In boxing at the Olympic Games, the boundaries between the sexes are blurred. (Image AI-generated)
Are sports categories still relevant? Trans and intersex athletes question the rules. But those who complain about a lack of fairness do not understand the nature of sport.
If you follow the heated debates about intersex and transsexual athletes at the Olympic Games in Paris, sooner or later you will ask yourself whether star footballer Lionel Messi should not have actually played football in disability sports instead of becoming one of the best and most successful footballers of all time.
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Eventually he was born with a deficiency of somatropin, a congenital deficiency of growth hormone. His parents decided to move from Argentina to Spain, where they hoped to earn more money to pay for the expensive therapy.
The story of the fourteen-year-old, 1.40 meter tall and 40 kilogram light ball artist’s trial training at FC Barcelona is legendary: the first contract, including coverage of treatment costs, was written on the next napkin after 30 seconds of trial play.
Nobody ever thought that the treatment was a kind of doping, an unfair advantage over others who cannot determine their own height with the cannula. The fact that Messi was also rather small at 1.69 m made him particularly agile and made his opponents slightly dizzy.
Ralf Bönt is a German writer.
Shouldn’t he have stayed small and played in the Paralympics or given up his dream? Growth hormones in track and field athletes are all too well known as doping. And finally, the South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, alias “Blade Runner”, had to face this debate. He was born with incomplete feet, which were then amputated along with part of his calves.
When he tried to compete against healthy athletes, some people said that his springy prostheses were an unfair advantage. However, others found this objection as unsportsmanlike as it was tasteless.
What is healthy and what is sick?
The line between health and illness is not a given. The German racing cyclist Jan Ullrich had asthma and took medication that every other employee takes and even has to take. Medicine operates with norm values that the young Messi fell below when it came to growth hormones.
On the other hand, Messi would probably not have suffered any health problems if he had only lived to be 1.55 m tall, apart from the psychological challenge of such a life.
Before hormones could be produced synthetically, people with dwarfism often ended up in the circus and were among the most popular; people have always liked to look down on others. Around four out of 100,000 people are born with somatropin deficiency, and you hardly see any people with dwarfism in everyday life these days: that’s a good thing.
Where does fairness end?
The problem of fairness in sport is the setting of limits, i.e. the question of where fairness ends and where sport begins.
The Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx allegedly always had much lower lactate levels than his opponents, and this is also genetically determined before every training session. The US cyclists Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich, in addition to their doping techniques, had veritable horse lungs of seven liters.
Normal values are just half of that. Nobody would think of setting up competition classes in cycling based on lung volume or body weight.
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There are no basketball teams for people under 1.80 meters. Those who are not privileged look for another sport and nobody thinks that is unsporting. On the contrary, sport is the desire to find the best and to watch them or to be one of them.
There are also rules in sport that seem unsportsmanlike to those who want equal conditions for all to be understood in such a way that disadvantages are compensated.
For example, the International Cycling Federation has set a minimum weight for competition bikes. To prevent them from breaking in a pothole at 120 km/h, which is easily reached on the descent from the Timmelsjoch towards Sölden, a lower limit of 6.8 kilograms is intended to put an end to lightweight construction.
Now this minimum weight applies to every rider, whether he weighs 50 kilograms or 80 kilograms, and it applies equally to women and men:
Apparently this is a disadvantage for lighter athletes such as women, whose times on the famous climbs lag behind those of the men.
In the individual time trial, some riders also started with small wheels in order to minimize the considerable force required to rotate the rims and spokes.
Cycling: 28 inches for everyone
The international cycling association Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) therefore set the size of the wheels at 28 inches (approx. 71 cm).
It now applies to the 1.55 meter tall climber who is now sitting between the wheels, as well as to the 1.85 meter tall sprinter whose saddle is towering far above it. Is that fair, or sport, or simply pragmatic?
If you had different rules, 26-inch (approx. 66 cm) wheels for athletes under 1.72 meters or a six-kilogram bike for those under 65 kilograms, you would only create other hardships. We know them from the weight classes in boxing, which some people starve themselves down to or eat their way up to. Not nice.
