Phoenix), who was also a lone female in high school wrestling, in the 1990s. Fitch is actually the seventh girl nationwide to win a state championship competing against boys. Now a senior, her final high school season is due to begin soon. If she wins again, she’ll be the first girl to do it twice.
Copeland notes that Fitch is “kind of an anomaly”, and while several girls have managed what Fitch has done, many more have benefitted, and many more would benefit from sanctioned girls’ programs in their states, what Copeland refers to as a “long-term goal”. Amateur sports can open up doors for non-anomalous young women also to win championships, attend college, and pursue careers. This was the idea of the 1972 Title IX Education Amendment–that women shouldn’t be denied those opportunities on the basis of sex, just because some thought their participation improper. In the meantime, Copeland also discusses the psychological pressures both she and Heaven experienced, competing against, and with boys, who had to make psychological adjustments of their own. Some would-be opponents refused to compete against Fitch.
Fitch is “kind of an anomaly” . . .
But it wouldn’t be accurate to claim any uproar over Fitch’s victory, not negative uproar anyway. Most have celebrated her achievements, because they are truly exceptional. Girls don’t usually beat boys. It’s still a sight at which we marvel as a society. Incidentally, that really has nothing to do with girlhood or boyhood, manhood or womanhood. It has to do with male and female. Or does it?
The Anatomy of Competition
In 1972, when Title IX was born only three years after the Stonewall riots, there wasn’t much household conversation in America about gender transcending sex. But since then, as more women, minorities, sexualities, and gender identities have emerged into the open light of society, the conversation has changed. Terms like “transvestite”–someone (usually meant as a man) who dressed as the opposite sex–used to be the most academic terminology one could produce to describe things we understand better today. We now know that dressing in women’s clothing is not just a thing some men like to do that we don’t talk about. We now know that sex and gender are not the same, and that gender identity and expression exist on a wide continuum. So a person’s sex doesn’t determine their gender any more than their clothing does, or any more than gender determines sex. For most of us, everything matches up. For some, it doesn’t. And that’s not as anomalous as we might have thought.
A female athlete who theoretically, or realistically, could beat males is more so, in the narrower field of high school athletics. Where some discussions of trans women “invading” womanhood have pointed in error to things like sanitary napkin wrappers and breastfeeding (life elements trans women don’t have the physical ability to use, but spoiler: those issues involve trans men or individuals who are nonbinary–not trans women), some of our most recent social and political arguments have revolved around transgender women–women who were born male–competing athletically with cisgender women–women who were born female. Here’s an arena where we might actually have an issue to talk about.
The reasons a transgender athlete would want to compete with other women is the same reason a cisgender athlete would, to the extent that she wishes. Girls generally want to be with girls, doing girl things, and athletics are not a “boy thing”. And boys don’t change their identities to win sports competitions. Imaginings of men dressing as women for some competitive edge are the things bad movies are made of–they’re fictional, superficial, foolish, and silly. Gender is not a life hack. But gender questions aside (assuming a concerned party doesn’t care how another person lives her life), the obvious concern is the physical advantage a biologically male body might have over a biologically female one, considering not every female athlete is Heaven Fitch.
When professional (men’s) sports were racially segregated, and long after they were integrated, some believed the myth that Black athletes, and presumably Black people in general, had “extra” muscles that allowed them to excel to such a marvelous extent, in sports. I remember hearing this presented as fact when I was a child, an explanation for the biological advantage Black athletes appeared to have. The answer, of course, is no. But clearly some factors are responsible for the obvious: Black athletes dominate in a lot of sports, and the number of sports Black athletes dominate only seems to increase with access to new sports. This Sports Illustrated article, published when I was a teenager, highlights what little science had revealed about Black bodies just twenty years ago. And a quick Google search will show you people are still asking and theorizing about “extra muscles” on sites like Quora and Reddit today (here’s an article I found that addressed it just last month).
So what does science say about trans woman athletes, especially considering that some trans women alter their physiques with hormone therapy?
