The science on trans athletes is inconclusive. Cricket’s prejudice isn’t

If cricket fans across the eras are to be believed, the game has always been on the brink of extinction. The game should have died yesterday; somehow it survived today, but tomorrow it will definitely slip into oblivion. The unintended consequence of this perpetual mode of apprehension is that on days when there are no real obstacles to overcome and no real issues to solve, imaginary problems must be conjured up, solely because the fight must go on; the chatter machine must keep ticking. 

Last month, attention fell on women’s cricket, and this purportedly novel effort to ‘save’ it brought in droves of commentators, cricketers, and even those who have always justified its marginal status by claiming it can’t generate more revenue. Everyone came in unison to protect the sanctity of women’s cricket from what they believed, and want us to believe, is the biggest threat to its existence: the possibility of trans athletes competing in women’s sports. This war was waged in the wake of the latest development surrounding Anaya Bangar, a transgender cricketer from India, also the daughter of former Indian cricketer Sanjay Bangar. This was after she received a nod from Cricket Australia (CA) to play elite-level women’s cricket, which would eventually make her eligible to play in the Big Bash League (BBL), Australia's premier T20 competition, next year.

One would expect such unchecked fury to be saved for raging against the actual issues like underfunding, pay disparity, and other systemic hurdles that are plaguing the women’s sport. Yet, these roadblocks never attain the same immediacy. What, then, explains the hysteria around the possibility of a trans woman playing in women’s sport? 

For the self-anointed saviours of women’s cricket, this became a fight to preserve the ‘sanctity’ of the game by resisting the entry of trans women, who according to them are here to colonise the game with their brute strength and push out the cisgender athlete to extinction, even though evidence at hand fails to support this fictitious panic. 

To date, Danielle McGahey remains the only transgender athlete to play international cricket, representing Canada's women's team in six matches. She had to retire after the International Cricket Council (ICC) imposed a blanket ban on transgender cricketers who have undergone male puberty from women's cricket. Anaya, like McGahey, is not eligible to compete in international cricket, but that did not stop prominent international cricketer Marizanne Kapp from calling the decision “absolutely ridiculous”.

Her comments are emblematic of how the world perceives trans women, or anyone not conforming to a cis-normative view, in general. If cricket, or any sport, merely reflects the prevalent cultural tensions of a wider society, then it’s natural for transphobic elements of the society to seep into the game. There’s no tourniquet at the stadium gate to block the hatred or negativity that flourishes against certain groups in the world outside. In fact, the gendered segregation of sports on a binary framework fosters the conditions where the worst of transphobic tendencies often spills out. 

This demarcation is based on a very rudimentary understanding of gender, one that sees it as inseparable from sex, and it comes at the expense of erasure and marginalisation of gender non-conforming athletes. Sports as a fundamental human right without any discrimination is enshrined in the Olympic Charter, the rulebook governing the basic principles of modern sports, but such rights don't extend to trans women or intersex athletes. Concerted efforts have sought to keep them out of the arena.

This isn’t a burden trans women carry alone. Any woman who fails to fit the narrow, feminine-coded checklist that these binary frameworks quietly enforce becomes suspect too. Indian cricketer Bharti Fulmali knows this all too well. When she was selected for the national team, the scrutiny fell not on her batting but on her build and appearance, with sections of social media questioning her gender and suggesting she didn’t belong on the women’s team. 

Trans men, meanwhile, face far less scrutiny in men's sport. This asymmetry does not reflect biology, but a patriarchal assumption that strength belongs to men by default while women’s sport must be defended from anyone perceived to carry a ‘masculine advantage’.

By pitting inclusion and fairness against each other and situating them at two polar ends, sports are actively contributing to the villainisation of trans women, painting them as ‘deceivers’, as someone who undergoes the transition simply to infiltrate the women’s space. 

Anaya underwent gender-affirmation surgery to feel physically closer to her gender identity, not to exploit some grey areas so she could hit more sixes and script new records. And by shutting the doors on her, without understanding her case, cricket is furthering an entrenched supposition that gender is invariant to sex. To people like Anaya, the message is clear: that their present reality stands for no value, and cricket still thinks of you as an outsider on a sinister mission to invade women’s cricket.

The incongruence between assigned sex and gender identity is seen as an act of deception, not as proof of gender being a social construct. “Fundamental to transphobic representations of transpeople as deceivers is an appearance-reality contrast between gender presentation and sexed body,” wrote Talia Mae Bettcher in her influential study, Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion.

In sports, this incongruence manifests against trans athletes in the repeated invocation of a language of fairness. This is where the supposed physiological advantage of transgender athletes becomes a premise to restrict their entry. Isn’t this contrary to the very logic of sports, a discipline where nothing excites the fandom as the physical exceptionalism of a player? After all, exceptionalism translates to an edge over opponents, which in turn translates to higher chances of victory. From Michael Phelps' unusually large lung capacity to Jasprit Bumrah's hyperextension in his right arm, sports are replete with athletes with certain physiological anomalies that enhance their performance. 

