In a story about the World Athletics Council’s decision to exclude transgender athletes from women’s track events, a journalist at National Public Radio claimed — obliquely, as if mentioning a truism — that there is no “strong evidence” that men have advantages over women in physical contests.
As a generalization, this claim is not an imprecision — the result of ignorance or inexperience or illiteracy — but a lie. Here are some truisms: Men tend to grow taller, they tend to have larger lungs and thoracic capacity, higher skeletal mass and bone density, and greater levels of natural muscle development throughout adolescence. Research that samples only elite athletes may be scarce, but it’s also tangential. If journalists at NPR or elsewhere would like to argue that these broad differences between the sexes are irrelevant to athletic performance — or that they’re completely alterable after puberty — then the burden to produce evidence is theirs.
Sporting federations should account for and, yes, somehow accommodate intersex athletes with rare chromosomal configurations. But these cases remain rare, and I’d wager that most recent controversial entrants in women’s leagues involve individuals whose genetic material is arranged quite typically.
We can assume that NPR’s journalists already understand all this — that they know that relevant corporeal dissimilarities develop between girls and boys during pubescence — but choose to pretend otherwise to their readers, and perhaps to themselves, because they’re convinced that doing so is kind. The vault towards this sort of apparent nicety is understandable. To forbid from participating in a contest people who earnestly wish and believe that they ought to be allowed to feels cruel. But that doesn’t mean that inclusivity in all contexts is synonymous with kindness (it certainly isn’t when it entails being unkind to female athletes).
Rather than choosing a group to display compassion to and tampering with the truth to support that act, journalists should stick to reality. It would be far simpler — and more self-respecting.