The new Kiwi government under Christopher Luxon is weighing a rule that women’s sports will remain women’s spaces—at least in publicly funded sports, which clearly includes those in schools. But there’s a lot of pushback, as you can see from reading this piece in the New Zealand Herald:
Excerpts are indented:
The Government is threatening to withhold millions of dollars of public funding from New Zealand sports bodies if they do not comply with a push to separate transgender athletes from grassroots competitions.
The hardline and potentially divisive policy from the Government sets out the agenda to “ensure publicly funded sporting bodies support fair competition that is not compromised by rules relating to gender”.
The policy is led by New Zealand First, whose sport and recreation spokesman Andy Foster says it is “about fairness and safety in sport for women”
. . . .While previous Governments have left sporting organisations to work through the vexed transgender space at arm’s length, the National-led regime intends to tackle the issue head-on.
International sporting bodies, including cricket, rugby league and swimming among others, have banned transgender women from their respective elite female codes.
The NZ First-National policy agreement, however, applies to the amateur end of the spectrum by targeting participation in community sports.
Are community sports different from school sports? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Rather, I think that the government is leaving professional sports to work out their own rules. But the government is clearly of the mind that it’s unfair to have trans women participating in women’s sports, something I agree with. But the issue is inflammatory (much of NZ is still woke), and so the government is also a bit timorous:
Sport and Recreation Minister Chris Bishop was uncomfortable discussing the coalition agreement.
“New Zealand First are very keen to make sure we have an inclusive environment and atmosphere for everybody – and that rules relating to gender don’t get in the way of that,” Bishop told the Herald.
“It is a tricky one, a thorny issue. There’s strong views on both sides of the debate. I’ll work through that with the relevant sporting bodies.
“Ultimately it’s got to go over to sporting bodies to make sure that we have fair competition.”
They’re very careful in dealing with such an inflammatory issue, but they’re going in the right direction:
Next year, Sport New Zealand will invest $9.3 million in 38 sports at the community level.
Pressed on whether sporting bodies that objected to the separatist policy would find their funding frozen, Foster said: “If a code says ‘We don’t want to do that’, that’s their choice but they shouldn’t then expect the taxpayer to say we’re delighted to support you doing something which we see as unsafe and unfair.
“That’s the policy.”
. . .Foster, a former Wellington mayor, outlined the rationale for attempting to separate trans women from female community sports.
“It’s about fairness and safety in sport for women in particular,” he said.
“Looking at some of the debate that’s been across different sports codes around the world about transgender people who have transitioned from male to female, particularly after puberty, and the evidence around the advantages that happen in weight, speed, all those sorts of things, it compromises fairness in competitions and in some cases safety as well. We’re saying, for publicly funded sports bodies, we think it’s really important for women to have a clear line in the sand drawn.
“With rugby, athletics, boxing, you can see why power, weight and speed become a real issue. If there’s a teenage girl against a former teenage boy, your child is going to get hurt.”
Foster suggested the policy would not apply to all sports, citing equestrianism as an example of men and women competing in the same field.
That’s fair enough. Foster is right about the athletic advantages of post-puberty trans women who have had surgery and puberty blockers, but if data show no inherent advantages of trans women over women in horsey sports, it’s fine to have them compete.
A lot of the article is devoted to criticism from trans women athletes and others about the policy, but the criticisms mostly aren’t workable. For example:
However, transgender athlete and two-time national champion mountain biker Kate Weatherly fears it will lead to athletes being forced into men’s competitions or sidelined completely.
. . . . Given the minimal number of trans women competing in amateur sports, Weatherly fears it could lead to their exclusion from the grassroots arena.
The “small number” argument fails because if a trans women wins because of the advantages she has from male puberty, it is unfair to any number of women or girls who can’t win. There may be few winners, but there are plenty of losers.
Here’s another from Weatherly:
“Sports are inherently unfair. It’s so heavily dependent on money, where you were born, access to coaches, support networks. There are so many factors that determine how successful you are at sport.
Sports are inherently unfair, she says, so it’s okay to add a big source of unfairness to the mix. Nobody doubts, and it’s clear from recent results in sports, that trans women have a palpable advantage over women in nearly every sport in which they participate.
And there’s the inclusivity argument as well:
Former sport minister Grant Robertson condemned the policy’s intention.
“It’s incredibly sad the government is undermining the work done to make grassroots sports more inclusive,” Robertson said. “We should be doing everything we can to encourage people to participate in sport and recreation. Chris Bishop should be ashamed to be facilitating this nonsense.”
New Zealand Cricket is the first sport to publicly resist the policy – even if that means losing its $425,000 allocated government funding next year.
“Our position is that we’ll continue to prioritise inclusivity and accommodate transwomen in women’s cricket at community, amateur, social level,” NZ Cricket spokesperson Richard Boock said.
Sport New Zealand chief executive Raelene Castle indicated its focus remained on inclusion.
“We have developed a set of transgender guiding principles for the sector, to help organisations develop their own policies for the inclusion of transgender participants in community sport.
Now this is an argument that can’t be dismissed: trans athletes want to compete, and isn’t it unfair to say they can’t? There are various solutions to the problem, including an “other” category for trans people, or allow “men’s sports” to include trans athletes. That may seem unfair to trans women, but, as they say, “sports are inherently unfair.” (I am just using their own argument against them; I do think the problem should be considered seriously.)
Finally, there’s this argument, which was suggested, I believe, by Neil deGrasse Tyson as well:
Weatherly, a trans woman athlete, acknowledged fairness and safety concerns but pointed out that sports such as boxing featured weight categories to minimise risks.
The problem is that you simply can’t use “weight categories” for trans women competing against women. Even in boxing that would give trans women an inherent advantage. And for other sports, I can’t see a way to “group” women so that the trans women have no inherent athletic advantage. Try doing that in, say, the 400-meter dash.
I’m afraid that I see women’s sports as “women’s spaces,” with no clear way to include trans women. We should try hard to hit on an equitable solution for all trans people, but that demands both philosophical rumination and empirical data, neither of which we have. The New Zealand government is going in the right direction, for, in sports the mantra “trans women are women” does not hold.
