Transcript part 1:
Jane Garvey: So then to the final in our many conversations, it seems like, over the last couple of weeks, about sex and gender, which as I've said previously is something that really interests some of you, though not all of you. But nevertheless, it's a conversation we feel is extremely important and we are happy to return to it for one final time today. Yesterday we discussed lesbians and transwomen and you can find all our other discussions, of course, from the programme via the BBC Sounds app.
Today, we've moved on to sport, and transwomen, obviously want to play alongside and compete against other women and many would say, why ever not? Trans athletes can compete against women at international level but are they inevitably at a natural physical advantage? We'll get the views of Dr Nicola Williams, who runs a campaign group called Fair Play For Women and has a professional background in biology and biochemistry. First, you're going to hear from Dr Beth Jones, who's based at Nottingham Trent University, and Beth has conducted research into sport and transgender health. Now, I talked to her yesterday, not because she wasn't willing to join in a discussion, but just because she didn't have the time, she just wasn't available this morning.
So I asked Beth about the rules set down by the International Olympic Committee ...
Beth Jones: So, for transwomen there's a requirement that they've been taking cross sex hormone treatment, so oestrogen treatment, to enable their levels to be what we see within the cisgender population, so among cisgender women.
JG: Just to be clear about what you mean by cisgender ...
BJ: So cisgender are people who are non-transgender, so that's people who are kind of satisfied, or don't question the gender that they were assigned at birth.
JG: So yup, without putting words into your mouth and for the benefit of our listeners, you're talking essentially about 99% of women.
BJ: I wouldn't know the exact percentage
JG: Well, it would be about that, wouldn't it? Most of us think of ourselves as women, rather than ciswomen.
BJ: I think there are a significant proportion of women who might identify as a woman, who may have been assigned a different gender and I wouldn't want to assign kind of a percentage to that, but at least the majority of our society, yes, would consider themselves as a cis woman.
JG: The impact then of that oestrogen treatment you mentioned on athletic performance, what do you think it's likely to be?
BJ: I'm not sure that there is any scientific evidence that shows that, you know, oestrogen or testosterone has an impact in transgender people on their athletic performance. You know, certainly women report that once they've been on oestrogen therapy they feel weaker, they run slower than perhaps they did before, but there's no kind of robust scientific evidence to say that either testosterone or oestrogen impacts directly on athletic performance.
JG: Let's talk about Rachel McKinnon. She's interesting, in October she won the first world title by a trans athlete in track cycling. So, there was some controversy about this. Rachel did say that actually she had an unhelpfully low level of testosterone, something that the rules had actually insisted upon, and she pointed to that, so what do you make of that?
BJ: I think it's difficult to say, as I've said, you know, there's no evidence, and what we do know is that every person's body makes and responds to testosterone very differently, so that might just be her personal experience of having her testosterone levels reduced, but objectively, we don't know if that is the case or not.
JG: If we accept then that we are all different as individuals, is it time just to get rid of female and male sports and classes?
BJ: In an ideal world I think, you know, that would be great, it would overcome a lot of these issues around gender and sport, but at the current time it's probably not feasible to do so, I mean, you know, in years to come that might be the case, but at least for here and now, that's not going to be something that we can implement straight away. But we have started to see, at lower level sport and physical activity, you know, that people do at the weekend for fun etc., we have started to see more mixed gendered sports teams and so on, and you can see the positive impacts that that does have, not only on trans people, but also on, you know, cis people as well, the general population.
JG: But at the much more sophisticated, professional level of sport, if that happened it would mean that, in team games for example, no woman would ever play hockey for Great Britain or England again.
BJ: Uhhhhm ... they may ...
JG: Well, they may not!
BJ: They may not, that is all in the future to be determined.
JG: But that's not ... that's not an ideal, is it? Certainly for feminists who believe very strongly in female sport and the importance of it. That would be a horrifying prospect.
BJ: I don't think just because we have mixed gendered hockey teams, for example, that would mean that women wouldn't play. It might mean actually, if women feel that they are in a mixed team, they may push themselves even more to achieve even more, to be on more of a comparative level to males. I don't think it necessarily means that women wouldn't be able to play ... at a competitive ...
JG: No, I mean they'd never be picked. I mean obviously it would be the duty of whoever picks the team to pick the best team and, to be brutal about it, that probably wouldn't feature any women.
BJ: But at the same time we don't know that, and it may, and that's what I'm saying, that you know, there is a bit of an argument academically that perhaps women kind of cap their capability, psychologically, because they're competing against other women, if they feel that they're then competing against other men, who - we take it in society that men perform better than women, then perhaps they would up their performance and be competing on more of that level. So we may see women picked for those teams.
JG: What about the fact that at the moment, I mean you may know more, I don't think - I can't think of any transmen competing in sports who would out-perform their, let's call them cis male counterparts? Are there any?
BJ: I'm not personally aware, but you have to be mindful that we see trans people every day, they're not kind of invisible people, but we don't always necessarily realise that, or people don't want to disclose that. So of course there may be high profile athletes who are trans but we are just not publicly aware of it, just as there may be trans people, you know, working in the same office that you work in and you may not realise that because that person may not choose to disclose that information.
JG: Yep, I suppose what I'm getting at is the fact that there is no doubt that some people very firmly would believe that transwomen pose a threat to women competing in sport, in terms of success. To put it bluntly, do you believe that trans male athletes, let's say, pose a threat to male athletes?
BJ: I don't think any trans person, regardless of whether they identify as male or female, pose a threat to their competitors ...
JG: But we know, based purely on fact, it is highly unlikely that a transman would go faster, or lift something heavier, than a man in a competitive arena.
BJ: You say as a fact, but the same applies as it does to transgender females, there is no evidence that has explored you know, in transmen, what it's like to undergo testosterone therapy, how that might implicate our athletic ability, and whether we do perform better or worse, in comparison to cis males.
JG: What about the ordinary population, those of us who occasionally do a bit of sport? Sport - participation in sport - is actually really important, whoever you are, whatever you are.
BJ: Yep, of course it is, and perhaps even more so for transgender people. Unfortunately, you know, because of the way society is, trans people tend to report quite high levels of mental health, so a lot of depression, high levels of anxiety, social anxiety, and we know from extensive research that has taken place with the general population that physical activity - sport, you know, sport participation, is a really good kind of treatment to alleviate poor mental health problems. So yeah, of course it can only be a positive thing to make physical activity in sport inclusive for transgender people.