DOUBLE STANDARDS
“Who Gets to Be Glorious?”
As a former Olympian, I’m not buying the “level playing field” arguments against trans athletes.
(This article first appeared with my fierce colleagues at The Meteor)
Last week, when asked about the University of Pennsylvania’s phenom trans swimmer Lia Thomas, the equally legendary swimmer Michael Phelps inputted, very unhelpfully, that in an effort to strive to make sports “a level playing field” the NCAA should intervene—and it did. The organization announced a major change to its transgender participation policy, which effectively forces trans athletes to prove they don’t have an unfair advantage, and makes it increasingly prohibitive for them to compete.
If the consequences weren’t so immediate and dire, I’d still be laughing at the irony of this statement coming from the mouth of the most decorated Olympian of all time—a comment displaying an extraordinary lack of insight into his own career. There was absolutely nothing “level” about the playing field when Phelps first began medaling on the Olympic pool deck in 2008, and that is exactly what made him fun to watch: he dominated. His extraordinary physicality and accomplishments were a gift to swimming. But how we talk about athletes, and who is “allowed” to be exceptional and who isn’t, is a real problem in sports—with real-life consequences on the ground.
The challenges to women and girl athletes who defy “normative” protocol—which is to say, hetero, cis, and white—are endless. In 1998, when ice figure skater Surya Bonaly became the first and only Olympian to perform a backflip landing on one blade, the judges penalized her for an illegal jump. While Shaquille O’Neal was celebrated for being a domineering player on the basketball court, Brittney Griner, as a young 22-year-old in the WNBA, was scrutinized, bullied, and genuinely asked to explain herself for exhibiting a similar physical playing style. In my own experience as an Olympic swimmer in the 1990s, my fellow showy sprinter Gary Hall Jr. was labeled an intuitive and intelligent competitor, albeit eccentric—whereas I was marked as irreverent, difficult, and unpredictable.
Phelps himself has benefited from an “unfair advantage” over his competitors: a naturally occurring ability to generate half the lactic acid normally produced at effort. Lactic acid is the chemical that impedes recovery, and Phelps’s lower levels have enabled his awesome ability to swim multiple races in one day and break records in all of them. He wasn’t questioned for that genetic anomaly; he was celebrated for it. But South African gold medalist Caster Semenya met a different reception to her own naturally occurring genetic advantages, including literal policing from the IOC about which races she could and could not run and a requirement that she take medication to lower her testosterone to, you guessed it, even the playing field.
These double standards have devastating consequences—not just for athletes like Semenya or Thomas, but for the kid down the street who just wants to play sports. These rules at the elite level inform club-level rules, or school policies; when we’re legislating against an individual like Lia Thomas, we’re also legislating who’s allowed to play on the Tiny Tots baseball team. That’s the antithesis of what sport has to offer.
And if you’re wondering how exactly these double standards persist—well, look at who runs our top teams. The head coaches of the current U.S. swim team are two women and seven men—and that leads to a general acceptance of inequities. When this is the make-up of the coaching staff, after all, it’s no surprise that procedures like skinfold tests (an athletically irrelevant test to measure fat, mostly on the bodies of women and girls) have been allowed to continue for decades. Other countries have moved to make their governing bodies more representative: In fact, this year, after an inquiry initiated by complaints from female athletes, Swim Australia mandated a required quota for female coaches; USA Swimming has no such equivalent. (It took until 2015 for the organization to mandate 20% representation of athletes on its board of directors—so much for “Nothing about us without us.”)
That regulation without representation means that in general, the heavy burden of advocating for their physical and mental health falls on the shoulders of athletes themselves—especially women, girls, trans and nonbinary competitors. But that’s in keeping with the general trend in sports, in which the adults leave the room, and change tends to come only through outside pressure, often by athletes who are young adults or children. It took Oregon basketball star Sedona Prince’s viral video of the measly weight rack at the 2021 NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Tournament to extract a promise to rectify the disparity. And in a more extreme example, it took Rachael Denhollander, a former gymnast who was abused by Larry Nassar, to become a lawyer, and then bring a case against him, for that prolific abuser to finally meet his deserved demise.
The red herring of “controversies” around athletes like Lia Thomas distract us from the real problems the sports world needs to fix.
The solutions, if you ask me and other former athletes, are clear: Governing bodies should mandate equity between coaches across genders, in addition to installing an athlete on each team whose sole responsibility is to oversee the advocacy of the athletes (many of whom are still minors). And we shouldn’t let the red herring of “controversies” around athletes like Lia Thomas distract us from these very real problems the sports world needs to fix.
As for those athletes? Let them be special. Most of us will just never be part of the 0.01% of athletes who make up professional sports, and the reason we enjoy watching them is because they allow us to be transported, inspired, and entertained by their anomalous talent and rigor.
Talking about a “level playing field” when you’re talking about elite athletes misses the point. Elite competitors have always dazzled us with their exceptionalism and their wild feats of physicality, and we shouldn’t get to pick and choose who’s allowed to be that glorious.