Trans People in Elite Sport and Testosterone Myths with Dr Veronica Ivy | Transcript
CW: discussions of transphobia
Find the episode shownotes here!
Hannah Witton
Hi everyone. Welcome back to Doing It, the sex and relationships podcast where sex has never been so nerdy, with me, your host Hannah Witton. This week I am joined by Dr. Veronica Ivy, who is an interdisciplinary scholar and professional athlete.
She is a world leading expert on trans and intersex athlete rights and offers institutional diversity and inclusion training workshops, writes articles for major publications, and appears on major TV and radio shows to discuss trans issues and particularly trans and intersex people in sport. In addition to her academic work, Veronica is a two time Masters Track Cycling world champion and previous Masters world record holder. She is the first known trans woman to win a track cycling world championship and is an activist for trans and intersex athletes, and advises various national and international organisations, including the International Olympic Committee.
I'm so excited to have Veronica on the show to speak to her all about what it's like navigating the sporting world as a trans woman, and for her to bust myths around trans people, hormones, gender, and sporting performance. Veronica told me all about her sporting journey and also becoming a philosophy professor specialising in language. She spoke about what she means by sport being a human right, and shared how the Olympic guidelines and rules are back-up that trans people should be able to compete in the category of the gender that they identify. We talked about how there is so much more transphobia in sports these days due to far right groups, and Victoria shared so many brilliant insights and facts that debunk all of the myths and assumptions around hormones, trans people, and performance. My mind was honestly blown.
Veronica shared some really interesting perspectives on how the socialisation of children of different genders has an impact on their sport performance and it's not just about the physiological differences. She also spoke about why she doesn't think we should remove gender categories entirely in sport because of the patriarchal and psychological impact on men and women's performances. Veronica also spoke about the misogynoir that occurs towards Black female athletes and how people don't want to celebrate exceptional women: rather, they are suspicious of them. And instead of celebrating their achievements, they call for policies that ban them. We finished off by speaking about what allyship by cis athletes looks like, and why she calls for them to boycott transphobic leagues to truly support all athletes.
This chat was absolutely brilliant. I learned so much about trans athletes and all of the myths, studies or lack there of, about sex, hormones, and performance, which I know will help us all to informatively challenge people's transphobic views around sports.
Please note that we do talk about transphobia in this episode, so bear that in mind before listening.
And as usual, you can find more info and links to everything that we talked about in this episode in the shownotes over at doingitpodcast.co.uk. And please let us know what you think over on our Instagram, which is @doingitpodcast. And if you like this episode, please leave us a rating and review over on iTunes and Spotify. It is really appreciated. I can't wait for you to listen to this episode. Here is Dr. Veronica IV.
Dr. Veronica Ivy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm really excited to get into this subject and quiz you and get into all of that knowledge that you have and experience in this area. How are you doing?
Dr Veronica Ivy
Good. Yeah, I had a long very difficult ride yesterday and recovering. So today's a rest day.
Hannah Witton
Very important, those rest days. Yeah. So do you want to tell us a bit about your rides over the years? Your kind of like sporting journey? To kind of like get a picture of you and your kind of sporting history?
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah, I've been an elite athlete basically my whole life. Early on as a junior I was pretty elite level badminton athlete. And golf.
Hannah Witton
Aw, I love badminton. Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah. So you know, I was a junior provincial champion. And later in life, I, you know, competed at the elite level, won some tournaments, especially like Masters tournaments, so 30+ age category in Alberta. And then when I moved to the US to take up my professorship, there's no badminton in most US cities, they can't even pronounce it properly. They say "badmitten".
Hannah Witton
No!
Dr Veronica Ivy
So if you say badminton to them, they don't know what you mean. If you say "badmitten" then they know so -
Hannah Witton
Good to know, good to know.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So I needed to do sport and I started like doing spin classes on the bike and really loved it and then used a tax return to buy a road bike and started road biking, got into racing, crashed in my very first race thanks to someone else's bad riding. And even with bad road rash on my back, I was out there the very next week and won.
