Should transgender women be allowed to compete in women’s sports? Is it unfair on cis women if they do? Is it unfair on trans women if they can’t? Is there a coherent logic to the partitioning of sporting events?

Things mentioned in this podcast

• Martina Navratilova’s criticism of transgender women in sport
• Sharron Davies’ criticism of transgender women in sport
• The Heraean Games
• Eligible impairments for paralympic participation

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing fairness in sport. Peter, can you lead us in and tell us why we want to talk about this?

Okay, I'll try and do this sympathetically and uncontroversially. But just stick to the facts, Pedro. Yeah, so there's been a few high-profile athletes talking about fairness in sport, particularly women's sport, in reaction to a number of fairly high-profile wins by transgender athletes. So notably, Sharon Davis said that there needs to be some protections put in for women's sports, and Martina Navratilova, slightly less politically astutely said that transgender women could be called cheats within women's sport because they have unfair physical advantages because of certain physical characteristics. So really, it's an interesting topic, and I think it's worthy of some deeper analysis. So why is it interesting to you? Well, it's interesting because I'd like to explore what the possible alternatives might be. So we have a traditional binary gender approach to sport. You have men's sport and you have women's sport. Very occasionally, you have mixed sport. And in a world where, increasingly sort of liberal world, where the genders matter less and less and less, and in a world where gender identity is much more fluid, do we need to change it? And if so, how can we change it so that it's fair on everyone?

I mean, yeah, I guess the starting point is the, as you said, like the first split straight there is a gender split in sport, and that exists because, presumably because of fairness, essentially. Um...

Well, I think we really want to drill into what that means. So let's do that. Well, okay. I mean, humans differ on all kinds of characteristics, right? So I mean, you've got sort of gender, height, weight, you know, you're... Handsome, not so handsome. Exactly. You didn't see where Fraser was pointing there, but... I was pointing to you first and then to me. Listeners can draw their own conclusions. And, you know, and then obviously skin colour, eye colour, you know, things like your length of name and stuff. Now, obviously, some of these we have decided, you know, deserve, or for various reasons, it is not, it's not, it's good to hive off people with certain characteristics and say you can have your own sport. Or in the case of gender, actually lots of other activities. I mean, sort of acting springs to mind where, you know, there are separate Oscars for best actor and best actress and so on. So, you know, clearly we have made that judgment that some of these characteristics are, in some way, is good to separate out on that basis when you're doing sport. And others we don't. So we don't have race based, you know, Olympics, but we do have the Paralympics, which is based on, you know, certain measurable physical characteristics that you have. So that, there is the first question is why, is there anything meaningful about those characteristics? Do they, do they, is it in some sense good to have separate sporting events for men and women? You know, given that actually in a lot of other contexts, we try to minimise the impact of gender. We try not to discriminate on the basis of gender as far as we can. So, you know, what's the argument in that case? And does it, would it make sense to have an Olympics for, you know, only for sort of brown eyed people or, you know, and if not, why not?

Yeah, and I'm aware this is... Or an Olympics for fat people. Yeah. Dear to my heart. I mean, look, yeah.

Or an Olympics just for white people. Okay. Right. So, I mean, so this is, I have tried to look for what, you know, what is the state of scholarship on this topic? And I have to say, it seems to be a bit under-researched. I don't, I wouldn't say that I found any really clear sort of statements of what the issues are here. And I think my feeling would be, okay, right away that we're going to be looking at a bunch of trade-offs. It is not going to be possible to find some really, really neat rationale for, okay, we have sport for women, but not for, you know, not for and we have sport, you know, specifically for amputees, but we don't have sporting events for,

you know, for tall people, say, you know. So, to summarize then where we got so far with our introduction, which is there's this set of rules in place that divides up in one way, which I guess it seems sort of a normal way to divide things. But that's just because maybe we're used to it. If we actually drill down into that a little bit, it can feel a little bit, not arbitrary, but why divide that like that and not in another way? I mean, I think we can start from the assumption

that women's sport is a good thing, right? I don't, I mean, you know, it was, it's very old as well, apparently. I mean, apparently women had, there was a women's Olympics in ancient Greece as well, the Herion Games, which was very similar. You know, that women ran similar distances. The only, one of the main distinctions was they didn't have to run fully naked like the men did, which I can't imagine doing a sprinting naked. I find that a very odd idea. But anyway, so it's an odd idea. And I think we can start with the assumption that it is clearly good to have things like women's football because it encourages lots of people to play sport. I'm not particularly keen on sport, but lots of people are. And it seems to me like, yeah, I mean, women aren't going to be able to compete in a lot of those areas if there was no distinction made about gender. And so that would negatively harm participation in sport. So, you know, okay, let's start from the assumption that he's doing something good. And then ask the question of, well, are there other categories that are worthy of the same? Well, okay, so which avenue do you want to

