#170 Cathy Devine on Human Rights of Girls & Women in Sport
“In terms of advantage, the people who are advantaged are the males. So how could inclusion logically be about including people who are already advantaged in categories designed for people who are arguably, if you’re talking about one performance spectrum, disadvantaged? Doesn’t make sense. It’s topsy-turvy.”
Cathy Devine
Cathy Devine, a researcher in the field of sports policy and equality, talks to FiLiA about how policies enabling male competitors to enter women's categories negatively impact female athletes and are detrimental to women's rights to fairness and inclusion in sport. She argues that "the human rights of females in sport depend on fair eligibility criteria which acknowledge human sexual dimorphism." Cathy discusses findings from two of her recent publications: "Female Sports Participation, Gender Identity and the British 2010 Equality Act" and "Female Olympians’ voices: Female sports categories and International Olympic Committee Transgender guidelines."
Listen Here (Transcript Below):
Sara: Hello everyone. My name is Sara. I'm one of the volunteers and welcome to this episode of the FiLiA podcast. So I'm delighted today to be joined by Cathy Devine, who is an independent researcher. We're going to be speaking with her today about a couple of her latest academic publications, which are about female sports and regulations around transgender participation.
These two papers are Female Sports Participation, Gender Identity, and the British 2010 Equality Act and Female Olympians’ Voices: Female Sports Categories, And International Olympic Committee, Transgender Guidelines.
Cathy, thank you so much for joining us on the FiLiA podcast.
I was wondering if we could just start off with a bit of an introduction for our audience. Could you tell us a little bit about who you are and the backgrounds?
Cathy Devine: Yeah, fine. When I was a girl I got very involved in gymnastics and started an awful lot of gymnastics and trampolining. And I got sent to ballet lessons, consequently. So I've always really done sports. As I got older, I took up wind surfing as well. And I did actually work for a year at a dance company. And more recently, for about 10 years, I got very involved in climbing and it's a friendly rivalry and climbing between sport climbing and proper climbing.
I've always been involved really in walking, mountain walking, running, and so-called wild swimming, which is just really swimming outdoors. And I qualified when I was young, I was a gymnastics coach and a trampoline coach, and also as a wind surfing instructor.
So I've done an awful lot of coaching as well. Then I did 2 biological sciences degrees at universities. I've got an undergraduate degree from UCL in zoology, which is what they call biology, you know, a few decades ago. And then I did a Master's in nutrition. So I've got a Master's of science in nutrition.
I mean in terms of how I got to where I am now, what I then started doing was when I actually did some TV research for a while, some scientific and medical research for TV. And then I got more and more involved really with sport policy development. So I worked for the National Federation of Women's Institutes as their Head of Sport and worked for what was called then the National Coaching Foundation for five years.
And I had responsibility for developing women's coaching. And throughout both those jobs, I worked very closely with the Sports Council, which is now called Sporting England. We're now branded Sporting England, developing women in coaching strategies and winning in sports strategies. I was on the organizing committee for the first International Women in Sport conference, in the nineties in Brighton.
And there were delegates from many countries there, and it was really phenomenal events. And the Sports Council were very keen on developing the sport policy strategies for getting more women involved in sport. So my career was kind of in 2 parts. That's been sport development and support policy development.
And then because of that, really, I moved into academia because sports was in its infancy in academia at that time. So there were very little textbooks, academic articles and so on and so forth in relation to sports. And I started at the university of Cumbria in 1995. If I recall correctly and I was there for 23 years.
And in the Department of Sport and Physical Activity, and obviously because of the biological sciences education that I've got that role, because in a lot of departments in universities is multidisciplinary.
So sport policy is multidisciplinary. We need to know the science. We need to know how we're going to approach policy development.
We need to understand why girls are less involved than men and boys and so on. So really I took as my academic base, a lot of theoretical underpinning from philosophy, so political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and ethics. And that led me then to start researching. So I went to quite a few conferences over about 10 years, 15 years, and they were mainly sports philosophy conferences.
I used to go to the British Philosophy of Sports Association conferences and presented papers and the International Association of the Philosophy of Sports and present papers there and various sport policy conferences. And then obviously I was encouraged by the profession to write up my research, my presentations.
And so I started publishing in 2012 and my first paper was on the London 2012 Olympics legacy. That was primarily that paper about the policy direction of sport in Britain at the time, because it was shifting from what I discussed as a sport for all policy aim, to an elite sports, competitive for policy aim.
So the money, if you like was being shifted away from local authorities who developed sports opportunities for everybody, sport and physical activity and sport was being withdrawn because it was a conservative government at the time. In fact, and there was more money being put into elite sports or high performance sport.
So that's what that paper discussed. And it discussed how girls and women were going to lose out at a participation level from that. And then that carried on and published a number of other papers and two of them, which I smile at this now because I published in 2016, I think it was a paper called Sex Sport and Justice.
And you know, the word sex is now kind of contentious, but at the time it wasn't. So that was 2016 in sport. I think I would have had more trouble publishing that with the word sex in the title now, but that was basically about what is justice for girls and women in relation to sport policy? Does it mean treating them equally to men or does it mean recognising them, in terms of in particular, I was talking about their choices in relation to the sports and physical activities they want to do because competitive team sports was, and still is very much is very, very heavily male dominated and sport policy was all about ‘let's try and get more girls and women doing the sports that men like doing’ rather than let's ask them what they want to do from those sports.
And that's very much a problem in education in fact. So in PE, so although the PE curriculum in England is very much about a breadth of what we'd call movement literacy. In fact, it focuses on competitive team sport, whereas girls in general are less interested than boys.
And that's when I argue, that's one of the reasons why girls and women don't participate to the same extent as boys and men do, basically because the things they want to do are disproportionately excluded from the curriculum and disproportionately underfunded. And that led into another paper, which was called Sex, Sport and Money.
And that was talking about what in political philosophy is called distributed justice. You know, all the corporate organisations and government organisations, such as the sports councils adopt all the equality rhetoric that is important in the equality, diversity and inclusion landscape. But I was interested in whether and how that actually tracked down into whether they funded sports for females and males equally. And no they didn't.
