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news
National Cycling Centre (British Cycling).jpgGB Olympic cycling chief joins calls on UCI to tighten transgender rules
The head of British Cycling’s Olympic and Paralympic programme is one of more than 70 signatories to a letter calling on the UCI to tighten its rules on allowing transgender cyclists to compete in women’s events. Meanwhile, in an allusion to the Emily Bridges case, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that he does not believe “biological males should be competing in female sporting events.”
The letter, dated yesterday and addressed to UCI president David Lappartient and other senior figures at world cycling’s governing body, is signed by “a group of retired Olympians, elite cyclists, scientists, researchers, and supporters of female cycling sport who wish to express our deep regret that it took a crisis situation to get us to the point where the UCI has admitted that rule 13.5.015 is ‘probably not enough’.”
Those were the words used by Lappartient last week after the UCI barred transgender cyclist Emily Bridges from making her debut in a women’s race at the British Omnium Championships in Derby last weekend, with British Cycling having previously said that the 21-year-old’s testosterone levels had fallen to sufficiently low levels to comply with the regulations set out by world cycling’s governing body.
The Guardian reports that the 76 signatories to the letter include Sara Symington, who represented Great Britain at the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Games and has since last October been head of British Cycling’s Olympic and Paralympic programmes.
“Recently, female athletes in the UK have shown you that they were willing to boycott their own National Championship competition to get the UCI and British Cycling to hear their concerns about fairness in their sport,” the letter said. “That is how seriously female athletes are taking this issue and we greatly respect what our sisters were willing to sacrifice to have their voices heard. We are saddened that this should ever have been necessary.”
“We believe that rule 13.5.015 does not guarantee female athletes ‘fair and meaningful competition that displays and rewards the fundamental values of the meaning of the sport’,” the letter continued.
“We believe that the rule is asymmetric and thus discriminatory in that it advantages only biological male athletes by providing them greater opportunity to compete and enjoy the rewards of sport at its highest level.”
It calls on the UCI to provide “robust scientific evidence that the rule guarantees fairness for female athletes,” and says that in the absence of that, it should be scrapped and the governing body should “and implement eligibility criteria for the female category that is based on female biological characteristics.”
The letter concluded by thanking Lappartient “for his recent public comments and support of female athletes,” and that the signatories “realise we all share the same goal – a sport which is fully inclusive that ensures fairness for our female athletes.”
Johnson alluded to the Bridges case this morning when speaking to the press during a visit to a hospital in High Wycombe.
“I don't think biological males should be competing in female sporting events,” the Prime Minister said. “Maybe that's a controversial thing to say, but it just seems to me to be sensible.”
His remarks came the day after it was confirmed that a planned landmark conference on LBGTQ+ issues, due to be hosted by the UK government in June, had been cancelled after dozens of organisations including the charities Stonewall and the Terrence Higgins Trust boycotted the event after the government said that trans people would not be included in a ban on conversion practices.
On Monday, Stonewall said that it would no longer participate in the Safe to Be Me conference because of “the Prime Minister’s broken promise on protecting trans people from the harms of conversion therapy.”
Resigning yesterday as the government’s LBGT+ business champion, Iain Anderson said that “conversion therapy is abhorrent” and that news “that trans people would be excluded from the legislation and therefore not have the same immediate protections from this practice was deeply damaging to my work.”
He added: “Now – more than ever – we need tolerance and respect in our national conversations.”
Besides sharing his opinion that transgender women should not take part in female sporting events, Johnson said today: “I also happen to think that women should have spaces – whether it's in hospitals, prison or changing rooms – which are dedicated to women. That's as far as my thinking has developed on this issue.
“If that puts me in conflict with some others, then we have got to work it all out,” he continued. “It doesn't mean I'm not immensely sympathetic to people who want to change gender, to transition and it's vital we give people the maximum love and support in making those decisions.
“These are complex issues and they can't be solved with one swift, easy piece of legislation. It takes a lot of thought to get this right.”
Bridges, who wrote about her struggles with gender dysphoria and its impact on her in an article for Sky Sports on Coming Out Day in 2020, began undergoing hormone therapy last year.
Ahead of the National Madison Championships, it was confirmed that her testosterone levels were low enough for her to compete in women’s events under British Cycling’s Transgender and Non-Binary Participation Policy.
The rules, in line with UCI regulations, require transgender to have testosterone levels below 5 nanomoles per litre for a year (men generally range between 10 and 30 nanomoles per litre) before being permitted to compete against other women.
After she was barred from competing in the National Omnium Championships, Bridges said in a statement: “I am an athlete and I just want to race competitively again. I hope they will reconsider their decision in line with the regulations.
“I've been relentlessly harassed and demonised by those who have a specific agenda to push.