Hannah Witton
Amaing.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So that embarked my professional/semi professional road racing career. I ended up racing sort of the top domestic amateur levels, professional levels in the US and Canada, had some good results. And then, in 20 - at the end of the 2017 season, I retired from road racing and transitioned to track cycling, and was training full time while also working as a professor, of course. So you know, 20 hours a week in the gym and on the bike. And then in 2018, I won my first Masters World Championship. So that is an age group championship aged 35 to 39. And in 2019, in Manchester, I defended my title.
Hannah Witton
Oh, nice.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So I have two Masters Track Cycling World Championships. That also means that I get to wear these rainbow bands on my - either on the sleeve or the end of the sleeve and on my collar of my racing kit for the rest of my career.
Hannah Witton
That's pretty cool.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So like, once you're a world champion, you're always a world champion.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Oh, that's cool.
Dr Veronica Ivy
I once upon a time held a world record in the Masters event, but it has since been broken.
Hannah Witton
That's the pesky thing about world records.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Oh, they never stand forever.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. You mentioned your professorship as well. Um, can you talk a little bit about kind of like your academic career, as well?
Dr Veronica Ivy
Sure. So my early background was actually in science. So I was in kinesiology and chemistry, I worked for a time as a research chemist, running experiments and, you know, writing up reports for a company, and got kind of disillusioned with lab work. And for some reason, going into philosophy made sense to me. Because the kinds of questions I was thinking about were like what counts as evidence, what counts as a good theory? Well, those are the sorts of questions that philosophers ask. So I went into philosophy, got my undergrad, did a master's degree, did my PhD, which I finished in 2012. I specialised in knowledge and language, and specifically, things like propaganda and lies. So -
Hannah Witton
Oh, my God, huge crossover in this topic we're going to explore around like -
Dr Veronica Ivy
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I taught business ethics for about 10 years. So I've published in all kinds of topics like the nature of luck, and how we should evaluate performances that are lucky or unlucky. I've published on evolutionary game theory and how it relates to behaviour changes.
Hannah Witton
Oh my god, this all sounds so interesting.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah, so for the past six years or so, I've been moving to specialise in sport and athlete rights. So I work on the legal, the ethical, and the scientific basis for athlete rights, and specifically intersex and trans women athlete rights. And yeah, that has brought me to be an adviser to the International Olympic Committee. I've been an advisor to World Triathlon. I do a lot of activism and advocacy, but also, like expert testimony.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Wow. So one of the things that you say, kind of like on the rights side of things, is that sport is a human right. And I'd love to know what you mean by that.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah. So the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, has an Olympic Charter. And really early on, they have their seven fundamental principles of Olympism. And principle four starts with the sentence that participation in sport is a human right. So when I say that sport is a human right, it's not like me arguing for it. It's just like the Olympics says that it's a human right. And what they mean by that is competitive sport. So not just like access to recreational sport. It's the Olympics, right? They only care about competitive, elite level sport. And what they mean is that people should not be denied access to competitive sport based on their identity, like their gender, sex, which includes gender identity, religion, social origin, like what country you're from, these sorts of things. Like there should not be discrimination in sport blocking you from competing.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
And the IOC has taken the position that trans people deserve as a right to compete in the gender that they are. So trans women should compete in women's sport.
Hannah Witton
So what's the big hoo ha, then? What's kind of like happening with these conversations? Because if the Olympics are saying trans people should compete in the the gender category that they are, then is the kind of like transphobia that we're seeing around trans people in sport a backlash to that? Was that like, a recent thing? Or has that just always been there and transphobia just seems to be kind of like more and more vocal now? Like, I feel like there's just been so much conversation about trans people in sport, and I didn't even realise that the Olympics'd already gone, "No. No, trans people can compete in the category that they are."
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah, it's really complicated, but to distil it: the IOC put out their first policy recommendation in 2003 to include trans people and no one gave a shit.
