Everyone knows separate is unequal … except anti-trans activists like Donna Lopiano

The following op-ed was written by Blake Hereth, Sam Simpson, Alison McConwell, Christopher RM Philips, Anthony Szczesiul, Carol Hay, Christa Hodapp, and an anonymous author:

On Sept. 8, UMass Lowell held an event advertised as celebrating the 1972 creation of Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in education and school programs that receive federal funding.

The event featured Donna Lopiano, Ph.D., whose advocacy for women’s sports and Title IX is informed by her childhood encounter with gender discrimination in sports. Today, she serves as President of Sports Management Resources, a company she founded and dedicated to equity in athletics.

Considering Lopiano’s impressive pedigree, it is even more shocking that she would choose to use this occasion and this platform to argue for the exclusion of some women from women’s sports. Ironically, Lopiano opposes recent expansions of Title IX to include gender identity and expression, which US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona announced in June.

This is not Lopiano’s first foray into the debates over trans equity in sports. She helped create the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, whose explicit mission is to “safeguard girls” by restricting trans women athletes. Last month in Forbes, she outlined the group’s Swiftian “moderate proposal”:

“Our nonbinary solution is called the Women’s Sports Umbrella. Under this umbrella, all people who identify as female would be invited to try out for women’s sports teams, with one caveat: Competition,” Lopiano wrote with Mariah Burton Nelson.

For Lopiano, fairness requires both that trans women not be excluded from women’s sports and that trans women who possess a “post-puberty performance advantage” be barred from competing against cis women. To hear Lopiano tell it, excluding trans women from competition is a minimal sacrifice — a claim that rings hollow upon a moment’s reflection. Competition is the very beating heart of sports!

At UML, Lopiano expanded on her Forbes op-ed and repeatedly promoted the idea that there are “immutable biological differences” between males and females. According to her, post-puberty biological males will always have natural athletic advantages over biological females. These “ immutable” advantages entail that athletic inequality is also immutable and, therefore, inequitable. Or so says Lopiano.

Call this the “Immutability Argument.” Like most arguments against the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports, it’s irreparably flawed.

First, the argument assumes a long-debunked essentialist view of biological sex and sex properties. Testosterone levels are highly mutable pre- and post-puberty. For cis men, testosterone levels drop over time, sometimes requiring supplementation. In cis women, the occurrence of hyperandrogenism — the “excessive” presence of testosterone, androsterone, or androstenedione — effectively nullifies the competitive advantage enjoyed by cis males. Indeed, a recent study (Handelsman, Hirschberg, & Bermon 2018) in Endocrinology Review defending a testosterone baseline for athletic fairness recommends allowing for cis women with hyperandrogenism to compete in women’s sports. Why not instead allow cis women with hyperandrogenism to compete with cis men?

Second, the average ‘testosterone gap’ does not exist exclusively between cis women and cis men. It also exists between black men and white men. Researchers from a 2014 study concluded, “After age adjustment, free testosterone levels were significantly higher in black than in white men,” translating into “a racial difference ranging from 2.5 to 4.9%.” If the Immutability Argument justifies the exclusion of trans women from women’s sports based on higher testosterone levels, it also justifies racially segregated men’s athletics. Because this is an unjust extension of Lopiano’s argument, we should reject her argument.

Third, nothing about the Immutability Argument prohibits trans men from participating in cis men’s sports. This makes sense under Lopiano’s reasoning: Trans men have lower average testosterone and therefore lack an (unfair) competitive advantage over their cis peers. Yet this threatens to treat trans men differently from trans women purely based on sex: Trans women must be excluded from women’s sports, but trans men need not be excluded from men’s sports. Yet differential treatment based purely on sex is precisely what Title IX prohibits!

Fourth and finally, Lopiano continued to use the phrase “immutable difference” as if it were grounded in scientific fact, yet “immutable difference” is a phrase rooted in biological essentialism and biological determinism.

David Hull explained the negative effects of essentialism on taxonomy: Essentialism cast species as natural kinds or categories with ‘essences’, but evolutionary change precludes species as static and unchanging entities. Brown University biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling defended the existence of at least five sexes and detailed how scientists have historically politicized sex and gender, penning a New York Times op-ed detailing how those looking to biology “for an easy-to-administer definition of sex and gender can derive little comfort.” Variation is the rule, not the exception.

Stephen Jay Gould argued that biological determinism is a casing (a container or form) of bad argumentation used to emphasize traits as innate and “inferior” genetic endowments of the disadvantaged. Gould explains how this has been historically recycled as a basis for “biologizing” social injustices. The same ingredients are at play in the Immutability Argument, where biological sciences are used to naturalize exclusion and discrimination.

For Lopiano, the natural lottery — that is, the set of natural abilities a person has because of genetic and other factors beyond their control — favors post-pubescent males over post-pubescent females. Lopiano claims proper differential athletic performance should be due exclusively to skill and training on an otherwise level playing field. Yet athletes commonly vary with respect to their natural gifts. These are athletes with natural athletic advantages, gifts they neither earned nor cheated to acquire, who are nevertheless allowed to compete. How, then, is it fair for trans women to be excluded for their purported natural advantages?

We cannot close this response without noting the language in which Lopiano’s ideas were espoused. During both her opening statement and the Q&A period, Lopiano repeatedly misgendered trans women as “men.” She twice spoke the “N”-word, casually and without apology , imitating (and condemning) a racist critic of racially integrated athletics. Perhaps this is why a key organizer denied our request for a recording of the event, and why the event itself sparked sufficient controversy to elicit a statement from UML’s chancellor and an editorial by the university’s student newspaper.

Far from being an advocate of Title IX, Lopiano proposes to limit its application in ways reminiscent of Plessy v. Ferguson, the disastrous 1896 US Supreme Court decision that solidified “separate but equal” as the law of the land. Trans women must compete separately , just as black athletes were required to do. As with the majority in Plessy, Lopiano’s argument appeals to junk science to imagine immutable differences between two groups to justify exclusion.

With trans people comprising only 0.005% of the US population, and with even fewer being women athletes enrolled in women’s sports, it’s worth asking: Why all the anti-trans fuss over so few trans people? Trans people generally (and trans youth especially) “already face an alarming mental health crisis with high rates of depression, PTSD, and suicidality,” with a 2016 study showing that trans students are 45% more likely to attempt suicide when denied access to gender-appropriate bathrooms. The stakes, then, are high for trans women. Excluding them from women’s sports courts disaster. If unfairness is at issue, the unfairness of excluding trans women surely surpasses any purported unfairness to cis women.

We should all reject Lopiano’s proposal. In its place, we should accept a model of athletic equity that recognizes trans women as women with varying natural abilities. We should welcome them to women’s athletics and fully include them in competitive events. We should disavow Plessy and its intellectual progeny and treat all women fairly.