So what it found was that I just looked at the top five sports that women wanted to do the top five skills that men wanted to do, and the split was something like 25% to 30% went to female choices and over 70% perhaps to male choices. So it was just interesting to me that the equality rhetoric is one thing, but the reality in terms of how that tracks through into policy is sometimes very different. And really the bottom line is money. So when you track through, into money, what does that cash do? So that was the last paper published before I was made redundant from the University of Cumbria. And that's the little bit of an aside that was, I'd say if I'm being bitter about that, that's because I was a woman in my fifties whose research was in women in sports rather than you know, perhaps a male academic whose research was in football and the department was downsizing. So that was a shame, but then I thought, well, I'm just going to carry on publishing, which is what I have done.
And so I do some consultancy and I do some research. And that's where the two papers that you've talked about, you know, have come to fruition because obviously then we had, it was becoming very high profile, wasn't it? The inclusion of transgender athletes in female categories. And so I was interested in that from a number of perspectives.
Sara - Thank you, and there's so much that I would actually be so curious to know about just from that, like for example, what are women in particular interested in and how much does it have to do with this sort of legacy of who comes up with the sports and who creates those rules and for whom these sports are designed and so much more and I don't think it's necessarily being bitter to suspect that being a woman interested in women's issues might have some questions raised as to priorities.
I did want to ask in terms of these papers, can you say something maybe a bit about why you think from all your different perspective and bringing all your knowledge, and I love the fact that your first love, it sounds like was, was sports. That's how the sports kind of organically grew into this policy and academic work. But why female sports categories in particular?
Cathy Devine: So from a biological point of view, I mean, this, I have to say this astounds me about the whole debate that we're having currently, but the whole of the biological sciences bar one or two academics agree that there are two sexes, sex is immutable and in terms of the implications of that for sports performance, it's very, very clear cut puberty, male puberty, gives an unassailable, if you like male advantage in sports performance. And that's because, and this is might be strange from a, you know, a sports policy, academic, sport isn't really that important in the grand scheme of things. What's important is being conceived, gestate and giving birth to the next generation and so women biologically are evolved to do just that.
And that's an extraordinary thing to be able to do, but quite obviously that means that the reproductive system of females is developed such that they have, as compared to men, wider hips, shorter arms, or body fat and so on and so forth. So they have to have capacity for a womb because they have to hold the baby.
Then lungs are smaller and so on and so forth. So in biological terms, as a definitive paper has outlined, it's really incontrovertible it's settled science that the biological differences between the sexes, it's not just that females are smaller males, it's that their reproductive biology, anatomy, morphology, physiology is such that the physiological systems and anatomical systems involved in fulfilling that reproductive role, biologically mean that in sports performance, which let's face it, it's not really that important in contemporary society, but it just means, you know, this, I suppose I say that because it makes me laugh when people talk about men being superior or stronger. You know, as far as I'm concerned, males are not superior and stronger, they are just not designed to conceive gestate and give birth.
And that has consequences for their performance in sports and for female performance in sports. So therefore, given we, in general as societies, perhaps are getting more egalitarian rather than less egalitarian, if women or females are going to take part in sport, we need in most sports, not in all sports, but in most sports to have single sex categories to ensure that, what philosophers might call ‘the goods of sports’ are available to everybody.
And it may be, but a different society might decide. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics didn't think females should be playing sport. He thought they should be clapping from the side-lines and garlanding the winners. That was his view of what sport was about. It was about celebrating male, physical prowess, rather than involving females.
Thankfully we are more egalitarian than that as societiesand we don't subscribe to that anymore, but it's still the case that sport is very, very what I would call male centred. Sports that are valued, if you like, built out of the physical attributes of males rather than females.
So flexibility, for example, females are more flexible than males, but that's not valued if you like in sports terms, you know, running fast, being the strongest, those kinds of physical attributes are valued and quite naturally females want to play sports. And I don't think any of us would agree that we would just leave sport to males and females can do other things, females can crochet or cook. And so, for female inclusion, you have to have single-sex categories in most sports for fairness and safety reasons.
I have to say that I'm absolutely astounded that even that kind of basic settled biological understanding appears to be challenged.
Sara: It’s interesting because it appears to be challenged at the sort of highest level of sport, in terms of the International Olympic Committee in particular. And I wondered if we could talk about your paper that concerned Olympic female athletes and their perspectives on the policies that were there at the time. Could you tell us a little bit about why that piece of research was so needed and also what you found?
Cathy Devine: I mean, one of the things, many things that I've found to be in the 21st century discussion around females and males in sport, one of the things that astounded me on the one hand, but not on the other, was that the sport policy, which looked at defining what the eligibility criteria were for female categories, didn't actually ask females what they thought.
How can this be the case? But I know how this can be the case, because SSA sport is very andro centric. It's very male centred. And then in addition, I think as you know, the richer society, so say America and the UK, we have a technocratic approach to democracy rather than a democratic approach to democracy or participation approach to democracy.
So although it is really important that policy is evidence-based, part of that evidence base, as far as I'm concerned is at least asking the female athletes what they think should actually be included and the decisions that are made. But at least we need to ask them what they think. And because there was a lot of anecdotal evidence that female athletes were very unhappy with the, at the time there were the 2015 International Olympic Committee guidelines.
It seemed that the only people being asked about those guidelines were transgender women. So for example, on the panel to decide what those eligibility criteria should be or to suggest guidelines for, then there was one transgender woman Joanna Harper and Joanna Harper at the time was arguing. ‘Yes, transgender women do have physical advantages. But their social disadvantages are so great that they outweigh the physical advantages’. And I just thought this was such a topsy-turvy way of doing things to just ask trans athletes, obviously trans athletes are stakeholders, but female athletes incontrovertibly by definition are stakeholders.
