Trans athletes: guarding against disinformation
CW: transphobia, blood
The Tokyo 2020 Olympics are now belatedly under way in 2021, and this is the first ever Olympics in which any openly transgender athletes have qualified to compete, despite this being permitted since 2004. This topic attracts a lot of heated argument, to put it mildly.
The problem is that a lot of the information that you’ll see on social media and in much of the press is outright disinformation. Propaganda. Fake news. Lies.
Much of this propaganda is designed to appeal to your emotions, not your reason — to provoke outrage, not thought.
This isn’t an article about the trans athletes currently competing. Nor is it a detailed analysis of the science. Nor am I even stating a position on what the policies for trans athletes should be.
This about recognising the ways in which people are trying to deceive you.
Won’t somebody please think of the children?!
One of the key tactics is to use carefully-selected images to appeal to your emotion rather than your rational thought.
Those who have followed this debate for a while will probably recognise this photo. It’s used relentlessly to present the inclusion of trans women as an obvious threat to girls and women in sport. Who could fail to be appalled by the manifest unfairness of this masculine brute calmly destroying a poor girl in the wrestling ring?
Just one problem: this wrestler isn’t a trans woman (i.e. assigned male at birth). He’s a trans man, assigned female at birth.
Mack Beggs wanted to compete with the boys in high-school wrestling, but the State of Texas wouldn’t allow him to. If you agree with Texas that trans athletes should compete as their birth sex, then this photo is what you are voting for.
Beggs later won a scholarship to wrestle in the men’s division at college, as he always wanted.
So this photo isn’t just selected to appeal to your emotions — the way it is used out of context is also an outright lie.
Update: the Texas GOP are still repeating this lie in 2024, 6 years later.
Don’t think, just look
Similarly, this photo of Veronica Ivy has often been used by those opposed to trans athletes — generally without any explanation beyond “JUST LOOK!!!”.
Look at what?
People posting such photos often won’t articulate what precisely we are supposed to be seeing and concluding, because the whole point of the tactic is to trigger an emotional response, not to encourage you to think.
Presumably we are expected to conclude that the race was unfair because Ivy is taller and larger than the silver and bronze medallists? So what’s the assumption behind that conclusion?
Are we assuming that size is an advantage in this event? What even is this event? Is size likely to be an advantage?
The event is track sprint cycling, and conveniently we can compare with the same event in a previous year, where Kristina Vogel (5'3" / 1.60m) took gold against a cis (non-trans) woman (Elis Ligtlee) who is bigger than Ivy.
None of this has anything to do with scientific or ethical debate on inclusion, because we can’t determine anything relevant from one photo.
Ivy has a thread here with some further details, including a photo that is dishonestly cropped to compare her to another woman who isn’t even a competitor.
Naturally the people posting this photo omit other key facts about Ivy’s performance. For example, the fact that (with all due respect) her world record of 11.649 seconds was:
- in a narrow 35–39 Masters age category
- has now been beaten (11.606 seconds at the time of writing, held by Felice Beitzel)
- is almost 15% slower than the current elite women’s record (10.154 seconds). In just the last week, a new Junior (16–18) British record was set at 10.961 seconds in Glasgow, UK.
Similar cherry-picking and de-contextualising of photos is used to attack other trans athletes (such as Hannah Mouncey playing handball for the Australian women’s team), trying to emphasise their size against a smaller opponent, for emotional impact, regardless of whether this actually matters for their sport. It’s notable that world-class handball teams are not composed of unusually large women, suggesting that size isn’t a significant advantage.
In the pictured tournament, the Australian team came 5th overall, beaten by South Korea, Japan, China, and Kazakhstan (all countries with substantially shorter average heights for women than Australia, incidentally). The reports and scores do not suggest any particularly dominant performances by Mouncey compared to her cis teammates, or other teams.
Disinformation sources also add flourishes like the claim that she “led the Australian team”. In fact the team’s key players were Potocki and Vernay.
Game, set & mix & match
Those opposed to trans inclusion frequently bring up combat sports, because they can play on the fears of women being injured — another appeal to emotion not reason.
They have repeatedly used this composite image showing a bloodied MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighter next to the trans woman fighter Fallon Fox.
But they have never fought. The right-hand image is from a completely unrelated fight where Kal Schwartz knocked out Kay Hansen at Invicta FC 28.
In fact the image of Hansen (March 2018) was taken over three years after Fox retired (last fight: Sep 2014).
