Canada's new sports minister owes female athletes clarity on sex-based categories

Adam van Koeverden can start by "telling Canadian men and boys to accept feminine males in the same way female athletes have always accepted tomboys."

Canada's new Secretary of State for Sport was once so much a proponent for women's sport that he went elbows up in the National Post to provide "a lesson in feminism" to a fellow Olympian. That was nearly a decade ago, and two years before he began his political career. Since entering Parliament in 2018, three-time Olympian Adam van Koeverden has avoided the issue of men in women's sport. But given his new portfolio and his statements in support of "2SLGBTQ+" individuals, he owes Canadian sportspeople a clear idea of where he stands.

During the 2016 Summer Olympic games, van Koeverden upbraided Adam Kreek over Kreek's comments on the CBC about tennis player Eugenie Bouchard's commitment to sport. Kreek peddled "the kind of tired, regressive, paternalistic, arrogant and sexist commentary that female athletes put up with all the time," van Koeverden wrote.

One week later, a Canadian female athlete suffered much more tangibly and objectively at the hands of a tired, regressive, paternalistic, arrogant, and sexist policy: that which allowed three male athletes with differences of sexual development (DSD) to compete in the finals of the women's 800-meter race at those same Olympics.

Melissa Bishop was the fastest female in that race, yet placed fourth. While van Koeverden was defending Bouchard's prerogative to use her social media for personal branding and marketing opportunities, Bishop likely lost millions of dollars in endorsement contracts by finishing off the podium.

And Canada missed out on an Olympic medal.

Van Koeverden expressed neither umbrage nor support over Bishop's—and Canadian sport's—unfair loss.

Peter Eriksson was Athletics Canada's head coach for the 2016 Summer Olympics. He recalls being hired to break AC's 16-year rut of winning no more than two medals at World Championships or Olympic Games. "We won six track & field medals at the Olympic Games in 2016, a record number for Canada. Melissa would have been medal number seven, had she been able to race honestly. But the federation didn't care. They weren't even interested in pointing out that the federation's goals were compromised by the unfairness of the sport."

We now know why Eriksson did not speak up at the time: he was threatened by a lawyer from the Canadian Olympic Committee, an incident he revealed only two years ago.

Since the 2016 Olympics, the issue of sex-protected categories in sport has swayed sports governance, national politics, and cultural discourse around the world. Anyone leading a sports body—whether a local soccer club, a professional league, or a country's ministry of sport—will face it. The athletes, coaches, business people, parents, fans, sponsors, and citizens who make up those sports organizations deserve to know where their leaders will take them.

Bishop's and Eriksson's experiences provide a starting point for questions that Van Koeverden should answer publicly, both as a matter of transparency and because he will likely face some version of them during his term.

• How will he develop Canada's policies regarding sex-protected categories in sport in light of the United Kingdom Supreme Court's ruling that "sex" refers exclusively and explicitly to "biological sex?" How will he align such policies with the increasing number of international sports governing bodies that are restricting the female category to (biological) females?

• Does he believe girls and women at all levels of sport, from youth and grassroots to professional and Olympic, should have female-only competition? Or will female-only categories be reserved for higher competitive levels?

• Will he speak up for a female Canadian athlete who loses a competition to a male in the female category?

The closest van Koeverden has come to making a public statement about males in female sports was in his very short-lived Substack blog, Middle Bench Views. In support of his thesis that "2SLGBTQ+ communities are under attack," he wrote in 2023 that "[w]e've started to see intolerance normalized in hockey... [S]ome NHL players have recently decided not to wear pride-themed warm-up jerseys before their team’s pride nights and the league’s 'Hockey is for Everyone' campaign."

Six months before he wrote that blog post, the NHL sponsored an "All-Trans Draft Tournament" in Middleton, Wisconsin, as part of the "Hockey is for Everyone" and "NHL Pride" campaigns. The draft resulted in one team being "stacked with physically imposing biological men." During a game, a player from that team pushed—innocently, non-maliciously, maybe accidentally—a female player to the ice. The difference in strength and size between the two players resulted in the female player sliding head first into the boards hard enough to induce a concussion.

