Top female athletes who identify as trans often stay in their sex category. Why don't males?

Three top female athletes who identify as male (and two, nonbinary, for which the default is also male—cut off breasts, hope to one day take testosterone) chose to continue to compete in the female category. Males who identify as women rarely continue to compete in the male category. In fact, suggesting that males could identify however they pleased and continue competing in the male category, as most competitive female athletes do, is considered unthinkable, inhumane, bigoted. Why? If women, whose gender identities are just as strongly held as mens’, can compete in their sex class without existential angst, why can’t men?

Ideally, I would ask those athletes directly, as trans advocates always preach. Okay. I contacted runner Nikki Hiltz, soccer midfielder Quinn, swimmer Iszac Henig, swimmer Lia Thomas, cyclist Emily Bridges,and hurdler CeCe Telfer. None answered my request for interview, so we’ll have to make inferences as to their reasons for competing in the sex class they did from interviews they’ve done. Lots of those.

The New York Times wrote about Nikki Hiltz, “They hope to one day have top surgery, a gender-affirming double mastectomy, but at this point the goal would be to wait until they have had the opportunity to qualify for and race in the Paris Olympics in 2024. ‘Right now, competing in the women’s category still feels OK for me and my gender and where I’m at with that journey,’” Hiltz said. So, Hiltz remains in the female category for the opportunity to qualify for and race in the Paris Olympics. In other words, to remain competitive. There is nothing to stop Hiltz from cutting off her breasts (which, other than recovery from surgery, has zero to do with athletic performance) but if she took testosterone she’d need to enter nonbinary categories (a doping friendly zone—see my previous post, USADA pretends there are sexless runners) of which there are none at the Olympic level, or compete in the male category where exogenous testosterone is a bannable doping offense. Even if it wasn’t, injecting testosterone would not bring her 4:00 1500-meter best anywhere close to elite men’s times in the low 3:30s. Hiltz has made frequent comment about how wonderful and accepting other female athletes have been of her trans nonbinary identity, and she recently won a women’s national championship, so it seems competing in a sex class that doesn’t align with her belief about herself is not the soul destroying existential hell that we’ve been led to believe.

Trans nonbinary soccer midfielder Quinn has said lots and lots about being trans but great big nothing about why she continues to compete with the Canadian women’s national team. The Independent said, “They [Quinn] were granted permission to continue playing professional women's football based on a sex-assigned-at-birth basis.” Other news sources used the words “allowed to continue,” suggesting that Quinn herself requested to stay on the women’s team after declaring a male gender identity, which she authenticated by cutting off her breasts and hair. In the deluge of press that has covered Quinn, none has asked her why she doesn’t play with the team that matches her gender identity. It seems implicit, given the US women’s team’s defeat to some under-15 boys’, that Quinn plays with the women to remain competitive. Male identity or no, she would be washed out of any men’s professional tryouts on the first day. But, like Hiltz, playing in the women’s league has not seemed to squelch her existence, her desire to live, her authenticity as a trans person, her joy in her sport, or her abilities as an athlete.

Yale swimmer Iszac Henig is a bit more interesting and a skosh more honest. Henig, you may remember, competed at the same time as trans-identified male swimmer Lia Thomas. Henig got far less press because she was a woman (you could end the sentence right there) who, at least for the first two years after she declared a male identity, continued to swim on the women’s team. She told the New York Times that she continued to swim on the women’s team because she’d made a commitment to the women’s team. The reason she had her best season ever as a junior (on the women’s team), she said, was because she’d already decided to switch to the men’s team for her senior year. Like Hiltz and Quinn, Henig remarked on the acceptance of her female teammates—continuing to compete on the women’s team was not a soul destroying hellish existence. Unlike Hiltz and Quinn, Henig ultimately decided going with the team that matched her male gender identity was worth giving up competitiveness. She said on podcast SwimSwam that she couldn’t sugarcoat—it was a hard adjustment. Even taking testosterone, Henig told the New York Times, “I’m not as successful in the sport as I was on the women’s team. Instead, I’m trying to connect with my teammates in new ways, to cheer loudly, to focus more on the excitement of the sport. Competing and being challenged is the best part. It’s a different kind of fulfillment.”

When asked why he competed with the women’s swim team at Penn, Lia Thomas told Sports Illustrated, “I am a woman.” That’s quite a statement, a male level of entitlement there. None of the women above have ever said, I am a man. Nonbinary runner Cal Calamia has been injecting testosterone for four years, what she calls “man juice,” and sometimes sports facial hair, but she has never asserted that she is a man. Thomas could have declared his female identity but continued to compete with the men without having to take estrogen and testosterone blockers. He could have just been “a woman” with junk, like he is now. When he came out to his male teammates, they were fine with his gender identity. He had friends on the men’s team. But Thomas apparently never even considered it. In their breathtakingly sycophantic piece of drivel, Sports Illustrated said, “She realized she desperately needed competitive swimming—and that she wanted to do it as her authentic self. As a member of the women’s team.” So in other words, Thomas should get to do whatever he wanted to—invade women’s spaces and remain competitive.

Cyclist Emily Bridges, who set a British national junior men’s record in 2018 and was still listed as a man in 2021, told the Guardian, “I am an athlete, and I just want to race competitively again. No one should have to choose between being who they are, and participating in the sport that they love.” Again, Bridges raced very successfully in the male category. It did not seem an erasure of his being. There is nothing to suggest that declaring he was a woman and continuing to race in the male category would have made him any less successful.

Collegiate hurdler CeCe Telfer described why he didn’t want to continue to compete on the men’s team: “They didn’t get that I was a female competing in the sport that I love. They were starting to see me as a gay male athlete running with cisgender men.” Telfer later said the world “hated people like her,” so obviously, a lot to keep a therapist busy there. Telfer was not successful, even in getting out of bed, as a male athlete, and his college coach credits his switch to the women’s team with his success as an athlete—the showing up for practice part, not that he was male racing against women. Telfer, like the other men, could not abide simply declaring his opposite gender identity but continuing to compete in his sex class. That was not even an option. It seemed that his identity was dependent on everyone else in the world affirming it.

Unlike the women, the men had to have the affirmation of others. They took it as their right, that when they declared themselves women, everyone else would believe them, and that they would automatically have the rights of women. Because they wanted it. Because they were entitled to it. Women, even when they declare a male identity, have been willing to give and take—remain competitive but stay on a team that doesn’t match your identity; or give up competition to be on the team that matches your identity.

Women’s sports have been and are very accepting of all women—lesbian, straight, trans-identifying, gender nonconforming. There are a lot of different ways to be a woman. But male isn’t one of them. Men, and men’s sports, need to get on board with that same ethos. If women can do it, with joy, without giving up who they are, then men can too.