Is Opposition to Trans Athletes Really About the Old Testament?

Debates over inclusion obscure deeper issues of power and patriarchy

In the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, God first created a man, and from the flesh of that man he created a woman. Following some drama involving a snake and some fruit, God told the woman that the man “he shall rule over you.” We’ve been dealing with that ever since. In particular, modern sport has deep roots in deeply held and often invisible beliefs of male superiority.

Of course, it would be easy to look at elite sport as a confirmation of the superiority of men over women. After all, when it comes to things like running and jumping men consistently outperform women — so much so that if we didn’t have a separate category for women, we wouldn’t see many, if any women if elite sport competitions. This is a refrain that we hear a lot these days, particularly in ongoing debates over the inclusion of trans athletes, particularly women.

Before we go further, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The sporting disciplines and events that we celebrate today were invented more than a century ago to highlight male athleticism and to exclude females. More than a century ago, Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic games was resolutely opposed to women participating in the Olympics, other than to place laurels upon the heads of winners. For him the Games were “the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism with internationalism as a base, loyalty as a means, art for its setting and female applause as reward.”

Coubertin was simply reciting Old Testament beliefs common at the time, that men rule over women. The superiority of men was obvious in competition, Coubertin explained, “ninety-five times out of a hundred, elimination rounds favour the men.” Today, we are often told that the dominance of men over women reflects essential biological characteristics of men over women. Men are superior athletes, just look at comparable times in the Olympic Games.

But what is always ignored in such arguments is that athleticism is a function of the sporting events that we create. And the sporting events of the Olympics (and beyond) were created to reflect a particular ideology that was dominant at the time of their creation. Our thinking may have evolved since the creation of these games, but the games themselves as vessels of a historical ideology are still with us.

It can be difficult to see ideology in sport. In 1982, academics Alan Clarke and John Clarke explained, because sport “appears as a sphere of activity outside society, and particularly as it appears to involve natural, physical skills and capacities, sport presents these ideological images as if they were natural.” Another academic, Michael Messner explained the consequences of the historical roots of modern competitive sport: “organized sport is clearly a potentially powerful cultural arena for the perpetuation of the ideology of male superiority and dominance.” Messner sees this cultural ideology most obviously in American football:

Football, based as it is upon the most extreme possibilities of the male body (muscular bulk, explosive power and aggression) is a world apart from women, who are relegated to the role of cheerleader and sex objects on the sidelines rooting their men on. In contrast to the bare and vulnerable bodies of the cheerleaders, the armored male bodies of football players are elevated to mythical status, and as such give testimony to the undeniable "fact" that there is at least one place where men are clearly superior to women.

In American culture there is nothing quite like football, and the historical origins of the sport are that it was designed to emphasize male athleticism and their superiority to women. Don’t take that from me, take it from Theodore Roosevelt who played a key role in establishing football in American culture as a place for males to express their “virility.”

Of course, it is not just football, but almost all sporting competitions that we celebrate today were inventions of the late-19th and early 20th centuries, designed not just around male athletic capabilities, but in the context that such a design would separate men from women and demonstrate male superiority to women. There is a deep and significant academic literature on this history that deserves wider appreciation in how we think about modern sport.

Males and females of course typically have different physiologies due to biology. Those differences mean that there is such a thing as male athleticism (favoring those athletic capabilities of typical male physiology) and also such a thing as female athleticism (favoring those athletic capabilities of typical female physiology). The sports we celebrate overwhelmingly favor male athleticism, because they were created specifically for that purpose.

I have come to understand that for many people, the idea of female athleticism can be a difficult one to accept. After all, if we believe that sport is natural and separate from society, then there is only one athleticism, and it just so happens men are superior athletes. This of course is a convenient view for those holding Old Testament views (whether they realize it or not). But if we instead see sporting competitions as social constructions — after all, they are just games that we invent! — then female athleticism can enter our view as something distinct and of value on its own merits.

That males and females have different athleticisms should be obvious. Think for a moment just about male competitors in the Olympic games. You can see the physiological differences between a marathoner and a shot putter — the former is always small and skinny and the latter is always big and buff. Are these differences based on some essential biological factors? No. They are based on the fact that we made up some games which exemplify different types of male athleticism — the games we invent favor certain body types. We can invent games that favor any body type. There is nothing uniquely special about running 26.2 miles or putting a steel ball weighing 16 pounds. We just made those games up.

It just so happens that all the games that we made up more than a century ago were ones that favor male athleticism. In an alternate universe we could have instead invented a bunch of games that favored female athleticism. The most obvious example among modern sport is women’s gymnastics. Events like the balance beam reflect that “the importance of a well-suited "gymnastic-specific" body build for reaching the highest level in artistic gymnastic competitions is well documented.” Not surprisingly, women have bodies more suited to women’s gymnastics, just like marathoners and shot putters. Indeed, the current rules for scoring in women’s gymnastics not only favor women’s athleticism, but they have evolved such they favor the athleticism of young girls, necessitating the creating of new rules governing the minimum allowable age for participants.

What might an Olympics focused on female athleticism look like? We don’t have good answers to this because designing sport around female athleticism has not been a priority, nor has it been much studied. Candidates among existing sports would include equestrian (where men and women compete against each other), shooting, archery, gymnastics, ice skating and dance, synchronized swimming and diving. More expansively, female athleticism may be favored in emerging sports such as endurance running and swimming.

From this perspective, achieving equality in sport between men and women would involve more than creating protected categories of competition for women in legacy disciplines that favor male athleticism. It would involve creating more disciplines of competition that favor female athleticism. Imagine an Olympics where half of the disciplines involve competitions that are carved out for men, because they would not be able to otherwise compete with women, because the competition was designed to emphasize female athleticism. Inventing such categories of competition should be a priority in global sport.

And this gets us to the debates over trans athletes. In what other context in modern society can people openly and proudly boast about the superiority of men over women? Messner quotes one of his interviews conducted in his research on football and gender in modern society: “A woman can do the same job I can do-maybe even be my boss. But I'll be damned if she can go out on the field and take a hit from Ronnie Lott." Perhaps the debate over trans athletes in elite competition isn’t really about trans athletes after all. Maybe it is an opportunity for people to express Old Testament beliefs out in the open, and reinforce those parts of our culture which hold that men are simply superior to women. As Emmanuel Reynaud wrote in 1983, “The ABC of any patriarchal ideology is precisely to present that division [between men and women] as being of biological, natural, or divine essence.” Think about it.