go down? Explore other categories or return to our initial question? I've created a bit of my

choice. Well, it's relaxed because there were, you know, CIS women who had testosterone levels

that were higher than the amount. Yeah, yeah. So to my mind, it's a conflict between a very traditional view of gender being a binary thing that's decided at birth, versus something that's much more now a personal decision or a personal preference or a sort of way you find yourself after exploring yourself throughout your adulthood. So it's about how you identify yourself, which runs counter to the existing historical traditional approach to sport. So perhaps there's a way of, rather than having gender-based sport, male and female events, having some sort of league system, and I know it could get quite complicated, but it's based on a set of characteristics, measurable characteristics. So one of them might be testosterone, one of them might be your just absolute physical strength, might be your absolute sort of VO2 max and things. So you would have top leagues, which would probably be largely dominated by male athletes for certain events. So cycling would probably be male dominated at the top. But there'll be other leagues lower down, which are no less prestigious, but have different other types of people. But I think you've, I think you

will undermine what you just said in a way. I mean, if you're going to have leagues that are lower down, you can't, they can't but not be less prestigious. You know, that's the problem here. You know, you're gonna, that's why we have hived off women's sport separately. I mean, you're just going back to a situation which, you know, you're more resistant saying we'll just put everyone in the same pot, and then we'll make an arbitrary cutoff somewhere and then say, oh, well, you lot, oh, well, great, you're top of the B league, you know, well done you. But we all know that actually that's lower than the bottom of the A league. How else could we approach it? I mean, if we lowered

the stakes for everything, so there was no such thing as professional sport, then it would be churlish to actually get too worked up about which league you're in. Yeah, I mean, Peter,

this is a classic Peter engineering approach. He's trying to re-engineer everything from the top down. I mean, so just having a think about what kinds of characteristics work in this context, what characteristics could you imagine using? And I think there's, I at least came up with sort of four aspects of a feature, which I think are going to be important here. One is meaningfulness, which is, you know, does it actually matter to your performance of the sport? So I mean, I mean, you know, I can't remember if there's women's snooker anymore or women's darts, but that seems to me like a classic situation where, well, if it doesn't make much difference to your ability, if there's no meaningfulness in that feature in terms of the performance in the sport, it's hard to imagine why you would want to hive it off separately. So we're looking for something which is correlated with performance for a start, right? Basic kind of stage one. Then, you know, is it unambiguously measurable? And, you know, in the old days we would have said, well, obviously what gender you are, that's dead easy, right? But now, of course, we are running up against the problem of, you know, sort of genuinely non-binary aspects of gender, which we might want to take on board. So things like testosterone levels, and particularly in the case of transgender people, where you're going to have a mixture of both sets of characteristics, you know. Then there's this sort of issue of quantitative versus qualitative. And I think this, if you look at something like the Paralympics, where, you know, if you're an amputee, that's very obviously qualitative. I mean, you know, you either have a leg or you don't. But then, of course, there are lots of other things, impairments that kind of have these arbitrary cutoffs to get into the Paralympics, like sort of leg length difference, for example. So if you have a certain difference in your leg length, if it's sufficiently high, you can get into the Paralympics. If you're not quite there, well, bad luck. You're never going to make it in the Olympics. You know, so that when you have these quantitative variables, you're going to start to find these edge cases, which become difficult. And then the final thing is, I think it's important that you wouldn't willingly change it, because I think that would then disincentivise or incentivise potentially harmful behaviour. So for example, if you had an Olympics for fat people, it's reasonable to think, well, people would become incentivised to be unhealthy in that regard, you know. I wonder if Coca-Cola and McDonald's would sponsor that one. They should, really. Yeah. So I think there were four things I was thinking about. And, you know, actually, they're all quite important. But if we're going to subject a proposed feature to examination, I mean, gender worked beautifully up till recently, you know, and there's the problem that it has gone from being something that's binary and qualitative to being something that actually is hard to measure and quantitative. And so I think that's why it's become, you know, problematic. And it means that we're going to end up with edge cases. There's no way around that. You know, you can't have a perfect system on a quantitative variable where you don't get cases where someone is just above or below a cutoff. And, you know, forced, you know, people who are in that category are going to see that as unfair, potentially. But of course, perhaps it's unfair to that person if they're having to compete against people in the next round up.