The Physiology of Competition
This Muscle and Fitness article discusses the science of transgender inclusion in the specific arena of powerlifting. While the data on transgender athletes (like the numbers of transgender people in the American population) are very little, writer Andrew Gutman concludes that dramatic differences in physical strength do exist–between cisgender men and cisgender women. But they don’t necessarily exist between cisgender women and transgender women. It’s apparently not as simple as comparing apples to oranges when hormone therapy gets involved. In fact, hormone regimens can actually put trans woman athletes at a disadvantage. He points out that, while smaller managing bodies in the U.S. grapple with this issue, the International Olympic Committee, or IOC, after very careful and scientific consideration, allows transgender woman athletes to compete, as long as testosterone levels meet certain criteria. (To date though, no trans woman athlete has.)
This more recent NBC article comes to a somewhat different conclusion than Gutman’s. Both articles cite studies presented by the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The more recent study, conducted not on elite athletes but on active duty service members, focused on physical readiness tests required every six to twelve months, including sit-ups, push-ups, and 1.5-mile timed runs. It studied 29 trans men and 46 trans women in relation to their cis peers, both before and after hormone therapy. The results: trans women retained a pre-treatment competitive edge even after a year of hormone therapy. Interestingly, trans men who demonstrated a notable disadvantage before hormone therapy, equaled the cis males’ push-up and running performances, and outperformed their cis male peers on sit-ups, after hormone therapy. For them, physical disadvantage virtually disappeared. After two years of hormone therapy, trans women roughly equaled their cis peers on strength-based push-ups and sit-ups. But running performances, though they did see notable declines, still exceeded the cis women’s. The study–suggesting trans women need at least two years of hormone therapy to level with cis women, as opposed to just one–is being used to suggest changes to the IOC’s criteria, which the IOC is considering.
However, other scientists and even the author of the study, point out several limitations to the data, and reasons why it shouldn’t be used to disqualify trans athletes, especially not at the amateur and recreational levels. For example, there are many factors the military study didn’t take into account, that could’ve affected participants’ performances over long periods of time, like training habits. And even at the level of high school sports and below, other factors could present any athlete with advantages over others, like their access to elite coaches, facilities, and equipment.
A Society of Competition
Back in the political arena, it’s also interesting that at the same time lawmakers are debating trans athletes in women’s sports, they’re also debating, and legislating, restrictions on medical access for trans patients, for things like–you guessed it–hormone therapy. So, while they’re fighting for woman athletes to have a level playing field, they’re also building barriers to the very thing that can level the playing field for all woman athletes, which national and international sports authorities do allow. So the fight may serve to simply restrict trans athletes from playing. Trans girls, that is.
Because most of the legislation being proposed does target children specifically.
Are politicians really worried about keeping girls strong? Are they worried that trans girls are going to flood the field of girls’ high school athletics? Middle school athletics? Children’s recreational sports? That boys are going to change identities for trophies? That, as Linnea Saltz said to the Conservative Political Action Conference, “women are going to be watching their own sports from the sidelines”? Considering how few people in America are even transgender at all (less than one percent), much less trans woman athletes? I’m wondering why we don’t work this hard to protect girls from being raped, in the numbers they are, not in public restrooms, mind you, but on dates, with cis boys. Why this? Maybe this mission is about something else entirely.
After all, trans men and boys face no restrictions against competing with cis men and boys. Movies about women dressing as men for some competitive edge (and falling in love in the process!) are easily swallowed romantic comedy or drama. It’s cute, because girls are not seen as a threat. Children who want to play co-ed sports are allowed without a thought. And if a girl wants to compete in boys’ sports, best of luck to her.
Who knows? Maybe she’ll just win a state championship. We’ll cheer her on.
Acknowledgment: Even some of the news articles cited in this story don’t make proper use of the terms “sex”, “gender”, “transgender”, and “transsexual”. I think it goes to show our society has a long way to go to understanding sex and gender. To find more on Sex and Gender, check out the Issues menu.