Strongwomen are women: Maria Barwig on sex and strength
"Strength of her convictions" takes on extra meaning with professional Canadian Strongwoman Maria Barwig.
Maria Barwig broke the uncomfortable silence when a male athlete took his turn at a Strongwoman event. She, alone, cheered. She wasn't happy about it.
"When it was time for him to compete, the crowd went silent. It was uncomfortable. I felt it from the crowd right away. There was this silent acceptance of 'we have to compete against this person.' And it was wrong. It didn't feel good. None of it."
And yet... she cheered?
"It has nothing to do with the competitor. They're only doing what they've been allowed to do. The best thing that I can do is be a good sport. They're entering this sport, and it's solely on the federation."
That federation, Strongman Corporation of Canada, had already ignored Barwig and 15 other Strongmen and Strongwomen competitors in the preceding months. Word dropped into a group chat that a trans-identifying male athlete was planning to compete in the next meet. Barwig and the others sent emails individually and as a group expressing their concerns to Strongman Corporation, and to confirm the open secret. They did not even receive a strongarm response telling them that "this is the policy and you're just going to have to deal with it." The federation and the meet organizers ghosted them. "And in our sport, 16 people is huge."
So Barwig did what a decent portion of Canadian female athletes do when they find themselves in this situation: she reached out to April Hutchinson.
The federation didn't ghost her.
"April would message Strongman and they communicated back and forth, but there was no direct communication with me."
Barwig heard rumors that there was going to be a policy change at the end of 2023, and that she would just need to do one more show and then everything would be taken care of. Just one more show, was the half plea, half put off.
"Why do I have to one more show?" Barwig still asks when she looks back. As that "one show" approached, she decided to go all in with Hutchinson and the Independent Council on Women's Sports (ICONS) to speak up. "Between April, ICONS, and bringing this matter to social media, things definitely sped up. Even so, the only communication was an Instagram Reel explaining the new, third 'Open' category, which began right before nationals."
To Barwig's knowledge - and reviewing the results I can find - no one has entered a competition in the Open category yet. Barwig is hopeful but not optimistic that a third category will protect the female category.
"It's Canada. We can't just have two categories. We're going to have adapt to the open category. But what is scary is that once you go through a 'transition,' you change all the paperwork. The onus remains on the person that has transitioned to enter the right category, and there's no way to confirm or verify because the only people that have access to pre-transition records or documents are medical doctors. You're relying on good faith."
As she showed last September, Barwig will extend sportsmanship in even surreally unfair circumstances. But she's not naive enough to expect any amount coming back her way. She talked about a trans-identifying male competitor who, well, there's no other way to say it, pranced and preened his way through events that some of the strongest women in Canada grunted, groaned, and gutted through, sometimes falling short despite their efforts.
Strongman events are separated by sex and weight class. Those classifications determine not just the grouping of competitors, but the specifics of the physical tasks the athletes must complete - akin to different hurdle heights or weights of throwing implements between men and women in track & field.
For example, the 2024 Arnold Amateur Strongman World Championship used 30 and 35 lb bags for the Ascending Height Bag Toss in the Women's Open category. All of the men's categories used 40 and 50 lb bags, except for the Men's Open category, which used 50 and 60 lb bags.
Likewise, the options for the Lever Squat in the Women's Open category were 312 and 390 lbs.
Let's pause for a second, man or woman you may be, and consider that 312 lbs is deemed the "light option" - then remind ourselves what Kim Jones, co-founder of ICONS, said: "We need to be able to see female athletes as remarkable in their own accomplishments and stop comparing them to males." But to finish the comparison, which is the point here, the lightest men's category loads the lever squat to 392 and 490 lbs.
The gaps between these numbers are not arbitrary: they're normative, rooted first in biology and then in sport science. A quick look at the recent Lundberg et al paper refuting the International Olympic Committee's framework on sex and gender reminds us that men - as a category - have 50% more quad strength, 40% more lower body muscle, and 50% more upper body muscle than women, contributing to a 30% higher output in weightlifting and up to 65% higher output in power lifting.
Barwig didn't need to compete against a male - a rather unsportsmanlike male - to know that the male advantage in physical performance exists, possibly more in her sport than any other. "It's obvious," she said, as so many have said before. It's so obvious that Barwig has to look for other explanations when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that the CEO of Canadian Women and Sport, Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, believes that minimal standards of sex verification "will actually have more of a negative impact on all girls and women in sport" and that "Until the sports system … moves beyond having these two categories - male and female - in sport, women's sport is going to be the best place, we believe, for transgender girls and women to play."
"They're saying it's OK to have unfairness in sports," Barwig said. "The CBC is trying so hard to be inclusive in that article that they don't understand what it's doing to women and girls - not just in sports, but more broadly in terms of fairness and safety. That's what infuriates me."
Barwig is bullish on her fellow Canadians, though, partly because she knows that the CBC doesn't speak for them and they don't listen to it anyway.
The day before we talked, she filmed a segment with Canadian alternative media outlet Rebel News. "They are huge advocates for truth seekers, and I want to say that's what most Canadians watch. It's what we're drawn to - not what Justin Trudeau is putting out. Places like Rebel News and Quillette are big. They're just unreported and definitely kept under the thumb. You have to really dig for them sometimes, because when you watch the big ones" - the CBC and CTV - "they make you go cross-eyed a little bit."
Barwig speaks confidently of a "silent majority" around the transgender issue in sports and other female protected spaces, like locker rooms. But she doesn't think a majority - not even of the electoral variety - will be sufficient to restore and enforce the female category in sports.
"When women compete against trans-identifying males and the federations don't want to change, we have the right to sue. It's sex based discrimination, which goes against our Charter of Rights. We're going to have to dig the heels in and get the athletes to rally together to sue the federations. Inevitably, that's either going to bankrupt them or force the change."
Barwig thinks Canada needs its own version of ICONS to navigate Canada's legal system and culture. As she said, it's Canada. They can't help but be inclusive.
"We need the cultural flexibility to find what works. We need that checkpoint organization that all sports and all organizations can go through and say, OK, this is what works long term, and this is what won't. If federations try to take it into their own hands, it might be a little tricky. But a group like ICONS can help refine it, all the while respecting the reality of male-female biology."
Respecting reality is the essence of integrity, which in turn underlies some of the attributes that we value the most in sport: fairness and sportsmanship. Forced into situations where her expectation of fair sport conflicts with her commitment to being a good sport, Maria Barwig will stand and clap, alone, if necessary. The sooner the majority can drop their commitment to silence, the sooner Barwig and other female athletes will be on the receiving end of applause for their athletic achievements and character.