And so I thought let's ask them what they think. And, I put in an abstract to a conference, which was around this topic. So it was about voice, female voice and it was accepted. And so I went and did a presentation at the time I had 14 female Olympians answer my survey, and then following that conference, I had a few more come in, so it was basically 19 female Olympians, who very, very kindly and very importantly for the debate filled in an online survey, which was quite detailed so that I could get rich data.
It was just extraordinary, really, because quite rightly they concluded that the evidence for what's called male advantage mitigation, which is the fix at the time was that we'll ask transwomen athletes to lower their testosterone circulating testosterone to below 10 nanomoles per litre. Yeah. Quite obviously that fix doesn't actually work. The evidence shows us that that doesn't work and there were 2 review articles that summarized the available evidence that shaped that to be true. And one of them was done by Joanna Harper, the transwoman, who sat on the IOC panel and one by Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg. And so these athletes that I interviewed, that I surveyed, said, you know, what I found was they thought both female and transgender athletes should be fairly included in elite sports, but there was unanimous agreement that there wasn't enough scientific evidence to show no competitive advantage for transwomen.
And when I asked them in 2019, it was before the two review articles were published and say now, there is, there still was evidence, but now there's even more evidence and a consensus of the evidence that transwomen, if they lower to 10 nanomoles per litre, do have a competitive advantage.
So, you know, the female athletes, the female Olympians said that the IOC should read it, that the rules and the scientific evidence. And really one of the most worrying things was that the majority of those Olympians, you know, so these are the best in the world. You know, these women are the best athletes in the world of their generation and between them have gone to, I think, all the Olympic games, if I remember writing my own papers since 1976 and surely to goodness, you know, their lived experience, their understanding of training regimes, their understanding of competing, their understanding of the science.
You know, it seems to be that people assume women can’t understand science, but their understanding of the science, surely to goodness, that should count for something. But the majority of them felt like couldn't ask questions or discuss the issue without being accused of transphobia. This is wild really, because, you know, you have to be able to discuss what the evidence base is for policy decisions.
To me that is just a lack of respect and recognition for, I would go so far as to say for the personhood of those female Olympians, you know, they don't count as people if you like within the sporting infrastructure, you know, their voices are not sought, they don't count, they're not asked. It's just not acceptable, really.
So that, that's why I asked them. Some of the quotations are just shocking and heart-breaking. I mean, the women are very, very respectful to trans athletes. Those Olympians said, for example, I remember one of them said that she didn't think that trans athletes should have to take medication to compete, meaning they shouldn't have to lower to 10 nanomoles per litre, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they should be competing in the female category.
And, you know, I agree with that. I don't think anybody should have to medicate to compete in sports. That ethically seems totally inappropriate. However, that then does mean we need to have a look at those eligibility criteria for female categories and for other possible categories in which trans athletes could compete, or trans women athletes could compete.
I don't know if you want some of the quotes from the athletes?
Sara: That would be nice to hear what they said.
Cathy Devine: So one of the Olympians said most female athletes have no clue about the decisions that take place behind their backs that have a direct impact on the sports in which they participate.
This is not right. Another said I agree in principle that transgender athletes need support and protection to compete without discrimination, but this cannot be at the expense of female athletes when it comes to fair competition. Somebody else said it's the lived experiment where female athletes will lose out until the obvious is proved, then it will be changed.
Unfortunately, at the moment that's looking optimistic but anyway, that is not fair. And it, I mean, this is the telling one it's not right that females are disadvantaged by an altruistic desire to include transgender athletes under an unfair policy.
So they felt that their human rights were not being upheld.
And one of them asked why don't women matter.
Sara: Well, and I think that's a really good question and as we've sort of alluded to, obviously now there's been a change in the, in the policy just quite recently, I think from the International Olympic Committee, which removes everything as far as I know in terms of hormone adjustments. And I think it also says something along the lines of like you shouldn't presume that their players will have an advantage. What are your thoughts about this policy then? Do you think that any of these women have contributed to it?
Cathy Devine: I'm disappointed in the policy and I think it's got some good bits to it, but it's basically a whole mish-mash and kind of conceptual and ideological and political attempts to balance, well not even attempts to balance, but attempt to kind of circumvent the crux of the matter.
And I think it sells out female athletes, basically, it sells out female Olympians. And as you rightly say that the problem, the major problem with it is, well, let me talk about the bits that are good. It talks about the importance of fairness. And that's really, really important, obviously. However, there's this very strange in my view, juxtaposition of what's called inclusion versus fairness.
So, and this is really important. So from a, from a philosophical point of view, the framing of any sport policy is really important. So the framing always seems to start from inclusion and fairness being in opposition and I fundamentally do not accept that, inclusion and fairness as values are not in opposition, inclusion of transgender athletes and fairness for female athletes are in opposition.
Those are the two things that are in opposition, but inclusion can't just apply to trans athletes. It has to apply to female athletes as well. So female athletes, if they are to be included, require that eligibility criteria. So I argue in my papers that inclusion and fairness, they're not in opposition, they are aligned.
And we need fair inclusion of transgender athletes and female athletes.
The fair inclusion of transgender athletes and female athletes means we cover the territory.
We can't just look at the inclusion of trans athletes. We have to also look at inclusion for female athletes. So that's, that's where I think they set off on the wrong foot, if you like from the get go. I don't accept that framing, that those two values are in opposition. And I think it does female athletes a disservice. They then also talk about importance of evidence and evidence is very, very important.
It's so important that we have evidence-based policy, but as you say that the huge concern for many of us, including, it has to be said, to Joanna Harper who I talked about earlier, transwoman athlete, who's not an Olympian, but she's a transwoman recreational athlete, is it's called principle five and it's no presumption of advantage.
And what it says is, and this is a quote from the IOC document ‘until evidence determines otherwise athletes should not be deemed to have an unfair or disproportionate competitive advantage due to their sex variations and or transgender status’. And the problem with that presumption is competitive advantage is not due to their transgender status. It's due to the sex of the athlete.
So if you’re going to be an optimist, you could say fine, there is no presumption of advantage due to trans status, but there is a presumption of advantage due to male status in female categories. However, the signalling of the document is not really that, because the signalling then goes on to say the OC guidelines say it's up to the International Federations of Sport to decide.