Also, the claim that Fox broke two opponent’s skulls is barely even half true. She once fractured an opponent’s eye orbit, but this is hardly a rare injury in women’s MMA (Fox has posted a thread of examples, and research confirms the prevalence).
After I originally posted this debunking on Twitter in February this year, it was also covered by OutSports a few days later, and was confirmed by the Politifact fact-checking site in March.
Update: in 2023, Kay Hansen herself confirmed the facts and called for the misinformation to cease. She also added: “It was a small cut that required two stitches. It’s important to do your research before posting/reposting everything you see on the internet.”
Just for completeness, note that Fox won a few fights but was then defeated by cis woman Ashlee Evans Smith (who was hardly an outstanding or world-class fighter, and was defeated in turn by other cis women).
Update (8th April 2023):
Yesterday, anti-trans blogger Graham Linehan falsely claimed that Fox was still “beating up women” and described her as a “fucking monster”, quoting old footage from the 2013 fight as if it were current (remember, she retired in 2014). The footage also appears to have been doctored to give her a deeper voice. Her actual voice can be heard in documentary footage, and a Reuters fact check also confirms the tampering and much of the other misinformation described earlier.
Foreign parts
Claims about another part of the world, that can’t easily be verified, are always handy for propaganda.
This next example tries to appeal to people’s sense of fair play, and probably also xenophobia — demonising “cheating foreigners” as well as trans athletes.
In 2021, I still see this image and story from 2015 (which ran in multiple newspapers) being posted to claim that the Iranian women’s football team had eight “male” trans players.
But the story is false.
The allegation was categorically denied by FIFA. “There are no gender concerns for women’s futsal and football teams,” Dr Zohreh Haratian, the governing body’s appointee in Iran, told Shargh daily. “No scientific proof exists on these claims,” she said, noting that all the players had been checked.
So what’s behind this myth (other than lazy journalists just making stuff up and/or not fact-checking)?
Could it be because in 2014 some players were removed for failing to conform to expected Iranian gender stereotypes?
“…a number of female athletes have randomly faced disciplinary actions because of short hair, tattoos, piercing or apparently manly behaviour or clothing… intelligence forces […] pay undue attention to women who behave against traditional norms, and if players are suspected of homosexuality or transexuality, the forces remove them from the team…”
Also, according to the Iranian Transgender and Lesbians Network…
“Gross Gender-based Measures against Female Players in Iran… officials repeatedly refer to women players whose appearance is not typically feminine as bisexed, and subject them to harassment and ban from participation in the games”
…who sum up the whole issue very nicely:
“some media & Internet outlets failed to investigate this case of serious human rights violation. Instead, they have treated the issue of women football players & sexual identity with mockery and insult”
I’ve also seen someone claiming that this Iranian football team won the 2015 AFC Women’s Championship. Just one slight problem: there was no such event. It runs every 4 years and was in 2014 and 2018. And Iran has never taken part.
A similar baseless claim about the Chinese women’s relay team in 2019 spilled over into outright racism and anti-trans hatred. The Chinese Athletics Association has confirmed that none of these competitors are trans.
Just a few days ago, similar baseless rumours spread on 9GAG (based in Hong Kong), Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and other sites, against the Chinese weightlifter Hou Zhihui and the Chinese 3x3 basketball team, even extending to conspiracy theories that any of the press photos that didn’t match their theory must have been photoshopped.
But the science…
As I said above, I’m not attempting to discuss the science in detail here. But if you want to delve into it, you have to actually engage in it critically. If you just read about one study in the media, but you don’t read the critiques of that study, and don’t read the other studies that reach different conclusions — then bias, propaganda or just poor science are almost guaranteed. Propagandists will frequently cherry-pick, take studies out of context, or even just outright lie about the conclusions.
Ian Rennie clearly demonstrates here how one can’t take media reports of studies at face value, particularly in a ‘controversial’ area where the media may have an agenda to push.
“Okay, so you haven’t read the study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, you’ve read a Guardian story about it” — Ian Rennie
See also the excellent Trans Women in Sport: A Response to Hilton & Lundberg to appreciate the biases that can influence the science itself in this area. UPDATE: a 2022 study commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport reaches similar conclusions.
And finally, speaking as a trained scientist, it’s important to note that this is not a question that can be settled by science alone; it is also a philosophical question of ethics and human rights. Science can measure aspects of the performance of individuals; it cannot tell us what is “fair”, or what “fair” even means; or how to balance inclusion and fairness (as the Olympic charter demands) or who should compete in what categories.