And indeed, yeah, you couldn't. One size fits all rule won't work because humans vary day to day, minute to minute, depending on how hard you train or what kind of training you do, your testosterone level will change and other characteristics.

I mean, we have we have weights in boxing right now, Fraser, you're a boxing man. Certainly am. And, you know, that could be subject to these kinds of discussions. I think particularly the thing about willingly, would you willingly change it? You know, because obviously, I mean, I'm assuming that at least for some people, it's possible through diet and exercise for them to either be a small heavyweight or a big, you know, welterweight or whatever. That happens a lot. Yeah, right. So what's going on there? I mean, do people, is it the case, however, as I sort of suspect that actually, even though, yeah, it's great to be a, you know, good featherweight, really the top of the boxing, you know, league is really actually heavyweight. And you can't, you know, it's you really if you everyone would, if they could choose, actually be the best heavyweight in the world.

It's hard to say, because, I mean, there definitely is a certain prestige and a certain kudos to being, I think it's super heavyweight is the is the classification to being that champion of, especially if you can unify all the different belts. And you're perceived as being you probably the best, because if you're the biggest, you can probably be anyone else.

Well, that's the question. So is it conceivable that a really good flyweight could be a super heavyweight?

No, I don't think so.

I mean, they're big units, these lads.

They are. And you can, I mean, I don't know, it'd be interesting.

How many flyweights would you need to knock out of Mike Tyson?

But it might be that sort of thing where he's just a flyweight just running around and around. But also, for example, there's, but it doesn't always apply. So there is, so you've got this phrase, which you hear, the best pound for pound boxer in the world. And you hear that and it's to try and achieve some kind of evening out. And so, for example, some of the biggest boxers in the world most recently is, I can never say his surname, is Manny Pacquiao, Pacquiao is from the Philippines, who had a number of fights with, oh, I've forgotten his name. But he's an American boxer. You follow boxing very closely. I do, who is one who had this, you know, retires, comes back, retires, come back. But those two were extremely famous. And the other thing just about boxing is actually heavyweights are not always the most interesting to watch because they can be quite slow, quite sluggish, and it can be a bit of a slugfest.

This is one of the key arguments for having this. I mean, I've mentioned participation, but, you know, obviously there's also an aspect of it being more interesting. Okay, I mean, look at online matchmaking, right? So this is something that people who run multiplayer game servers have to think about is you have some very experienced people and you have people who are total noobs. And matchmaking is about trying to put people up against people who are roughly their level. You know, and how you do that is sort of, you know, varies by game to game. But I mean, the point is that it's clearly a laudable aim. I mean, it is a good thing to put people who are roughly evenly matched together. It's more interesting for everyone, you know, so there is an argument for doing that. But it becomes problematic because actually, you know, if you're really good, you know, if you're really good in League Five, you might suddenly find yourself being back to square one in League Four. So, you know, yeah, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is it's trade-offs all the way down. And I don't think we should, there isn't, it's a complex problem. I don't think there is a clear answer, really.

So, Peter, you literally, I've got a question.

Well, I've got a question, boxing question. Yeah. Since Fraser's our sort of notional expert in the room. Thinking about the incentivising dangerous behaviour, is it the case that someone, a boxer who's at a borderline between two weights might choose to try to compete the lower weight because they are going to be at the top of that bound and possibly sort of therefore the strongest and the heaviest and the most able to sort of take the punches. And in doing so, to get there, they will potentially diet and exercise more dangerously, like to more of a higher extreme in order to make that weight category. So the answer is, I don't know.

I think a boxer wouldn't regularly try and fight in that weight category. I think, but also the other thing is that I could be wrong on this, but generally, as I said, the bigger the weight, the more the prestige and the more opportunities. And so I think boxers tend to box up rather than down. I could be completely wrong on that. And there's another aspect, which is as a career progresses, you tend to see boxers going up through different weights rather than down or staying the same. And I think that's also just the way the body ages. And the more you train, the more mass you put on. Yeah, exactly. So I think that's how it works. I could be completely wrong. Personally, I always just boxed in the same weight, which was overweight. Just one thing, we're close to wanting to finish. There's one thing I want to ask about, which is we talked about the ambiguity that there is now and apologies, I don't necessarily know the correct vocabulary here. Because we were saying that gender used to be relatively simple. It's sort of yes, no kind of thing. But there's this element of now that sort of self-identification, but based on certain factors.

I think it's always been complicated, but it's becoming more officially recognized as being more diverse.

