CrossFit HQ misses the mark, bad
Excluding trans* athletes ruins what makes CrossFit great.
The press are reporting that CrossFit refused to allow a CrossFit trainer and transgender athlete named Chloie Jonsson to compete in the CrossFit games as a woman in 2013.
The reports indicate that Chloie was told in a letter from an attorney for CrossFit that,
“The fundamental, ineluctable fact is that a male competitor who has a sex reassignment procedure still has a genetic makeup that confers a physical and physiological advantage over women.”
The letter apparently continues:
“Our decision has nothing to do with ‘ignorance’ or being bigots — it has to do with a very real understanding of the human genome, of fundamental biology, that you are either intentionally ignoring or missed in high school.”
I want to address two things. The first is what I think makes CrossFit great—what I think CrossFit is really about—and the second is the claims that HQ makes in the letter, and the kind of thinking that they represent.
The Radical Politics of CrossFit
I first set foot in a CrossFit gym in 2008. I still remember the walk up to the door. The gym was your classic old-school CrossFit box: a space with a big roll-up door in a row of warehouses in a dumpy part of town.
I was nervous on my approach and the image that I saw as the inside of the box came into view is one that I will never forget. The owner of the gym, in his 30s and in great shape, was spotting an older woman, maybe in her 50s and fairly deconditioned, as he introduced her to work on the rings.
That sight made something click in my head instantly, like a switch flipping. I had recently finished running a marathon, and much of my training had been done on a treadmill in a globo-gym in Santa Monica, CA. The cliques in that gym were unbelievably powerful: there were the grunting muscle heads in the area with the machines and free weights; there were the thin blondes in sports bras slaving away on the ellipticals; there were the overweight people in sweat-soaked, loose-fitting clothes whose every movement and tic seemed to evoke shame at even existing.
No one talked to one another—people scarcely even made eye contact.
What my first CrossFit coach embodied, and still embodies today, was the antithesis of that kind of disconnection, which is what the modern culture of fitness had become about.
You know how you get people to keep buying? You sell them not on your product, but on their own inadequacy.
You teach them that they’re too fat, too thin, too muscular, too ugly.
Anyone who has ever done CrossFit seriously knows that its ethos and its culture do a lot to undo these toxic messages. That’s exactly what Heather Bergeron’s comments at the beginning of this video are about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufVcD2_2dXg.
It turns out that there is something profound and radical about CrossFit’s central axiom, that the fitness needs of our grandparents and an Olympic athlete differ in degree, not in kind.
When you really embody that assumption, you begin to counteract the normal messages that we receive about what our bodies are for. You begin to free women, for example, from the all-pervasive notion that their bodies exist to be appreciated as beautiful by whoever happens to be looking.
You begin to free heavy people from the notion that everyone exists to be thin.
You begin to free old people from the notion that old age means having a broken body.
By offering everyone the same kinds of opportunities to improve their fitness, you literally create a new kind of “body talk,” one where people talk, care about, and value exploring what their bodies can DO, instead of what their bodies look like.
That is a really remarkable achievement, and I think it’s an idea worth spreading, which is why I’ve been involved with CrossFit for the six years since I first walked into that gym.
On Disrespecting Trans* Athletes
First, I want to address the factual claims in the letter.
CrossFit HQ is wrong on them all. It’s quaint, cute, and devastating that their letter references high school biology, because what is commonly taught in high school biology about the genetics of sex is just plain wrong. For further edification, one could talk to, for example, Alice Dreger, professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern School of Medicine. Or one could simply read her recent article in the New York Times on exactly this issue: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/sports/22runner.html?em&_r=0. To quote:
If the person has XY chromosomes, you declare him a man. If XX, she’s a woman. Right?
Wrong. A little biology: On the Y chromosome, a gene called SRY usually makes a fetus grow as a male. It turns out, though, that SRY can show up on an X, turning an XX fetus essentially male. And if the SRY gene does not work on the Y, the fetus develops essentially female.
Even an XY fetus with a functioning SRY can essentially develop female. In the case of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, the ability of cells to “hear” the masculinizing hormones known as androgens is lacking. That means the genitals and the rest of the external body look female-typical, except that these women lack body hair (which depends on androgen-sensitivity).
Women with complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome are less “masculinized” in their muscles and brains than the average woman, because the average woman makes and “hears” some androgens. Want to tell women with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome they have to compete as men, just because they have a Y chromosome? That makes no sense.
So much for that half of their fundamental, ineluctable fact.
It turns out the other half is wrong, too, though. Transwomen who’ve had genital surgery don’t enjoy any measurable physical or physiological advantages over their ciswoman counterparts.
Oops!
Furthermore, elite athleticism is, of course, all about genetic traits that give elite athletes a remarkable advantage. That’s part of what allows them to be elite athletes.
Michael Phelps has an unusually long wingspan. He has an unusually long torso which is particularly triangular. He also has short legs and double joints. He is a genetic freak and it is part of what makes him the best swimmer ever: http://www.isciencetimes.com/.../michael-phelps-body-made....
We celebrate Michael Phelps as an incredible athlete. He never seems to upset our notions about what kinds of genetic advantages are fair or unfair in competition.
Ask yourself: why?
You tell me: is it plausible that Rich Froning has naturally high levels of androgens, driven in part by unusual genetics? Here’s a photo in case you’ve forgotten what he looks like:
Why aren’t we concerned that Rich Froning’s genetics could confer upon him an unfair advantage? How come no one ever talks about that?
If we pause to really think about that, what felt like righteousness about defending the principles of competition to CrossFit HQ may come to feel startlingly like their own fear of the unfamiliar.
If the same exact genetic advantages that make an elite male athlete able to reach the elite level also make an elite female athlete able to reach the elite level, why the fuck are we only policing women’s bodies?
It’s time to give HQ a dose of biological AND political reality. Biology has no patience for discrete categories like “genetic male” and “ genetic female,” despite your quaint ignorance, which ends at the high school level of comprehension, by your own wonderful admission.
Your blatant and ignorant discrimination and bigotry—your words were a perfect description—against Chloie damage the core values of your organization, the things that make CrossFit great.
It’s a devastating indictment of your character as an organization to listen to you mansplain to Chloie about high school biology. It shows that your leadership is myopic and dysfunctional.
As good “rabid libertarians” do, you display a profound ignorance of the ways in which culture and society inform your own beliefs.
If CrossFit is “open-source fitness,” it’s time we open-sourced your moronic, small-minded bigotry.
Excluding trans* athletes doesn’t make you paragons of rationality and defenders of the principles of fair competition. It makes you xenophobes who fail to embody your organization’s core values when they matter the most.
Make the Games fair for everyone to compete in by allowing trans* athletes to compete in their identified and their legally-recognized gender now.
