Australian Polity, Volume 9 Number 3 - Digital Version

as anyone identifying as woman, a women’s prison or
women’s changeroom can therefore be accessed by
anyone identifying as a woman. If you don’t like that, you’ll
be directed to a piece of anti-discrimination legislation
stating that it’s illegal to discriminate against anyone
on the basis of gender identity, or to a bureaucratic
guideline which says the government values inclusivity
and respects everyone’s identity.
Gender and Sport
Of all the areas where gender theory has impacted
women’s rights, sport has been one of the most
visible. The broad appeal of sport means that there is
widespread understanding in the general public about
why male and female athletes are separated in the vast
majority of sports. Yet against all common sense and
scientific understanding of male and female sporting
performance, sporting bodies around Australia and
the world are eagerly re-writing their rules and policies
to allow biologically male trans women to compete in
women’s sport.
sport. To put the scale of this advantage in perspective, in
running, males enjoy a mere 10-13 per cent advantage –
which is enough for the women’s 100 metre world record
to have been bettered by male athletes more than 10,000
times, including by boys in high school.
When Hubbard qualified for the women’s category
in Tokyo with the second-biggest qualifying lift and
subsequently lifted a weight of 125kg which few other
competitors even attempted (the lift was ruled out by
judges due to a faulty technique), what we saw was a
mediocre male athlete, more than a decade past physical
peak, using that 34 per cent male advantage to qualify
for the very highest level of women’s sport. Hubbard
demonstrated this point by immediately retiring following
the Olympics, saying “Age has caught up with me. In
fact if we’re being honest it probably caught up with me
some time ago. My involvement in sport is probably due,
if nothing else, to heroic amounts of anti-inflammatories.”
Is this what we want for women’s sports, for the women’s
Olympics to be a last hurrah for ageing male athletes while
dedicated young females miss out and watch on TV?
Most prominently, in the recent Tokyo Olympic Games
New Zealand 42-year-old trans weightlifter Laurel
Hubbard was gifted an Olympic berth in the women’s
87kg+ category, at the expense of a young Nauruan
weightlifter, Roviel Detenamu, who now may never have
the opportunity to become an Olympian. Had her spot
at the Olympics not been taken by a biological male,
Roviel would have become the first woman from her
country to compete at the Olympics for more than 20
years. Around the last time a Nauruan women qualified
for the Olympics, Gavin Hubbard was a junior male record
holder at national level in New Zealand. This early career
success never translated into success at a higher level,
until Hubbard transitioned and began winning medals
and topping the rankings at Oceania level in women’s
weightlifting.
Hubbard’s story was widely publicised because there is
no scientific question that going through male puberty
provides a huge advantage over female athletes in
weightlifting. Peer-reviewed research puts this advantage
males have over females in weightlifting at 29-34 per
cent, which is at the higher end of male advantage in any
The Tokyo Olympics also put an end to the false and
misleading rhetoric that trans people are “banned” or
“prevented” from playing sport when Canadian soccer
player Quinn, a biological female who identifies as
transgender, won a gold medal with the Canadian
women’s team. Hubbard too would have been eligible to
qualify for the Olympics in the appropriate sex category
– the only obstacle being that the lift which achieved a
ranking of 5th in the world in the women’s category was
more than 100 kilograms off the standard required to
qualify for the male category.
Even the International Olympic Committee was
begrudgingly forced to admit that their current rules
around transgender participation are not fit for purpose.
This has been blatantly obvious to experts in the field for
some time, with IOC rules focused exclusively on trans
women being required to lower current testosterone
levels to 5 nmol/L. This limit, which is still many times
the normal testosterone level for females, is not fit
for purpose as a guideline for participation because
it is not current testosterone levels which confers the
vast majority of male athletic advantage. It’s the way in
which testosterone permanently alters the body during
24 Australian Polity