And again, that is right. It is right that those Federations of individual sports should decide eligibility criteria for their sports. But it's totally unrealistic to expect every sport to presume until it is proved otherwise in sports specific research, that transwomen who are obviously male, do not have an advantage.
The presumption has to go the other way because of the wealth of evidence that we have. We have a wealth of evidence to show that male puberty confers competitive advantage for anybody for, you know, obviously males. That's why we have separate men and female categories. So the presumption of advantage has to be that male that anybody has gone through male puberty and what happens at male puberty that may appear to have a competitive advantage in female categories.
These IOC guidelines, the IOC framework seems to turn that on its head and say, strangely, this particular group, transwomen, who obviously they wouldn't be trans if they weren't male and haven’t gone through a male puberty, we've got to presume they don't have an advantage, whereas for the males that compete in the male category, we presume they do have an advantage. So they're excluded from female category.
So that's, that's the huge problem because what it means that if the IOC has kicked the ball down the road, given it to the International Federation of Sports, international federations of sport, don't have the resources to commission the research. By the time you've commissioned the research, lots of women may well have lost out on their opportunity to compete at the Olympics and in high-performance sports, until if you like the obvious is proven all over again.
If I'm looking at that from a feminist philosophy lens, I'm looking at that and saying, that's the very definition of andro-centric, sport policy, it centres males, and females, if you like, are not considered within that. That's what feminist philosophy means by andro centric and most sport policy is male centred.
And so in a way, maybe we'd be unsurprised that this is male centred, but it doesn't reflect the science. It kind of relegates females to the side-lines in terms of focusing on their human rights and their inclusion and fairness to them. And so it's a bit of a dog's dinner really, and a major problem for the International Sport Federation.
Sara: I mean, there's so much to unpick really. Part of it is the kind of question of what is the responsibility of the IOC here, because they do seem to be shirking. I think they have a duty to say the obvious basically. But the other question in terms of the kind of andro centrism is it seems a very interesting question of where the resources are going to go, because another thing you highlight in those papers is, you know, a dearth of any sort of research into kind of female sports physiology in and of itself beyond the question of hormones. So that's one question to you is are these very limited resources that we have for women's sports going to get side-lined into basically proving something that should be common sense?
Cathy Devine: Yeah, that's a really good point. I think Caroline Criado-Perez, book, Invisible Women has giving us the detail of the extent to which, you know, a whole range of different areas of public life are andro centric. Centred around the default male. Sport is not exempt from that. And so absolutely correctly, I think female bus drivers are sacked I think for being five foot where the new bus cabs in the UK were designed for people who were taller than that.
So that's a perfect example of androcentric design, where the male is the default. And so female biology and female performance, female book performance has much less attention in research terms, you know, than does male physiology. I mean, you know, I'm old enough to remember when undergraduates were told, when you choose your participants for the dissertation as a new third year, try and avoid female subjects, because the menstrual cycle will mess up the research.
I mean, it’s got a bit better now, but you know, a bit better. So lots of research has been done on males and then extrapolated to everybody, but that's just not good enough. I mean, it's starting to change now. Say the conference at which I presented my female voices paper was about to be subjects in sports. And they had to pay people, looking at the menstrual cycle, how that affected the athletes, how they almost had, I think they were developing different training programs for different points of the menstrual cycle, how breast size affected female athletes. And obviously how that changes through the menstrual cycle, how sportswear needs to be designed to cater for that, you know, the whole issue of pregnancy as an athlete. Can you be an elite athlete and have a career break to have a child? What does that do to your career? What does it do to your body? All of those things are under-researched.
And so I think you ask a very personal question, which is: What a shame that all the research funding is now used to prove what we already know, which is that in sports, not all sports, but in most sports, and in the British Equality Act, they're called gender affected sports that they're actually obviously referring to sex affected sports.
There is a statistically significant difference between female performance and male performance. When we could do with all that money to put into researching female physiology, female high performance sport.
Sara: Well, I'm seeing, as you brought up the Equality Act and how sports are sex affected, I thought that that paper was really interesting in terms of your analysis of how self-identification, inclusion policies in particular affect the different sexes differently.
And I really liked the way that you broke down the kind of what happens if certain percentages of the male population identify into the female category versus the female population identifying into the male category. And so I wondered if you wouldn't mind just talking a little bit about that paper and what your findings were regarding those.
Cathy Devine: Yeah. Okay. So this was at the opposite end of the scale, if you like. So my paper was with female and high-performance sporty athletes and Olympic athletes, but sometimes what people have argued is, you know, you obviously have to have male advantage mitigation at elite level – it seems the IOC is no longer arguing that - but anyway, but at participation level, it doesn't matter because the numbers of trans athletes are so few.
And again, you know, with my sport policy academic expertise, I was thinking, well, that's not actually quite true is it because we need to have a evidence-based policy. And as I've said, there's a lot of evidence-based policy in relation to the biological differences between males and females. But what seemed to be missing, this is another gap in the evidence base, if you like, was, what is the impact in terms of the numbers of trans athletes, who would likely move into the female category under a policy of self-ID? And the thing is, we've got some of that evidence for England and the other Sports Councils who have published some of that evidence. And so I thought, let’s look at some of that evidence and let's see what would, what would happen. And basically the problem is, is that, because most sports, competitive team’s sports in particular, are heavily male dominated football. 90% of the participants are male and only 10% are female in England, the effect of even a small percentage of people moving from a very large group or pool of people into a small pool of people is disproportionately large.
That's, that's the logic of percentages, you know, small percentage of a large number is still a relatively large number if it's moving into a small pool. I think people didn't kind of know that they didn't understand those figures. Sport England should have known those figures as some of those figures are their data.
And they collect the data, it's in the Active People survey, because what people see is at a high performance level, women's football has taken off and so on and so forth. So I think people see women's football having much more coverage media time and assume that there are huge numbers of women playing football.