Hannah Witton
Okay.
Dr Veronica Ivy
And in 2015, they made it even easier for trans people to compete. And some people like threw a fit, but not really. Not on the scale that we see today.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So what has happened is that far right groups and transphobic "feminists", air quotes - they want to exclude trans people, and specifically trans women, from women only spaces or female only spaces. And their first avenue of battle was like bathrooms and change rooms. So they tried to exclude trans people from bathrooms. And that came to a head in North Carolina with the passage of HB2. There was a huge international and national backlash to this policy, this law, banning trans people from using their appropriate bathrooms, that like the NBA, All-Star Game pulled out of going to North Carolina over it. So there are these economic reactions so that they killed the bill. And what's happened is the same people, often funded by far right groups like the Heritage Foundation, have switched from caring about bathrooms to sport. And it has nothing to do with them giving a shit about women's sport.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
They don't materially support women's sport in any sense. They just view it as a vehicle for their transphobia. Of course, you don't want to call it transphobia. They get very upset when you call it that. But if the only time you care about women's sport is to exclude trans women, you don't care about women's sport.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, so it's just another battleground. And like in a couple years time, it's going to probably be something else once they -
Dr Veronica Ivy
Well. My hope is that in a few years, once we finally get over this, there's nothing left. There will be no more battlegrounds.
Hannah Witton
Hopefully.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Sport is the final frontier.
Hannah Witton
Ooh, do you think?
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah.
Hannah Witton
Why so?
Dr Veronica Ivy
It seems to be the place where people's preconceived misconceptions about differences between sexes and genders has the most impact. So a lot of the arguments against trans women in women's sport are based entirely on these like really terrible scientific studies, where all they do is compare cisgender male athletes to cisgender female athletes, and they say well, the average cis male athlete is bigger, stronger, faster than the average cis female athletes, therefore exclude trans women. But that's not the relevant comparison class. You have to compare trans women to cis women. And those studies have not been done.
Hannah Witton
They've not been done?
Dr Veronica Ivy
No. And -
Hannah Witton
Is there like a call for them to be done or -?
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yes, there are a couple pilot studies. And unfortunately, the pilot studies are very small and don't have control groups. So they're they're scientifically bunk. But like they're pilot studies. They're studies that get you to do more in depth studies. The problem is the anti-trans groups are taking, like, phrases like "it may be required to have blah, blah, blah as a policy for fairness" or whatever. And they're taking it as fact.
Hannah Witton
Right, okay.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So they're taking possibilities as fact. And that is not how science or policy works.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. And I'm also assuming that a lot of these transphobic groups couldn't give two shits about trans men and men's sport. Or is there something going on there as well?
Dr Veronica Ivy
In fact, they're very largely erased. So a lot of the discourse around trans woman athletes - you see this all the time, especially on Twitter - people say like, "Well, where are all the trans men athletes?" And I'm like, Google is your friend. There are plenty of successful trans male athletes. One in particular, for example, is a professional male boxer. Patricio Manuel, in the US, he cannot get a fight, because men are afraid to fight him. Because their egos can't handle being beaten by someone they actually think is a woman.
Hannah Witton
I was gonna say is it like also that entrenched stereotype of like, 'oh, you shouldn't hit a girl' kind of mentality as well?
Dr Veronica Ivy
Well. I think it's more like, "He's a good fighter. And if I lose, then I've lost to a girl." And boxing culture is hyper toxic masculinity, so their egos can't handle it.
Hannah Witton
Wow.
Dr Veronica Ivy
And in fact, like the one professional fight he did get, the person thought that it was like unfair to compete against him. And it's like, "How so?" Like, all of these arguments against trans inclusion are, to be perfectly clear, incoherent.
Hannah Witton
So one of the things that my partner actually says is that common sense is just all of the stereotypes and things that you've absorbed up until the age of 18. And so everyone's kind of common sense is different. And I think there'll be quite a lot of people especially like - even well meaning people who might say that they support trans people -
Dr Veronica Ivy
"Except."