So, if you see posts on this topic during and after the current Tokyo Olympics, I hope you’ll bear in mind the examples above, and be alert to such tactics.
Final thought: if excluding trans athletes is so clearly justified on rational grounds, then why do so many people feel the need to constantly lie to us with emotional propaganda?
Update (April 2022)
The trans swimmer Lia Thomas has been the subject of a deluge of hatred and disinformation after a recent NCAA win, including posting of pre-transition photos, and deadnaming. Many lies have been told about her performance before and after transition, with many baseless slurs on her behaviour and character.
We should note that her winning time was almost identical to last year’s winner, and remains almost 10 seconds behind the women’s record — she is only the 11th fastest woman in the history of the NCAA 500-yd freestyle.
Her winning time was slower than the winning time at a Junior Nationals this year where 16-year-old Bella Sims recorded a time of 4:32:28, and in the very same race 15-year-old Katie Grimes finished just behind her with 4:32:97. So two high school girls beat Lia’s time by around 1 second (thanks to Kirsty Miller for this comparison).
And again, photos have been selected for emotional impact, not facts:
The title suggests that this photo should “end the transgender-athlete debate”. The author (in conservative magazine National Review) claims:
“the jarring image of Thomas towering over the defeated women at the 500-yard freestyle yesterday is unassailable evidence of how wrong this charade is”.
Firstly, Lia Thomas is literally standing on the podium, higher than everyone else. The author admits this, but the many screenshots and re-uses of the photo naturally omit this obvious point. Lia is tall, but, unless we’re going to ban all cis women over a certain height too, that’s not an argument.
Where were we? Oh yes, looking at the “unassailable evidence” that this is “wrong”. But there isn’t any in that photo.
Many have also used this photo, with Lia isolated from the smiling group on the right, as evidence that her rivals reject her presence as unfair. Again, an appeal to your emotions, asking you to empathise with their stance.
But here, Erica Sullivan, one of the pictured swimmers, who came in 3rd, confirms that the photo is being used out of context:
Sullivan has also publicly supported Lia’s participation, saying:
Many of those who oppose transgender athletes like Lia being able to participate in sports claim to be “protecting women’s sports.” As a woman in sports, I can tell you that I know what the real threats to women’s sports are: sexual abuse and harassment, unequal pay and resources and a lack of women in leadership. Transgender girls and women are nowhere on this list. Women’s sports are stronger when all women — including trans women — are protected from discrimination, and free to be their true selves.
Another meme has done the rounds comparing her alleged rankings before and after transition, and also gratuitously deadnaming her and including a pre-transition photo (which I have blurred out).
But both of these numbers are misleading at best. There’s no single swimming ranking — these are isolated results. The “462” result is unsourced, and may even be from a race after she began hormone therapy (but continued to compete with the men) and thus didn’t even taper training seriously for. Pre-transition she was placed highly in multiple other events — naturally these are ignored. Post-transition she has lost to cis women in multiple events — these results, too, are ignored.
So, yet again, people are lying to you.
UPDATE: In February 2023, Lia’s school record of 15.59.71 for the mile was beaten by a cis woman, Anna Kalandadze (15:53:88). Anna also beat the Ivy record of Alicia Aemisegger (15:57.34, Princeton, 2009) which was already 2 seconds faster than Lia’s record.
Update (April 2023)
Via a Twitter thread by Rep. Zooey Zephr, referring to a tweet by @Str8Grandmother:
We are being invited to compare these two women as potential competitors and to infer unfairness from these images. Several issues:
- The trans woman on the left (Janae Kroc) won her world championship before she transitioned, and gave up career lifting. She was never a women’s world champion.
- The cis woman on the right is Mattie Rogers, four times world championships silver medallist.
- Their wins were about a decade apart (2009 vs 2017–2022)
- They competed in entirely different events (powerlifting/bodybuilding vs weightlifting).
- They were in entirely different weight classes (men’s powerlifting 220lb vs women’s weightlifting 156lb), so of course Janae is larger. She was a competitive bodybuilder so (just like cis women bodybuilders!) has impressive muscles.
So, once more, a completely misleading comparison.
Update (October 2023):
The unreliable far-right outlet Breitbart published an article claiming that a trans high school runner “dominates” a girls’ cross-country race.
She came fifth.
They also claimed she had risen from 127th ranking in the boys to 5th in the girls. No source is provided for the “127th” claim in any of the outlets repeating it. In fact she earned a 12th ranking in the mens 2-mile event in 2019, before transitioning to the girls event (and competing in a much smaller field — so a rise in ranking is unremarkable).