But in fact, the data shows you that that's not the case. The data shows you that 90% of football participants are male. So I thought let's just track that through for a range of different sports. And I took, as I say, the Sport England data that they collected through Active People survey and then looked at estimates of transgender people in the population. So I looked at an academic paper that estimated that self-identification increases by the number of people who are trans by a range of say a hundred, sometimes more because the number, because the percentage of transsexual people is very small. But those are the people in Britain who have the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, but most transgender people now under the transgender umbrella, which is much larger, don't have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, don’t go through a medical transition and which I have to say, I support, I didn't, I don't really want, unless it's absolutely essential, people to have to go through a medical and surgical transition. So it's fine for people to identify as transgender. But when we think about policy, we have to see what that does.
If we are then going to say, well, you can self-identify into a female category. So just very, very simply in Britain. I think that these stats are from Britain or the UK. Anyway, we've got about 6,000 people who have a Gender Recognition Certificate, and so who have legally changed sex, but Stonewall estimates, 600,000 identify as transgender.
So obviously that's a factor of a hundred. And then if we look at the people who've got GRCs, just under 75% of them are male. So males who transitioned to be legally recognised as women and only 25% of females, that's in the adult population. I think we know that in under eighteens that's those numbers are being flipped, but we talk about people with Gender Recognition Certificates there.
So if you're going to say that in the adult population, three quarters of the transgender population are male, and then you calculate through 90% of football is the male three quarters of trans people are male, the female category is relatively small. What impact does that have on the female category?
And that's what I've done in the paper. I've calculated that out and in football, that's the biggest, if you like impact on the female category, you could have up to 10% of female footballers would be male and that self-identifying transwomen rather than any medical transition. And that is a gap in the evidence.
And, you know, you have to do an equality impact survey for policies in the UK and you have to look at what is the impact going to be if we introduce self-identification criteria for female sports category. And then in addition in Britain, because the Equality Act, covers Britain rather than the UK, in Britain, Section 195 of the Equality Act says that you can have single sex sports category in, as we discussed before, gender affected sports, which are actually as defined in the Equality Act as sex affected.
And they say these are where the average person of one sex would have an advantage over the average person of another sex. So that's quite clearly sex affected activities. So it's not clear to me that Section 195 would allow people or governing bodies for example for sports, to choose not to invoke Section 195 in the Equality Act.
So to say, our sport is sex affected. There is a difference between the means between male and female performance, but we're not going to invoke Section 195 because we're going to go for inclusion of transgender people. I'm not sure, I think that's a court case waiting to happen. You know, that's the legal minefield, because a lot of governing bodies of sport in this country have some data by the Sports Councils. That's one of their main roles. They basically invest in the sporting infrastructure via governing bodies of sport, and they are subject to the Equality Act. They cannot indirectly discriminate against women. So if you had a sport that says, yes, we know this disadvantages women, but we're doing it anyway. It's not clear to me that sports councils could legally invest in that sport. I mean, I've tacked a little bit more onto my paper there, but that's really the implications of my paper because you may know that the Sports Council equality group has come up with new guidelines as well, where they said you can't reconcile inclusion of transgender people in female categories with fairness for females.
So basically you have to choose. And I think my paper gives additional evidence about the impact that having self-identification would have on female categories. But in addition, it's not clear to me that the Sports Councils could invest in governing bodies to choose to, if you like, to indirectly discriminate against females.
So that, that would be illegal, a legal test case waiting to happen, I think. But yeah, you know, it amazes me that it's just like ABC of policy development. Where's the evidence before we devise this policy, you know, where's the evidence in terms of what self-ID would in our category, but we haven't got any.
All we've got is anecdotal accounts of transgender people's lives. And obviously, those people will go through a very difficult life journey, but then so will lots of females, you know, one groups difficult life journeys cannot override another groups, difficult life journey. So anecdotal evidence is not enough.
We need to look at quantitative as well as qualitative evidence, before coming to decisions.
Sara -Your work also does a very nice job of summarising different positions within academia. In terms of the, kind of, let's say that gender identity theory type of perspective, versus the kind of biological materialist, feminist, maybe more science, I'm going to say a hard science perspective.
And I wondered if you wouldn't mind just explaining kind of in broad brush, simple terms, what you think has happened in terms of the thinking on this issue and academia and those people who are meant to be influencing, let's say policymaking on this subject.
Cathy Devine: Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? You know, when I published my 2 papers, which had sex in the title, both of them looked at European sport policy.
And I did notice at the time that it was using gender all the time, instead of sex, so retrospectively, I was quite pleased with myself, that I put sex in the title of those papers. And I think that it almost looked as though it was corporate speak to talk about gender rather than sex in European sport policy.
That seemed to be the kind of accepted corporate equality, terminology or language. But everybody thought, you know, perhaps earlier than that, because I think by 2016 it was shifting anyway, that gender was just a synonym for sex, unless you were a feminist who, unless you're a materialist feminist, where obviously the bedrock of materialist feminist analysis is that gender is a tool which can be used to position the female sex as inferior to the male sex. So gender is socialised historically and geographically contextualised. And is a tool which constructs gender stereotypes, which then are assumed to be centralized into female and male sex bodies and used to extract the reproductive labour of females and the caring labour of females and position males, if you like as rational and public and females as emotional and private.
So females are therefore naturally suited to carry roles and the domestic realm and males to public roles, decision making and the public realm. So for materialist feminists, that's all about gender and gender stereotypes. And the job was then to deconstruct those gender stereotypes, but not to deconstruct facts. What's happened is that somehow feminists have, has got overtaken by deconstructing things.
So not content with that it's not even deconstructing any more gender stereotypes in some enclaves of feminism, it's celebrating gender stereotypes, but instead deconstructing sex. So instead of disappearing patriarchy, it's disappearing females, which, you know, for a materialist feminist, such as myself, is entirely regressive because it basically means that for what is called cis-gender people, we are totally reconciled to a feminine gender identity and the material is feminist. You know, that whole journey to liberation has been about getting rid of feminine stereotypes and dismantling, not even deconstructing, but dismantling structurally gender stereotypes.