And so I saw, I mean, this gets called into question, this almost self-classification. And I remember there's a, I'm sure you would know who it is. Darling of the Right Wing, American, Jewish. I think he's an ex-lawyer from Harvard or something, who just takes quite great joy on YouTube tearing apart liberals. Okay. Do you know who I mean? I don't know. There's lots of them. Which one? Yeah, I forget his name. But anyway, he was being questioned. There was a student saying, look, you know, why can't people self-identify their gender? And his response was, well, look, how old are you? If you want to say you're 60, you know, can you just say you're 60? And that's that when you're actually 25. But it seems to me that- It wasn't quite the question, but yeah, that's a good bit of diversion. Yeah. But there are some differences here. But given this is what sort of caused this confusion, ambiguity, how does that hold up to analysis? This question of what's happening here in gender?

That, well, my point of view is that there's no right answer. You've got to do what Aleph Insights is always going to do, which is, you know, tell you to work out what you're trying to achieve. That's what are you attempting to achieve? Because the answer is going to be different. You know, there is going to be this trade-off between fun, inclusion, and fairness, right? You can't, in a way, have all three. It's going to be someone who's going to lose out. So you just have to, you know, do you want something that's very easy to measure and therefore uncontroversial in terms of inclusion? Yes, you are definitely, you know, allowed in the Paralympics or not. Or, you know, or do you want to have something where there's, you know, there's more sort of judgment, but more potential for someone to, you know, to get in who actually looks like they probably shouldn't? You know, that's the issue. I mean, the more you allow self-identification, the more you, you know, water down the crispness of that distinction. And it seems to me, you know, if you just simply allowed people to self-identify, they would always identify as the thing that they were most likely to win at. And I mean, surely we don't want that. I mean, you know, in the long run, it's hard to see why you would want that outcome.

Before we finish off, there's a question I want to ask. Before we do, anyone want to say anything, Peter? Okay, here's a question. Slightly loaded because I kind of know the answers. Um, I want you to tell me what sport you are best at, okay, in which you are most skilled, either in the past or even now. Um, because you're obviously quite, you know, athletic. I can see that anyone can, you know, so, um, yeah, tell me about which sport you historically have been best at or are good at now. Peter?

Well, I'm least rubbish at cycling, I think. But I'm still pretty rubbish at that.

Okay, all right.

Okay, and with things like Strava, I have a very good idea of how rubbish I am at it, because I got good stats about the rest of the population that take certain routes. And yeah, so even when trying to show me hard, I'm pretty low down on any given list.

Okay, all right. This is going to blow your mind. Nick, tell me. But I was, what I was actually best at was running back in the day. Really? Sprinting, yeah. Sprinting? I was like a streak of white lightning.

About 30 years ago.

It was a long time ago. Yeah, it was, it was, I guess, actually pretty much exactly 30 years ago. Yeah, I had a lot of confidence as well. I was quite good at hurdling because I just didn't care. I was, I used, you know, I wasn't put off. And then when I got a bit older, I think I lost my, I lost my mojo. You know, I could really fit, I was worried about jumping over hurdles. I was kind of worried about running too fast. And yeah, I slipped back from being in the sort of very top, always sort of coming second or third to being a nothing in terms of running. And then that's it really. That's my, the only time I've ever been good at a sport. I have to say, I've never yet done a sport that I've really genuinely enjoyed. Yeah, I'm much more of a solitary activities guy. Certainly never liked team sports.

More of a board gamer.

Board gaming, yeah. I could hold my own in some board games.

It's a shame because chess used to be in the Olympics. And, you know, we need to see if we can get Twilight Zone in there or something. I'm actually quite sporty.

You've totally made up a game called Twilight Zone. There's no such game. What's it called? Well, I don't know, given that you've just made up, totally made something up.

What's that absurd Cold War one?

Twilight Struggle.

Thank you. Okay.

There is, there are competitive leagues for that. I wouldn't stand a chance, but okay.

I'm pretty sporty, actually. I was the first person in my school in my year to win a House Colors, which was for water polo. Swimming and water polo. So I was amazing at water polo, which you have to be. It's an extremely vicious sport. It is. And very tough. It's, you know. It's bloody stupid water polo. We all know it. And then the other, and actually, as I get older, what I'm good at now, and I get the opportunity to play it most days, it's table football. Is I am, I'm a pretty. I think you just laid down a gauntlet there. Or a game.

I believe I could, I could smash your face off at table football, but that's for another. Yeah, I doubt that, but let's see. Okay, well. No spinning allowed.

No, of course not. Yeah, good. Okay, we'll stop there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. And until next time. Goodbye.