Hannah Witton
- and support trans people in sport - yeah, in theory, and then might go, "But how does it work in sport? And about the hormones and all of that stuff?" So could you please debunk that for us?
Dr Veronica Ivy
So I have written multiple academic peer reviewed articles doing this.
Hannah Witton
Excellent.
Dr Veronica Ivy
And I've done of course, lots of media interviews about these things. And the first thing I want to say is that we did not study the relationship between natural endogynous testosterone and sport performance until about 10 years ago.
Hannah Witton
Right. Okay.
Dr Veronica Ivy
That is very recent. So the presumption is that men are bigger, stronger, faster on average than women because of testosterone. And it turns out, that's complete bullshit.
Hannah Witton
Oh, wow.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So it turns out there is no relationship between your natural testosterone and performance. And in fact, low testosterone men are highly statistically over represented in elite athletics. So, like if you pick a five nanomole per litre testosterone policy, 6.5% of world level elite men are naturally below that number. And 0.55% of elite men are naturally below the women's average for testosterone.
Hannah Witton
Wow.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So people are approaching this with two misconceptions. One: testosterone is the male hormone. Meaning that women don't produce it. Which is bullshit.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Everybody produces both oestrogen and testosterone to varying degrees. There are plenty of women with more testosterone than cis men. And there are plenty of cis men of course with low testosterone. And a huge study by World Athletics - so like world championship level track and field - that found no relationship in men between testosterone and performance. So when people say it's, "Well, when you go through puberty, it's the flush of testosterone that causes you to get bigger, stronger, faster." That isn't true, because we have these men with less testosterone than the average woman, yet they're stronger. Right? It's just bodies and biology are not as simple as your grade eight science class.
Hannah Witton
No, I keep learning this and having my mind blown. And honestly just started to question like, What is the category of biological sex anyway? Like, Does it even exist?
Dr Veronica Ivy
It doesn't. So, at least in terms of the binary, it doesn't exist.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So people have very reluctantly come around to the idea that gender is a spectrum. Gender is a social construct made out of social stuff like mannerisms, clothes, painted nails, stuff like that. But they're much more slowly coming around to the idea that sex is also a spectrum. So you have the Olympics, for example, used to do chromosome testing, and they were testing for the presence of a Y chromosome. And if you had a Y chromosome, you were ineligible for female competition. They stopped doing that in 1996. And the practice has been banned since 1999. And you have some transphobic women athletes like Sharon Davies, trying to advocate for return to chromosome testing, even though we already know it doesn't work. It's not that's simple. So a lot of people don't know that. You can have XY chromosomes and be phenotypically female without like being trans.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So if your body has something like complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, it produces lots of testosterone but your receptors don't work.
Hannah Witton
Yes.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So you you develop into normal female, you just have XY chromosomes. And there's also you can have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, where you're XX chromosome, but your body produces so much testosterone that you develop phenotypically male. There's also cases of you can have XXY, XYY, XXYY, you can even be XO chromosomes.
Hannah Witton
What is O!
Dr Veronica Ivy
What that means is your second chromosome is a null chromosome. It doesn't do anything.
Hannah Witton
Oh, you can have where it's something is missing as well, can't you? I think.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah. So like this idea that sex is - like, you cannot give a set of criteria for who is male or who is female. Sex is socially constructed, meaning that, as a society, we have to decide who counts as male and who counts as female. And there's all these middle cases of intersex people where, like, there's no obvious way to decide which category to fit them in.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay. So I kind of have like two follow up questions and feel free to go with wherever you want to go. One is like about intersex people and competitive sport. How does that work? Are there any - kind of in this in the same way that the Olympics have their stance on trans people, like, has has there been anything about intersex people and how they can compete? And then the other question was about are there calls for getting rid of these categories in competitive sport altogether? What does competitive sport that does that look like?