Those players knew that they were playing in a mixed-sex tournament. Not all female athletes know that they will be facing a male competitor ahead of time. A Canadian boxer who was minutes away from unknowingly fighting a male boxer said female athletes should have to give informed consent before entering the ring, rink, court, track, or pool against a male.

• If Canada's policies permit males to compete in female sport, will they require that female athletes provide informed consent before facing a male opponent, whether in an individual or team sport?

• Will van Koeverden speak up for a female Canadian athlete who is injured by a male opponent in a competition that does not sex-test or disclose the sex of a male opponent, whether that happens in Canada or internationally?

Van Koeverden's temperament around gender ideology is another cause for concern, both with regards to female sports and freedom of speech.

His Facebook and X feeds contain annual posts marking International Transgender Day of Visibility. He responded adversely to some of the replies this year, posting on Facebook: "To all the ignorant commenters - Trans people exist they are just as deserving as you are of dignity. Stop being bullies, you pathetic turds."

That was not his first social media outburst. In 2022, while he was parliamentary secretary to the minister of health, he had an escalating exchange on Instagram with a Canadian living in New Zealand who asked about COVID-19 vaccine mandates, including flight and entry restrictions. Upon being called "a disgrace of a Canadian," van Koeverden wrote "F--k you" and that he "made a mistake in responding to someone like you."

Setting these two incidents against the backdrop of the threat leveled against Peter Eriksson:

• Will van Koeverden allow dissent and debate by Canadian sportspeople of this country's or any sport's governing body's sex eligibility policies?

• Will he commit to a good faith effort to engage with athletes, coaches, sport scientists, and others—female and male—who advocate for a sex-protected female category in sport?

In his screed against Adam Kreek, van Koeverden noted that female Olympians Marnie McBean, Chandra Crawford and Annamay Pierse had also criticized Kreek. Ever the white knight, van Koeverden wished "to make it abundantly clear that I am not sticking up for them, or defending women—they don’t need my help."

Maybe not on that topic at that time, but certainly on this one now, as he occupies a position of power and influence.

Coach Linda Blade says "It's all about leadership and willingness to accept biological facts."

Blade says van Koeverden could resolve all the problems for Canadian women and girl in sports in a way that is both politically and legislatively simple: put the onus on the men to keep males in men's sport.

"Change the interpretation of Bill C16 to what it should have meant all along. We fulfill non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity or gender expression by telling all men and boys in Canadian sport to be kind and accept the feminine male in the same way female athletes have always accepted tomboys.

"Violating the sex-based charter rights of female athletes by wedging feminine males into women's sports was never the right interpretation. It immediately brings rights into conflict. Instead, enact and enforce policies that say 'Don't bully the guy who expresses as feminine.'"

Failing that, Blade points to the provinces' authority over sports within their borders. Alberta's Bill 29, the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act, requires organizations overseeing amateur competitive sports—such as provincial sports organizations and schools, with some qualifications—to develop and implement athlete eligibility policies. Such policies must restrict entry to female divisions to "athletes registered as female at birth."

Gender Ideology Leaves Coaches With Nothing To Say

That is very similar to the Participation Policy for Transgender Student-Athletes put forth by the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) in the United States earlier this year. The peril in such policies is the ease with which individuals can change their birth records to reflect their preferred gender identity, legally overwriting their biological sex. Being registered as male or female at birth is not the permanent record of an objective fact that it once was.

Van Koeverden's parting advice to Kreek included "check[ing] your male privilege at the door." In sport, there is no greater male privilege than the biological advantages of being male. Will van Koeverden require all males to check their privilege and play exclusively on male teams?

As Secretary of State for Sport, he does not have the privilege to dodge that question any longer.

Photo credit: s.yume / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.