“They attack anything that isn't the norm. This is without care for the wellbeing of individuals or marginalised groups,” she added.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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48 comments
Ooh, this has just taken another turn... BC are demonstrating their total lack of spine and have gne back on their trans sport stance.
You mean they've bravely taken the decision to support biological female athletes, right?
The problem fundamentally is that we have, on one hand, an increasing understand in society of 'Non Binary' as being a perfectly acceptable way to feel about yourself and that people get to feel how they feel and live their lives accordingly, but having accepted this, those who identify strongly enough as non-binary to feel that they no longer want to confirm to their birth assigned gender but do want to conform to the broad definition of the opposite gender, which is fair enough, are sort of pushed back into a binary position because sports is one or t'other. I'm not sure there is a good answer for the non-binary community, short of handicapping cycling categories, which I don't think would really work from an inclusiveness perspective. I don't think that anybody wants 'trans cycling' as a category, or am I wrong?
Well this isn't about non-binary, its about trans. A position that underlines and props up a binary understanding of gender. Trans means to be one and becoming the one you want.
That's disingenuous crap and a huge twisting of what most Trans people would stand for.
Being part of the LGBTQ+ community means being understanding and supportive of all sexual and gender choices and only someone from the outside looking in would make that kind of crass judgment.
Edit: A 2 post "visitor" - shouldn't have wasted the typing.
It's about the problem of binary definition. We're all on a normal distribution, because that's what nature does. At the end of the day there have been two binary points defined on that distribution, you had a cock or a fanny and that made you a boy or a girl. The fact that society now (often, not always, and only some societies) let's people say "I don't fit around the 90% point (figuratively) that was biologically assigned to me at birth that's broadly 'man' or 'woman' in terms of what society expects me to conform to" is exactly what non-binary is. It's deeply contextual and endlessly parsing definitions gets us to where we are, where for some reason the governing body thought they'd fixed the problem by just defining a man and a woman by a measure of testosterone.
We all fall under a normal distribution that goes far beyond how much of this or that is measurable in the body. You can't address an issue that is societal, physiological, psychological, deeply personal and different for everybody with 'rule 13.5.015'. Of course it's not enough. Great if you can be comfortable living as a women or comfortable living as a man because at the end of the day society makes your life much easier if you're able to do that. Ultimately it's about people being comfortable living as themselves. For some people 'themselves' will involve competitive sports outside their birth gender if they identify far outside of that gender to choose the other. We make them choose a category because there's only a binary choice available. It's an issue that effects few people directly, it reflects well on society that I think most people would like to find something that works, but centuries of making the categories very simple and wanting to be fair to everybody mean that the answer is difficult. I have no idea what it is but I don't think we'll succeed in trying to manipulate the definition of male or female to fit into one of two categories because non-binary, by definition, doesn't fit, people will always have legitimate concerns and yes, for physically demanding Sports, it will be the women's category that feels the perception of injustice and unfairness more, that's the nature of the beast.
Maybe you could supply a sketch of this curve, with axes labelled and salient points marked. I'm keen to know where "the two binary points" lie, and especially what lies at the centre peak of the curve. A link to the literature would help, but otherwise even a quick sketch would do.
I think it is better to state that sex in humans follows a bimodal distribution rather than a normal distribution. I would say that the peaks are generally very well defined but there is a degree of overlap.
There is an interesting paper on testosterone levels for instance:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cen.13840
Note that the corrections are quite extensive however.
Yes, that would be a better way to put it. Vis 'drawing it', the reality is obviously multi-dimensional because we're not just talking about a single measure of 'sex' and yes, if you could it might not be 'normal' but it would certainly be a distribution. There are objective and subjective measures in this complex issue. You couldn't draw it if you tried, but sometimes a figurative approach is useful to illustrate the reality, even if you could never actually define it. But I assume Sriracha was just being a smartass rather than adding to the conversation.
No, not being a smart ass. I don't find it helps understanding to talk in loose terms that end up being meaningless. You described a mathematical distribution, attributed the authority of "nature", but I couldn't make any sense of it. It seems you can't either.
Sex in humans is pretty much clearly defined with only 0.0018% being born with DSD (intersex).
https://www.statsforgender.org/dsd-intersex/
Are you meaning gender in your post?
There is a huge range for testosterone levels in males, not so much in females. I couldn't see much overlap in the link you provided. One thing to note is that if the trans female was an athlete in the sport before transitioning then it's more than likely they were the benefactor of having a high testosterone level. Same with female athletes I might add, but the difference in levels would be vast between them.
the problem is that you are confusing transgender and intersex. It isn't the same
Yeah but Johnson is a lying cheating narcissist and if he told me the sun was shining I would make sure to get an independent second opinion.
remember a broken watch is right twice a day.