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah. So one question is easy, the other is hard. The OC framework recommendation - it's not a policy, it's a recommendation - covers both trans and intersex people. So they're covered by effectively the same policy. Well, not policy. Recommendation. Framework. And unfortunately, groups like World Athletics is run by a pretty super transphobic person named Stephane Burmon. He's gone on - he refers to Caster Semenya, for example, who has XY chromosomes. She's an intersex athlete. She's a woman, Olympic champion, and he refers to her exclusively as male, and he's gone on record. This - it's funny, I've a big poster in my room from this symposium at the French Embassy in DC, where I was a speaker, he was a speaker, and he said this at the symposium and like the room erupted, but and I thought it was like a slip of the tongue or the mask slipping off. But then like three days later, he said the same thing in like an interview. And he thinks that he's really glomped on to the idea that for women reducing testosterone is gender affirming care. That's true for trans women.
Hannah Witton
Right. But he thinks that for cis women?
Dr Veronica Ivy
Um, he thinks it for intersex and trans women.
Hannah Witton
Right, okay.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So for trans women, reducing testosterone is a standard part of your healthcare journey if you choose it, and not all trans women are medically eligible for those sorts of medications. There can be contraindications. But he said, "If you are really a woman, and you deny testosterone reducing medications, we should question whether you're really a woman."
Hannah Witton
Right.
Dr Veronica Ivy
And that is fucked up. So, the thing is about many intersex athletes is they are perfectly healthy. And if you view intersex as a disorder of sexual development, or DSD, or even difference of sexual development, you view it as like a wrong way of existing, so you must medically act on it.
Hannah Witton
Something that needs treatment.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Right. But most of these intersex athletes feel perfectly healthy. And so what it would mean to artificially reduce their testosterone is to make them less healthy. To make them, in fact, unhealthy. Because testosterone does good things for the bodies for all sexes and genders.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So yeah, his view is that, like, if you were really a woman, you would want this, and if you don't want it, we should question whether you're really a woman, and that is some fucked up shit. So that's how intersex athletes are sort of handled. The World Athletics has a policy of hyperandrogenism - so high natural testosterone -for three events: the 400 metres, the 800 metres, and the mile. And their own scientific data showed that, for the mile, there was a disadvantage for having higher testosterone. But they included it in their policy. Not because the science said that there was an advantage, but because the existence of intersex women with hyperandrogenism in that event is statistically over represented, therefore we must do this. And that is the most blatant form of discrimination that exists. Like you haven't shown that there's an advantage there. You just say there's too many of them, therefore we must enact this policy.
Hannah Witton
Wow. Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Now, your second question about does this not suggest that we should get rid of the gender binary in sport categories? That is a difficult conversation. In general, it is a fact that on average, and comparing elite to elite or average the average, cis male athletes are, on average, bigger, stronger, faster than cis female athletes. That is true. I do not deny that.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. I played tag rugby as a kid, like up until the age of 11. And it was a mixed team because we were all pre pubescent. Yes, I would not want to play that game in high school.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah, so pre puberty, there are no physiological differences between boys and girls. However, there are tonnes of sociological differences. So why is it that boys pre-puberty are in general faster than girls? They throw better, for example. They hit harder. It's not because of biology.
Hannah Witton
But do they? Is that a thing?
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah, it's a thing. It's - so you know, 'throwing like a girl'. The reason that that's a thing is because we expect boys to know how to play sports. We give little boys baseball gloves and sports equipment and rugby whatever, we put them into certain masculine sports, whereas women are often discouraged from sport or dangerous activities. And that has sociological effects on performance. And we have no idea the degree - so the gender gap in performance at adult level, we don't know how much of that is due to the sociological effect.
Hannah Witton
I'd never even considered that. Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah, so I'm not saying that like the gender gap is entirely due to sociological effects but at least some of it is and we have not measured it.
