Sporting Gender: The History, Science, and Stories of Transgender and Intersex Athletes

338 Pages·2019·2.052 MB·English

by  Joanna Harper

SPORTING GENDER

SPORTING GENDER
The History, Science, and Stories of
Transgender and Intersex Athletes
Joanna Harper
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CONTENTS
Foreword vii
DavidEpstein
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
1 “Prehistoric”Women’sSport 1
2 TheScienceofIntersexConditions 9
3 IntersexAthletesinthe1930S 21
4 PostwarSexTesting 35
5 Transgender101 47
6 EarlyTransgenderAthletes 57
7 NottheEndofSexTesting 69
8 Joanna’sStory 81
9 TransgenderandIntersexAthletes,2004–2009 93
10 CasterSemenya 105
11 TransgenderandIntersexAthletes,2009–2014 115
12 ThePost-SemenyaLandscape 129
13 DuteeChand 141
14 DuteeChandversustheIAAFintheCAS 153
15 TransgenderAthletes,2013–2017 165
16 The2016IOCTransgenderGuidelines 179
v
vi CONTENTS
17 AftermathoftheCASDecisionintheChandCase 193
18 TransgenderAthletes,2015–2018 207
19 TransgenderAthleticResearchUpdate 221
20 TheCasterSemenyaTrial 233
Epilogue:OneLastStory 247
RecentDevelopmentsinGenderandSports 251
Notes 253
Bibliography 307
Index 315
AbouttheAuthor 323
FOREWORD
David Epstein
I
n the spring of 2012, I sent the reporter’s version of a message in a
bottle: not a crumpled paper stuffed in wind-worn glass, but an e-mail
thatIfiguredhadonlyamarginallybetterchanceofgettingaresponse.
IwashopingtobeputintouchwithJoannaHarper.
I was, at the time, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, working on a
story pitch about transgender athletes with my colleague Pablo Torre.
We had already made successful contact with two trans men who were
collegeathletes—basketballandtrackandfield—bothofwhomdelayed
medical transition from female to male while they competed on wom-
en’s teams. But our pitch had a gaping hole. We hadn’t found anyone
who would give us a personal account of sports’ true third rail: an
athlete who had been born male but transitioned to female and was
nowcompetingagainstwomen. AndthenI cameacross apostbyJoan-
naonthenow-defunctsiteWomenRunningTogether.com.
Init,Joannadescribedhertransition—howshe had been bornmale
and,asaman,hadbeenanexceptionalrunner(2:23marathon);howin
2004,asaforty-seven-year-oldmedicalphysicist,shehadstartedtestos-
teronesuppression.In2007shebegantocompeteasawoman,andshe
didn’tjustcompete:Shewonthewomen’s50–54agegroupattheUSA
Track & Field Club Cross Country Championships. Her post was both
illuminating and disarming. She recounted having “married two very
attractive women (not at the same time), bought a big beautiful house
in the suburbs and lived what many people thought was a wonderful
life”—but also how she was devastated by puberty, when her body
vii
viii FOREWORD
changed in ways that precisely betrayed the person she wanted to be-
come. She wrote about eventually undergoing transition surgery, and
thatafterwardpeoplewouldaskhowshewasdoing.Iremembersitting
in my SI office and laughing out loud when I read her standard reply:
“[P]retty well, I’m back at work and I’m doing a little running now. Oh
yeahandmyIQisup10pointstoo.”
So I wrote an e-mail to the proprietor of WomenRunningTogeth-
er.com explaining who I was and asking if there was any chance my
message could be forwarded to Joanna. I didn’t hold out much hope.
Obviously, Joanna was willing to share, or she wouldn’t have written
that post. But SI was an entirely different beast. She would not be in
control of the words we chose to put in a story, or of the context in
which we placed them in an article that might eventually grace a side
tableatherdentist’soffice.Andshecouldrestassured thatmanythou-
sands of readers would recoil at her story—some would consider her a
cheater—no matter what the article said. The public discussion about
transgender athletes had not been, shall we say, enlightened. Were I
JoannaHarper,Iprobablywouldnothaverespondedtome.Fortunate-
ly,I’mnotJoannaHarper.
What began as an outside shot at a quote became much more. For
starters, not only was Joanna willing to chat, but—like a good scien-
tist—she had kept assiduous track of her race times as she underwent
transition. She had lost a lot of muscle, and her allotment of oxygen-
carrying red bloodcells had declined; her race times followed suit. She
was much slower as a woman than she had been as a man. And yet—
accordingtoperformancetablesthatindicatehowcompetitivearunner
iscomparedtootherathletesofthesameageandsex—afteroneyearof
testosteronesuppressionshewaspreciselyasrelativelycompetitiveasa
woman as she had been as a man. Not only that, but she had (and was
willing to share) similar data for a handful of other runners who had
transitioned. One runner she tracked competed in the same 5K for
fifteen straight years, eight times as a man and, after testosterone sup-
pression,seventimesasawoman.She had rununder19minutesevery
singletimeasaman,andover20minuteseverysingletimeasawoman.
InallthehoursI’dspentperusingarticlesinmedicaljournalsthattried
to triangulate the impact of hormone suppression on athletic perfor-
mance,Ihadcomeacrossnothingclosetothat.
FOREWORD ix
Joanna has since published some of that data, and it comprises the
bestavailableevidencethatayearoftestosteronesuppressionisreason-
able for competitive fairness among distance runners who were born
male and transition to female. But Joanna is the first to point out that
theconclusioncannotbeextrapolatedtoothersports.“Forcardiovascu-
lar factors, trans women go from typical men to typical women after
transition,”shetoldmerecentlywhenIspokewithherforaWallStreet
Journal piece. “But with strength, they go from typical men to some-
where in between typical men and typical women, and ‘somewhere in
between’isn’tveryprecise.”
That’sthethingaboutJoanna:shehassomehowmanagedtolivethis
incredibly fraught topic while also maintaining an extraordinary ability
to step outside of her own experience and examine the facts like the
scientist she is. In my experience as a science writer—and as a human
onearth(andonTwitter)—thatisincrediblyrare.Snowleopardrare—
asin: we allbelieveitexistseven though we’ve never actually seen it in
thewild.
For me, Joanna started as the person on another shore whom I
hoped to reach with my message in a bottle. Infrequently, you do that
asajournalistandnotonlydoestherecipientbecomeasource,butyou
startcommiseratingaboutasharedloveofIrishtheater,andbeforeyou
knowitthesourcehasbecomeafriend.Lessfrequentlystill,thesource
who became a friend then becomes an intellectual role model. That’s
what happened here. These days, when I try to explain a topic that is
complex and emotionally fraught, I find myself asking: What would
Joanna do? Her mix of lived experience, intellect, patience, rationality,
and empathy are, in my experience, simply singular. This is not to say
that I agree with her on everything related to transgender or intersex
athletes (or Irish theater), because I don’t. I couldn’t possibly; I’ve
changed my mind on certain aspects several times since she and I first
connected.Butthat’snotthepoint.Theseissuesaresodifficultbecause
well-meaning people can agree on the underlying science and still dis-
agree passionately over what should be done about it. An intellectual
rolemodelneedn’tbesomeoneyoualwaysagreewith,butrathersome-
one whose approach to problems, and to other people, you wish to
emulate—or someone whose approach would make the world a better
placeifitwereadoptedmorewidely.