But because my watch is broken I can't check it to find out if it's the time of the day when it is right??? Not helping me here ?!?
So you'll just have to assess the statement on its own merits, rather than by its provenance.
That depends how broken - not if the hands have fallen off.
The hands aren't the problem.
The trans female athletes are very good at explaining their own point of view whilst simultaneously completely dismissing the female athletes' point of view. It's almost as if they're still men.
Well, now that this has firmly become a culture war, we can expect lots of nuance, evidence, and consideration for other people's views....
.
Meanwhile, there are human beings caught in the middle of all this
Yep, human beings who are already heavily discriminated against, including the UK in case people thought we were much better.
Glad you finally agree Nos. And by allowing trans women to compete against them they'll be even more discriminated against.
I really wish they'd quote the average testosterone levels for non-trans women instead of non-trans men in these stories. After all, trans women will be competing against non-trans women.
The average range for non-trans women aged over 19 is 0.7 - 1.7 nmol/L.
By quoting the non-trans male testosterone levels it makes trans females levels look very low when in fact it's many times that of non-trans females.
I support and sympathise with Emily, and wish those in power would sort this issue out, otherwise there's going to be athlete after athlete in the future who comes up against these rules.
A way forward that's fair and acceptable to all needs to be found, but opinions are so deeply divided it's not going to be easy.
If there's any sport that knows about the relationship between body chemistry and performance it's cycling. The edge from performance enhancing drugs is a small one but one that's magnified by long stage races in particular.
I want Emily to be able to compete as a woman at a level similar to where she was as a male cyclist. Perhaps the answer is to let her compete and see what level she's at vs other women. If she's suddenly smashing Kenny and Archibald off the track then we know regardless of her testosterone level now there's an innate advantage from her going through puberty with a male body chemistry, because she wasn't winning track nats as a man.
Track races are won by thousandsth of a second and whilst technique & racecraft plays a role it's mostly down to watts. Assuming she doesn't sandbag the chrono isn't going to lie.
I too hope that there's an equitable solution for everyone. All elite athletes by definition have some innate advantages unlocked by training and commitment, but until we see trans athletes like Emily line up against other women we're not going to know whether she/they have a better baseline than an average elite biologically female athlete.
Yes, in the long term statistics would answer the question. For it to be "fair" there should be no statistical difference between the two groups, which represents the idea that A is the same as B. Unfortunately that means a pretty long experimental period, which would span the careers of some athletes.
I beg to differ, there are 700 men in 2021 alone who ran under the womens world record in the 100m on track. There has only been one woman within a tenth of the womens world record in nearly 35 years. This fact alone should suggest that we don't need to do any experimentation. If one says yes this is neuro muscular, well the same goes for the 10,000m with 550.
How many of those 700 or 550 have subsequently transitioned though? I don't think anyone disputes the idea that men have an advantage both in explosive and endurance efforts.
The questions here include:
- post transition, can trans women compete at a level that seems fair to cis women?
- how can sports make sure that such a level is maintained?
- is it fair to trans women if the "solution" here is a separate category, when it is so important to many trans women to be accepted as 100% women in every way?
- given that there seems to be no answer (so far) that will be fair to all, what's the best compromise? Will trans women in elite sport have to accept categorisation (which is far from uncontroversial in para sports), or will some cis women elite athletes feel that trans competitors have an advantage?
Given that Usain Bolt has advantages over me that his legs are longer and there is nothing I can do to change that, does that make my lack of Olympic medals unfair?
I believe that no one starts transition on a whim or for better chances in sport - it is such a hard thing to do both physically and mentally that there's no choosing going on. People transition because they cannot go on as they are, and I struggle with the idea that they should not be allowed to live fully as the gender they become.
I don't think there will be a way to allow trans females to compete fairly against non-trans women. Many of the advantages held by trans women just don't go away with testosterone suppression. Height, muscle density, lung capacity, oxygen carrying capacity, connective tissue strength are just a few advenatages. Not to mention that if a non-trans female returned a testosterone level of 5 nmol/L they'd probably be on the receiving end of a doping ban.
People might not like the thought of a 3rd category but is there any other way that protects non-trans females sports?
I think what we need is some empirical evidence to answer my first two questions. It seems that testosterone level is too simplistic, but line drawing will be very difficult, however many things are measured. Caster Semenya shows that what people think is "normal" body chemistry isn't always right.
I would put your question the other way: people might not like the idea that from time to time there may be a successful trans woman athlete, but is there any other way that protects trans women's ability to live as women?
Do we as a society say that we respect the right of all trans women to live 100% as women with a possible impact on women's sport? Or do we say that women's sport takes priority and trans women just have to put up with that - reinforcement of the notion that trans women are not really women?
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