Hannah Witton
We don't know. Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
However there's a problem in how could we even measure it because we live in patriarchal societies that celebrate physicality in boys and discourage it in girls, right? Strong girls get called manly. Strong Black women get called trans or men. So people like Serena Williams has been accused of being trans, has been accused of being a man. Michelle Obama the same thing. So that has an - like, women going to the gym don't want to get too buff. Why? Because they're viewed as insufficiently feminine. That shit has like performance effects. So until we smash the patriarchy fully, I don't think having the conversation about removing gender categories in sport makes a lot of sense. Because of all these sociological effects, where we don't know the magnitude of outcome.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess - another question I have is kind of like when non binary people fit into all of this?
Dr Veronica Ivy
So at the most elite levels of sport, they're not only not willing to move away from the sex binary, they're not even ready to open the conversation.
Hannah Witton
Wow. Okay.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So the way non binary athletes are generally handled, especially at elite sport, is you have to pick a sex category and you can't change it usually for four years.
Hannah Witton
Do people usually pick the sex that they were assigned at birth? Or is it kind of a bit of a mix?
Dr Veronica Ivy
Totally depends.
Hannah Witton
That's so interesting. Yeah. It's it's one of those things that I guess like when you've got whole institutions that have all these like frameworks and rules and everything, and then you throw something that's like literally non binary into the equation. It's just like, "What do we do?"
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah, so the first trans person to ever win the Olympic medal was a non binary athlete on the Canadian women's soccer team. Sorry, football. Their name is Quinn. So yeah, there were three trans people at the Olympics. Only one won a medal. And it was a non binary person on the women's soccer team.
Hannah Witton
Oh, wow. Yeah. Um -
Dr Veronica Ivy
Who was assigned female at birth, by the way.
Hannah Witton
Okay. Yeah. Okay, so we kind of talked a lot about like the elite side of things. And I was just wondering, like, how, how does this kind of then play out in schools and kind of in that like recreational level? Because obviously, when we're talking about elite sport, part of me just kind of wants to say, like, why are we arguing about this? Like, it's such a small percentage of society. But then when it kind of like trickles down to thinking of sport as a human right, recreational sport as well, what kind of is going on at that kind of level? What kind of conversations are being had? And like how can schools or like clubs and stuff like support like trans youth when it comes to them wanting to like access sport?
Dr Veronica Ivy
So the first thing is, I would push back on the claim that elite sport is only a small part of society.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
There's a reason that, for a period of time, British football stadiums banned alcohol because y'all love to riot so much for fucking football games.
Hannah Witton
Ugh, yeah. Can't say it's any better, but um -
Dr Veronica Ivy
In Vancouver when the Vancouver Canucks hockey team lost the World Cup, there was a riot. People riot when their team wins, people riot when their team loses. People give a huge shit over elite sport. It is a huge part of our society like massive. There's a whole segment on nightly news dedicated to sport like so when people say elite sport isn't this big part of society, I'm like, bullshit. In fact, it's a huge part of our society. The World Cup every year. You people go nuts over it.
Hannah Witton
We do.
Dr Veronica Ivy
The Olympics is a huge event. So like all these things, like when people say "Oh, elite sport, like doesn't really matter." I'm like, "Bullshit." It is super - I'm not saying it's super important because it's important. I'm setting society cares a lot. And there's a lot of money that gets pumped into like Olympic sport, for example, and athlete development.
Hannah Witton
A lot of eyeballs on it as well.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah, so with that said, what unfortunately what's happening is the transphobia at the elite level is filtering down because people are viewing lower level sport as a feeder to elite sport. So, in the States, for example, some like not very great high school sprinters took a lawsuit against Connecticut over allowing Black trans women to compete and win, claiming discrimination on the basis of like missing out on scholarships. So, at the high school level, they're saying we can't allow trans people because they are taking away opportunities that rightfully belong to cis women. Even when it's not true.