I can think about my mother. When my mother and grandmother were young women had to have men sign the documentation to buy a house, to buy furniture on higher purchase. They couldn't get served. They would be refused service at the bar in a pub because gentlemen should be buying drinks for the ladies. They could barely get a university education. They couldn't graduate. So we know that historically well in sports, you know, women were told they couldn't run because their wombs would move around their bodies and it would affect their childbearing capacity and so on and so forth.
So, gender is socially constructed to hold women back to justify a differential public role. And I think unfortunately what's happened is that we've gone into a situation where then biology has denied and it's not helped by the humanities adopting what I've called in one of my papers, a pejorative attitude to scientism.
So you've got this bizarre situation with some papers that I have read in relation to the two papers, I published, where people in the humanities will now say with no science and claiming there is no biological difference between men and women.
I think as partly very poor scientific education in this country, you know, that kind of helps an ideological approach to it. And it's also, I kind of put my head in my hands at the lack of understanding of statistics that it's statistically literate, because people say, wow, you know, the average man might be faster than the average woman, but there are men who are slower than them, but some men is slower than some women. So they compete on an equal basis.
And it's like, you obviously don't know statistics. You don't understand statistics. An average, a mean, captures the range. That's the whole point. And so it means I've explained in one of my papers that if you have a male performance hierarchy and a female performance hierarchy, that any matched centile, which is, you know, a position in a hundred.
So if you've got a hundred people, a woman, who's the 23rd slowest and a man who's the 23rd slowest, the man will be faster than the woman. So if you have a male and moving into the female performance hierarchy or category, it basically means they elevate their ranking at any level of performance level participation level, county level, regional level, it means you get a boost up the rankings.
And I have to say, this is one of my bug bears about some of the terminology. Inclusion, I have a go at in one of my papers though inclusion, historically, when I had to look at inclusion basically is about, it's a thinner concept than justice. I prefer justice as a concept, but when you look at where it came from, it based on that, including people who are lower down a given hierarchy in mainstream provision.
So for example, if you think about my daughter's applying for university at the moment, so some of her friends, because they live in a certain postcode, get lower offers or can get lower offers to get into a university degree, than people who live in other postcodes and that's because those postcodes are deemed disadvantaged, even though some of those kids are middle-class kids.
So it's kind of a crude method of saying kids who've gone to private school, have a leg up in the system. And therefore we'll try and include people who perhaps don't achieve the same A level grades, but are just as gifted by giving them lower grades with which to enter university. So it's always about including people lower down.
Inclusion is never about including people who are higher up it's bizarre. Let's have a look, but for the sake of argument, if you put everybody into one performance hierarchy, sport performance hierarchy, You'll have the men, the males will tend to drift to the top, the females will tend to drift to the bottom, but because they actually overlapping populations, there will be overlap with average to poor male performance overlapping with elite to middle female performance.
But in terms of advantage, the people who are advantaged are the males. So how could inclusion logically be about including people who are already advantaged in categories designed for people who arguably you talked about one performance, spectrum, disadvantaged. It doesn't make sense. It's topsy-turvy. So the female category is about including females in sports, because if you just have one universal category, they will be disadvantaged.
This is what I think inclusion is a weasely word, and it cannot be desegregated from fairness or from justice. You know, that's a philosophical argument about what does inclusion mean? And inclusion cannot just apply to one group. It has to apply to a range of groups who are disadvantaged. Trans athletes may be disadvantaged socially, and that may well be the case, or they would like to be able to collect the evidence to show that, other than anecdotal evidence, that may well be the case.
And it's obviously admirable to look at sport policy that includes trans athletes without a doubt, the right thing to do, but you can't do that unilaterally or asymmetrically. You have to look at inclusion of female athletes too.
Sara: I think your papers, at least one of them, but I want to say both, make the point that it's not a given that the way to include would necessarily be to open the female category up. And you mentioned various different kind of alternative strategies for encouraging people to participate who have various different kind of gender identities, including kind of making the male category an open one, having separate categories, et cetera.
Do you have any thoughts on that in terms of what you would recommend?
Cathy Devine: Yeah, I think that's the way to go. I think it's unfortunate that lots of sporting bodies re-frame inclusion of transwomen athletes as within female categories, because that's obviously not necessarily where we could include them.
We could look at a range of different options so that everybody's included in different categories. Yeah, there are two different ways of going. So there's having trans categories, which could be problematic, particularly initially in terms of numbers, or you can have open categories, which would be opening up the male categories. Some categories that we call male are already open categories, it's just that we call them male.
I think most people who have looked at the evidence, think that the open category is the way to go, and that may advantage some women as well. Some females in sports where there isn't any breadth and depth you see, might want to compete in male categories, they wouldn't get anywhere if it was a sport where there were huge numbers participating, but if you're talking very tiny sports where you've not got a lot of depth and breadth, and some females might want to compete in male categories, I'm thinking about things like ultra-endurance events, things like that, where there may be very few competitors and lots of other variables come into play in terms of planning and so on. So very, very small number of females may want to compete in. So you can have an open category that includes everybody who has puberty related, male advantage and women, if they want to compete up as long as it's safe to do so.
I mean, in collision sports, it may or may not be safe for that to happen. And I know that's not going to satisfy everybody, but it does at least give everybody a fair go at competing in the high-performance sports or competing on a level playing field at whatever level, you know, participation, performance, excellence at whatever level they come into sport.
And that surely has to be fair. I think we will know that, you know, obviously transwomen who are gender dysphoric and want to be seen as women and, you know, people can understand that and empathize with that. However, there are lots of transwomen who agree that it's not fair for them to compete in female categories.
I was thinking of doing my next paper, actually on asking them about their views. Because I think, it's quite often presented as these transwomen all want to compete in female categories that I actually don't think that's true. I know anecdotally, it's not true.
I know lots of transwomen who don't agree with that.