Arbitrariness has always existed
The categories we introduce for competitions are chosen based on arbitrary criteria, which is why they should be re-examined from time to time.
Especially because medicine and understanding are developing. Of course it makes sense to create age categories; nobody wants to compare 16-year-olds with adults, nobody wants to compare women with men.
And this, again, despite the fact that 17-year-old Lamine Yamal was undoubtedly one of the very best at the European Football Championship, both athletically and as a player personality.
Little ones lose
And although women on racing bikes can easily outrun many men on the mountain, the category boundaries are always arbitrary and unfair.
Anyone who has been through the youth classes knows that every two years you were a head shorter and had to take the hits, even if they were just defeats. But being able to lose is the basic discipline and the highest honor in sport.
Separation of the sexes
In the much-discussed appearances of transsexual athletes in martial arts, the risk of injury is a central criterion for the classification of participants into classes, which includes the separation of the sexes.
Perhaps we should save the debate on boxing because it should be abolished like bullfighting. But until that happens, we have to look particularly closely at this issue.
Calling Imane Khelif a trans woman all over the internet, even though she is clearly not transsexual but intersex. And even though hardly anyone knows exactly what that means, it is as unhelpful as accusing her opponent of being transphobic and of seeking publicity when she stopped the fight after 46 seconds, saying that she had never been hit so hard.
Women also hit hard
Imane Khelif has fought against women many times and lost. There will be women who hit harder than her, or dodge better, or have better tactics or stamina or more fighting spirit than her and strike more often.
If these women are allowed to use their power against women like Angela Carini, but not Imane Khelif, just because she also has male chromosomes or a very high testosterone level, then that is nothing but sexism: discrimination based on gender, in this case also that of a gender that is somewhat debatable.
Carini’s statement was very admirable. She buried her Olympic dream in tears and yet said that she did not want to judge her opponent’s admission. There must be a reason why she was here.
Khelif also has her fate
It becomes clear to anyone who is interested in her story that Imane Khelif also has to fight a battle that she did not choose.
It is not as simple as the question of whether trans women, i.e. men who seek to change their gender surgically or hormonally after male puberty, start out as women. Here the study situation is simple:
They lose five to ten percent of muscle mass, while the difference between men and women is 30 to 50 percent.
In a transsexual biography, a starting place in a martial arts discipline may not be the most important thing. But you can deal with it beforehand and should accept exclusion from the women’s category in the same way that a mountain flea accepts the minimum weight of a competition bike in the Tour de France, for which there is no definitive justification.
Need a new category?
It would probably be best to introduce a new category for intersexuals and transsexuals, even if that would bring us closer to the Paralympics, where there are inevitably all sorts of confusing classes.
Why are they still held separately from the normal Olympic Games when no one knows what normal is anymore?
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A separate gender category would also honor those affected, who are said to be 1.7 percent of the population, and make them proud, giving them the place in the world that they deserve.
By the way, Marta, the Brazilian superstar of women’s football, received the most deserved red card that the sport has seen for a long time. She kicked her Spanish opponent hard in the head from high up in the air. There was no shitstorm.
Born and raised in Bielefeld, Ralf Bönt first completed an apprenticeship as a car mechanic before studying physics and completing his doctorate under Harald Fritzsch. He worked at CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory and DESY. He has been a freelance writer since 1994 and has published numerous works, including short stories, radio plays, novels and essays. In 2017 he became a member of the PEN Center Germany and in 2022 he co-founded PEN Berlin.
In 2009, his novel “The Discovery of Light” was published, which was on the Spiegel bestseller list. He wrote reports about the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh and positioned himself as an opponent of nuclear power after the nuclear accident in Fukushima. In “The Dishonored Gender” (2012) he addresses the disadvantages of patriarchy for men.
He took part in the Metoo debate and hosted a radio show with Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky. In 2020, he signed the appeal for free debate spaces and called for a gender-sensitive corona vaccination regulation in 2022. In 2023, he successfully completed an aid campaign for eastern Ukraine.