Hannah Witton
Wow, yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Even when it's demonstrably false. Which is why they lost their case. So unfortunately, this transphobia has filtered down because they see themselves as a feeder towards the elite. So we have to apply whatever is happening at the elite level to the lower levels. And I think that's a mistake. So for the most part, like at the lower levels, like, just don't give a shit. Just like be inclusive, like -
Hannah Witton
Let everyone have a good time. Like, play the sport you want to play. That's tricky, though, because I remember when I was in school, and there was like no conversations about trans students being included, but it was very much split boys/girls, and like we did rounders and netball, and then the boys did like football and hockey. So even our curriculum was entirely different.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Oh, yes, sports themselves are highly gendered. So girls play softball, boys play baseball, like hardball. Or girls play ringette, boys play hockey. So the sports themselves are highly gendered. Girls and women are systematically not given better coaching, better facilities, better funding. There was a huge controversy a couple years ago at the US NCAA basketball championships, where you juxtaposed the women's gym facilities and the men's and the men's was like fully kitted out and the women's was like a craft table with some shitty hand weights. And it was like such a joke. And like, so when we're trying to compare gender gaps in performance, and you're like, systematically underfunding, not giving prime ice time to a women's hockey team versus a men's hockey team, the coaching staff is not as good. Like, it's a whole system that basically produces weaker women athletes.
One thing I love to - when I used to teach, like, sports ethics, I would talk to the girls in the class and I would say - and often like my class was all athletes. And I'd say "Okay, how many girls here are athletes?" And like, you know, all of their hands go up. I'm like, "How many of you, as your girls or women's team, played against the men's team?" And some percentage of hands would go up. And I said, "Did your team get better by doing that?" And they're all like, "Oh, yeah, we got way better by playing against the guys. Because they like, if it's volleyball, it's like they hit harder. And stuff like that. And we got better because of that." In my sport of badminton, if the girls played against the guys, the girls got better. Right? So when we gender separate our practices, then you see gender differences as an artifice of that social decision. So that's why I'm trying to say like, yes, there are performance differences between men and women. But how much of it is sociological? I don't know. And I'm not saying the whole gap is sociological. I'm just saying, at least some of it is and we don't know how much.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, that's definitely something to explore that. And I am better at tennis when I play against men. Like 100%.
Dr Veronica Ivy
It's high - it's super typical. Like also, when we play against better people, period, we tend to raise our performances. Yeah. So like, when I was a competitive golfer, if I was - so I was a scratch golfer, which means you know, I shoot average par or under par. If I played with a whole bunch of 20 handicap players, I would play worse, because I'm surrounded by people way worse than me where like an average or below average shot for me is like an amazing shot for them. Whereas if I played with other elite level golfers I always did better. So the people we surround ourselves for practices and play and competition affects our own performances.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. So we had a bunch of questions from Instagram, but I feel like we've kind of covered so much ground that we've answered a lot of people's questions. But one thing that somebody asked was: what could effective ally ship from predominantly cisgender sports people look like? And what is that currently looking like? Because I'm sure it is out there.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah, I mean -
Hannah Witton
Maybe.
Dr Veronica Ivy
I've - I've conflicted thoughts on this. So fight like hell for your trans siblings' right and to exist and freedom from harassment and discrimination. Believe them when they tell you that they are experiencing a form of harassment or discrimination. Immediately, like, taking the default of doubt is like harmful. So for example, right now, rugby is a big problem for transphobia. So like, the British Rugby Federation banned trans people and there's like not a single trans woman playing the sport. And World Rugby banned trans people entirely on the basis of comparing cis male rugby players to cis female rugby players.
Hannah Witton
Were there any?
Dr Veronica Ivy
And - well to return to the when I said these positions are incoherent is they're saying things like, "Well, you know, the average man is five foot nine and the average woman is like five foot four." It'ls like, okay, well, there are six foot 300 pound women rugby players.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, like what about the average rugby players because they're gonna be quite different from the average -
Dr Veronica Ivy
But not even averages. Like talking about averages is a mistake. What you're saying is a five foot nine trans woman is so dangerous if she's five foot nine 160 pounds compared to a six foot 300 pounds cis woman. And that is incoherent.