So not everybody's going to be satisfied with that. Interestingly, the female Olympians I've talked to have just a slight preference was not for the open category, but for a separate trans category. And I didn't ask them, but I wonder if the reason for that was that sometimes the female category has been seen as kind of inferior.
So you've got a proper category, an open category and then the female category. And I think historically, not even historically I mean, it's absolutely the case still today, but lots of people will say, proper sport is male sport because they can run faster and they're stronger and it's more exciting to watch.
So, I mean, that's a very, very common viewpoint even today, you know, the female Olympians they must study, possibly have a nod to that, but then not everybody can be satisfied. So maybe although that's what they prefer, a kind of symmetrical male and female category, maybe we have to go female category, open category and not everybody is perfectly satisfied that that seems like the best way to fairly include everybody.
Sara: It sounds the most sensible to me a little that I know at least, but I wonder just in terms of your experiences of doing this research, given the context of kind of various backlashes towards particularly female academics at universities for basically touching the subject.
And I wondered if, if you had anything that you wanted to share about your, you know, how it's been doing papers about this, and also if you have any tips for any other women out there, who might be interested in kind of following in your footsteps as it were and, and writing about this.
Cathy Devine: I think that's really interesting question.
And I do wonder if I've been able to do this research if I was still in a university position, because I think when seeing very high profile cases, Kathleen Stock, Selina Todd, Jo Phoenix, Alice Sullivan, then Mary Blackburn, the Mackenzie policy collective, lots of people have talked about how difficult it's been to actually work and teach in an environment where being materialist feminist, seems to be not permitted.
So I think it's a fair hypothesis to say it would have been very difficult for me to do this research if I was still at a university, that's one of the reasons why I decided to do it. I thought, well, I can do what I want. Nobody can tell me that talking about women's rights is transphobic.
So that's, that's the plus side, isn't it. But I have to say that it was convenient in that it took an inordinate amount of time to get these papers published. And that was because journals and publishers and reviewers were very, very, very cautious about publishing anything that looked at that perspective in relation to the human rights to female Olympians and in relation to lack of any negative effects of self-identification of gender and female categories.
And that was fascinating to me. I mean, I had to do an awful lot of work writing to editors and answering negative reviews and so on before I could get these 2 papers published and that's not good in a democratic society. If we are going to look robustly at an issue from all perceptions, particularly from the perspective of my interest which is in the % of the 51% of the population that is female.
We have to be able to talk about this. And not only that, it is the law of the land that says that sex is a protected characteristic in Britain. And so to kind of be told that sex was not allowed as a demographic variable, despite the fact that it exists in law as a protected characteristic is kind of surreal.
So some of the reviewers, I can tell you what some of them said. So some reviewers said that talking about biological sex and male and female bodied people is transphobic, sex as well as gender is socially constructed. Saying opposite biological sex is apparently sexist, homophobic, and transphobic, and biologically incorrect and trans women's bodies are female bodies if they say so.
Those are direct quotes from a reviewer who then recommended my papers not be published. And this is the problem because I've got two biology degrees and these reviewers are coming from the humanities and social sciences. And it's like, how can you without a science degree, tell me that talking about biological sex is transphobic talking about female bodied people, tell me that sex is socially constructed.
It's quite a failing of academia in my view, you know, and I think one of the problems is we haven't got enough cross disciplinary research. So I think in the humanities, there's an awful lot of qualitative rather than quantitative research, whereas the social sciences should be about quantitative work, but there's an awful lot of qualitative work that just has individual testimony and all these things I think are good.
It's really, really interesting to look at the individual testimony of two people or five people or something. All of that gives depth to the research terrain, but it can't be the only thing. It cannot be the only thing. We have to have more cross-disciplinary research. And I think a lot of the humanities and social sciences have been policy captured by this view that gender identity somehow should overlap overwrite biological sex as the more politically correct demographic variable.
That to me is the failing of the gold standard reviewing process for academic journals. It's a failure of academia, you know, to say that you cannot critique and some things like gender identity, which is our present under researched and evidenced I don't mean in terms of people obviously have gender identity, but we don't know whether that's the thing biologically.
And if it is the thing is that socially constructed, you know, all of that needs so much more research. And yet we have centuries of research in relation to sex. So I think my tip for people who are researching is, stick to your guns, expect it to take quite a lot of time to get things published, enter into dialogue with your editors, which is what I did.
Don't accept reviewers that tell you that everything you say is transphobic, because obviously transphobia is not something that is defined. Transphobia is, literally, fear of trans people. My papers are not about fear trans people, they’re about justice and in fair distribution of public goods, and then in my case sports.
So none of that is about transphobia. I did get told that one of my papers was yeah, would create a moral panic or contribute to a moral panic. And I had to go back and say, but a moral panic is based on a misinterpretation of the data, I’m giving you the data, that is the data.
So either critique the data or tell me why the data's wrong, but you can't just say, I don't like the data therefore I'm calling it a moral panic.
So yeah, I'd enter into a dialogue with journal editors. I'd critique any responses. One thing that I did actually was I explained to journal editors that gender identity theory was only one theory, and that consequently claiming that gender identity theory covered the whole terrain was not correct. And journals actually had to then work from a range of different theoretical perspectives. And so that's why, and I then have to go into a bit more detail about the differences between the biological sciences and materialist feminism versus gender identity theory, which I think is good. I enjoyed doing that.
I enjoyed talking about embodiment and having a think about that, but certainly you can't have one particular theory, gerrymandering political space or ideological space. Journals have a responsibility to address the issue from plural perspectives, but I did have to discuss and debate and some journals didn't accept that and said sorry, better luck next time you win some lose some. So yes, it was a relatively long process.
Sara: Well, there isn't a lot in terms of, you know, people who are writing from the materialist feminist perspective because they're probably getting blocked and people are self-censoring or a number of other reasons.
And so the entire structure, even there, like you say, once you get to the stage of you're ready to present something for publication, even there, you're going to come into the kind of roadblocks from everything being in that sort of same type of soup.