Hannah Witton
Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
So what these policies are trying to say is like these types of bodies are unsafe. But the problem is for whatever criteria you give about trans people, there will be cis people that exceed them, and are allowed to compete. So that's what I mean that they're incoherent is that they're not basing them on like principles. They're basing them on the average cis man. Well, but we're not talking about averages, when we talk about athletes. They're individuals.
Hannah Witton
And I guess like when you try and draw a line anywhere, there will always be cis people that like fall on the other side of the line. So -
Dr Veronica Ivy
Therefore the lines are bullshit.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah. So I believe that we need to stop drawing those lines. Also, we stop celebrating exceptional women. We are suspicious of exceptional women. People call for drug testing for exceptional women more than exceptional men. We celebrate exceptional men. So Usain Bolt: eight gold medals in successive Olympics, world record holder in all his events. Celebrated. Caster Semenya: two gold medals, no world records. We got a banner. It's unfair.
Hannah Witton
Yeah, "Test her. We need to double check." Yeah,
Dr Veronica Ivy
Like you can't make that case. So in 2012, in the Olympics, for example, when Bolt and Caster both won gold medals, Castor actually came second, but the Russian winner got caught doping. So Bolt won his event by a margin of five times what caster won her event by. So Bolt won by 1.25%, Caster won by 0.25%. We celebrate Bolt. We create policies to ban Caster. What the fuck?
Hannah Witton
There's nothing suspicious there!
Dr Veronica Ivy
It is manifestly incoherent is what my point is. So how do you - so like in rugby, there's this movement of keep rugby inclusive. And part of me is like, "Nice campaign slogan. But what are you actually doing?" Because these rugby clubs, these women's rugby clubs are still playing. They're still participating. If you want to actually have an effect, you boycott that shit. You stop competing. You pull out.
Hannah Witton
Oh, it's - yeah, the other athletes. Yeah.
Dr Veronica Ivy
By competing under the ban, even though you're saying this ban is bullshit, you're complicit with the ban. So my view is: you have to boycott. So what should have happened is all of these rugby teams should have just boycotted the league. Maybe that means you start your own league, but if a league is going to be transphobic, you boycott. You do not participate. That's what they should do.
Hannah Witton
Yeah. And the players have that power. Like if an entire team just goes, "We're not playing because of your transphobic policy" then they don't have a game.
Dr Veronica Ivy
If a whole league does it.
Hannah Witton
Yeah!
Dr Veronica Ivy
The league - that's power. Having a social media campaign of keep rugby inclusive and selling flags and stickers and shit doesn't do -
Hannah Witton
- does nothing.
Dr Veronica Ivy
- doesn't do anything. Boycotting does.
Hannah Witton
So how do we get all of these cis rugby athletes to boycott their league?
Dr Veronica Ivy
They have to put aside self interest. Cecause I understand the bind they're in. They're like, "I shouldn't be deprived of my right to compete because of this shitty transphobic policy I disagree with." But it's like, um, like Colin Kaepernick, for example, the NFL quarterback who took a knee and then basically got fired by the NFL over some racist bullshit. He put his career on the line for what he believed in. So if you - I hate the term ally, I prefer the term accomplice. Because the the term accomplice connotes willingness to put yourself on the line.
Hannah Witton
Action. Yeah, that makes sense. Veronica, this has been excellent. I feel like I've learned so much. And also just that last bit about like, you know, like, just something that's actually quite tangible that we can hope to see athletes and sports people doing when shit like this arises. Where can people find more of you and like all of your work and everything online and in the real world?
Dr Veronica Ivy
Yeah, probably the best place is Twitter. My handle is @sportisaright. Also, my Instagram is @drveronicaivy. My pinned tweet on Twitter is a long thread with graphs on the myths about testosterone and performance with links to my academic articles.
Hannah Witton
Ooh, okay, excellent. I know some of the nerds listening will be all about that. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time. And thank you all for listening. Goodbye.