Cathy Devine: One of the things that I've talked about, it already was, you know, that people seem to prioritise individual identities over collective recognition, which in political philosophy is quite interesting because materialist feminists, you know, we'll be talking about females as a class and the relationship between males and females as a class. And that is about a recognition of females. A lot of the literature that I've read just simply doesn't recognise females.
It doesn't recognise them as stakeholders in discussions about eligibility, eligibility for female categories. It doesn't recognise their biological bodies. And that misrecognition, has quite shocked me, I have to say, and for individual identities to be seen as more important than a collective recognition of a class of people, a class of female people who should have equal status as decision-makers as moral agents, you know, as people within society has been quite an education really.
And an education about how far, perhaps we haven't come. Whereas I suppose I thought we'd come further than that particularly on the left. I'm very definitely on the political left. And I thought it was accepted on the left that females, as a class of people were exploited and oppressed in relation to their sex, not in relation to their performance of femininity.
So yeah, that's been interesting from a political point of view, and I think that says something about society more generally, which is that you can neutralise perhaps challenge from the edges of a society by turning it into an individual, turning it into, you know, my identity versus your identity. To change society structurally you'd have to look at the structural differences and power relationships between different classes of people. So in my mind it suits corporate neoliberal, capitalism to focus on, you know, perhaps putting in pronouns with signatures and so on. That's something that can be done where you can tick an equality box, but really you don't have to structurally change whether females are paid less than males or whether females are decision-makers in sports.
So it's a gift, isn't it? It's a gift. Plus, it creates a whole range of new markets. So if you've got however many gender identities recorded, you've got all those different markets, that's the gift for the capitalism. It's a gift that you could produce pink and blue push chairs baby rather than one push chair that would do for all babies. It’s the gift to be able to market to a whole range of niche gender identities.
So for me, that's part of how some people, this well-meaning empathy for transgender people, if it's kind of a superficial understanding in relation to, oh, of course we have to integrate gender identities into all polices in a way that dis-benefits female. That is problematic. I think everybody should be able to dress how they want, live how they want and identify how they want.
But when it comes to the collective goods that we as a society, as a democratic society decide to distribute, that's a little bit different.
We have to look at justice, but all underrepresented misrecognized and secondary groups within society. As far as I’m concerned, one of the very largest groups that fit those categories are females.
Sara: And the one thing that I always am struck by, and even in reading your papers is just the speed at which this has been happening.
The rate of change in terms of the IOC guidelines, for example. They're kind of singular focus on, on one group. And almost pretending as though, as usual women don't really exist to me, it just looks like a very particular sort of pattern and it doesn't really look like even a sort of diversity and inclusion and equality type of movement in the way that one might be thinking of kind of various other groups who had to push really, really hard to get anywhere.
I'm mindful. For example, you were talking about football and the fact that, what was it? The football association, banned women's football for years and years and years.
Cathy Devine: Yeah. The FA has been appalling historically in relation to women's football. Yeah, very much so. And that's been the case for a lot of sports organisations.
You know, I mean, we had in the Olympic games this summer women heavy weight lifting. We had, the first transgender athlete in that category, but women's weightlifting has only been in the Olympics since 2000. So it's like women's weightlifting has only existed for 16 years as a female discipline
And now it's the female category, plus a much older transwoman who at 43, was was able to compete on an Olympic stage and deprive a female athlete of vast Olympic experience, you know, no 43-year-old female weightlifter would qualify for the Olympics. It just seems such a stark unfairness really that I think people have been very, very disappointed with both the IOC have come out with in relation to that framework guidelines.
Hopefully the international federations will therefore take the lead and hopefully we don't have too many court cases because that doesn't help anybody.
Maybe if we'd have had to clear IOC guidelines, the amount of money that international federations may have to spend on litigation and research and so on. And we might have avoided that. So we'll have to see where we go from here.
Sara: I'm afraid I'm far more cynical about this, but I'll keep my fingers crossed, but I'm mindful that I kept you for a really long time. Thank you so much for talking to us and it's been, your insights have been just so fascinating.
My last question is whether or not you have any action that you'd like our listeners to take with relation to anything that they can do to get involved. And also, what are some ways that the listeners might be able to follow your work or support your work?
Cathy Devine: It's difficult because as many people have observed, it's a very difficult policy area to speak out on but I think certainly in the UK it's become significantly easier to speak out in this policy area.
So I think for me, when I first started, I suppose, speaking in the public sphere on Twitter, it was with quite a lot of trepidation that I would advocate to people to do that because I think the more people that speak out the better, there has to be a point, a critical mass, where there is a tipping point.
I am absolutely sure that the vast majority of female Olympians do not think the current situation is fair. I think the vast majority of women do not think what we know from polling that the vast majority of women don't agree with self-identification, once they know what that actually involves to female spaces.
But if you like, it's a silent majority because that silent majority is accused of being transphobic, much less so now I have to say, if they talk about women’s rights, that females have human rights and want to be included and so on. And so I think speak out if you can anonymously if you need to protect your employment, because certainly we've seen where it has affected women's employment, but if you can speak out not anonymously then that's great as well. In terms of following me, I’m Cathy Devine, @cathydevine56 on Twitter, there’s a link on there to my website, it's got all my publications on there. Those two publications I've talked about have been really well received, very wide reach. And they've both got very, very high what's called altmetric scores which is a measure of impact or reach and extremely high for academic articles and the journal Sport Ethics and Philosophy has made one of my articles free which I'm really pleased about because normally you would have to pay for that to happen.
And the other one, the Female Olympians one, which you can access through my website. And so I think basically support people, follow people, speak out where possible, loads of great people to follow in terms of sports. There's, Emma Hilton, as I'm sure everybody knows, Ross Tucker in science of sports. There's a lot in science-y terms that you can follow. John Pike, at the Open University, philosophy as well, so I think stand up if he can and the more you do it, easier it gets.
Sara: Amazing. And thank you for that sort of, positive note to end on. Thank you so much, Cathy, for all your time with us today and for writing these papers and doing this research and kind of keeping up the good fight as it were. It's been an absolute delight to have you here on the FiLiA podcast.