Yet, these cases of exceptional physical traits rarely elicit any sense of deceit, since an athlete’s biological sex and gender align. It is well understood that these physical differences alone did not make Bumrah or Phelps stars in their respective fields. They still had to put in the hard yards, practise ascetic devotion to their crafts, to become the world-beaters. Yet, in the case of trans athletes, it’s assumed that their physical differences are enough to disrupt the level playing field of women’s sport. The overt emphasis on their gender overshadows other aspects of their lives, creating a fertile ground for a cynical depiction in media, where scepticism never leaves their side. 

But even if some physiological edge were conclusively settled, that alone would not resolve whether Anaya has a right to compete – advantage and eligibility are separate questions, and conflating them is precisely what allows the deceiver narrative to pass as a scientific one. Have they ever considered that it's possible to do things without any ulterior motive? Anaya wants to play cricket because she loves playing cricket.

Is the ban justifiable?

Most sporting federations have justified the ban on the pretext of preserving fairness and safety in women’s sports, the underlying assumption being that an athlete who has transitioned after undergoing male puberty attains certain irreversible physiological advantages. Thus, the fear-mongering over Anaya’s admission to community cricket is not a fringe view, but a position very much in line with one taken by the governing body. 

If sports federations are to be believed, their exclusionary policy is rooted in their steadfastness to maintain the ‘level playing field’ – a core tenet of modern sports that sustains the myth of meritocracy. If everyone starts on the same ground, the faster, the higher, and the stronger invariably walks out as the winner. In Anaya’s case, it is assumed that she already has an upper hand, which is not negated by Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), or gender-affirming surgery, since she did go through parts of male puberty.

Often, people question the legitimacy of their participation on the basis of scientific evidence. Taking the deep-seated prejudice against trans women to the realm of science supposedly adds a sense of neutrality and fairness to their views. No wonder former ICC CEO Geoff Allardyce also defended cricket's exclusionary policy on the basis of “an extensive consultation process founded in science”. Elsewhere, the IOC president Kirsty Coventry vowed to follow a “scientific approach” to protect the female category from trans athletes.

The science, however, is far from settled when it comes to the question of disproportionate advantage in trans athletes. Many studies have come to many conclusions, some entirely contrary to others, and sporting bodies only point out studies that affirm their belief, which is invariably against trans athletes. 

Three separate claims tend to get folded into one another whenever this debate plays out: that the science on physiological advantage is genuinely unsettled, that science cannot be the only basis for deciding who belongs in women’s sport, and that even a proven advantage would not, on its own, justify exclusion.

One of the latest studies to compare the body composition of trans and cis women, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine earlier this year, analysed the meta-data of 50 studies and over 6,000 participants. Trans women who underwent hormone therapy for more than a year and less than three years, the study noted, displayed greater lean mass, but their overall athleticism, measured in upper-body strength, lower-body strength and relative VO₂ max, was on par with that of cis women. 

Similarly, the opposing camp has research to back up their claims. Paediatricians Timothy A Roberts and Joshua Smalley found that trans women, after two years of hormone therapy, are still 12% faster than cis women. However, the same study also noted that “the push-up and sit-up differences disappeared”.

Such deviations are conspicuously absent from the statements of the sporting federations. In their version of the story, there exist no grey areas, no point of contention, just a complete shutdown of any possibility for trans athletes to compete in women’s sports. If different bodies respond differently to transition, shouldn’t it be case-by-case if sports really cared about fairness? 

“People don’t understand how much the body changes after you suppress your testosterone for a period of time, and it can lead to muscle loss, bone density loss, and diminished athletic capabilities as well over time. It’s been published by multiple studies out there as well,” said Anaya to ANI.

She also had “scientific evidence backing her case from Manchester University.” Did the ICC really care to read that? The blanket ban only demonstrates an absence of willingness to understand the complexity of the issues. The ICC medical advisory committee was led by Dr Peter Hardcourt, whose expertise lies in sports medicine, and he has also been a leading member of the panel that restricted transgender basketball players from competing in semi-professional leagues. “The gains in women’s sport are significant, and we don’t want to lose that,” said Harcourt, defending his decision to deny a trans athlete an opportunity to play for the women's team. The statement puts the inclusion of trans athletes at odds with developments in women's sport.

The fictitious panic

But even a fully resolved verdict on athletic advantage would not settle this question on its own – the deeper problem is treating contested metrics of performance as the final word on who belongs in women’s sport. The full report has not been brought to light by the ICC, leaving the researchers and athletes no ground to contest the ban on transgender athletes. When the science itself is riddled with deviations, both minor and major, and the method is marked by a sheer lack of transparency, how can its findings be construed as the final, indisputable verdict? 

“Scientism equates scientific knowledge with knowledge itself, especially valorising the natural sciences,” note Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young, in Testosterone: An Unauthorised Biography, a book that debunks our mythical understanding of testosterone. Their work is extremely relevant in sports, because the decision to exclude trans women largely rests on the assumption that testosterone is the primary driver of virtues like strength, aggression, and all things masculine. (The book argues that there’s little evidence at hand to make such a sweeping assumption). 

“Scientism also promotes forms of authority in which something is a ‘fact’ or is ‘scientific’ because a scientist says it, not because it meets any particular criterion of method,” they further write. Thus, the fight to resist these exclusionary regulations must move beyond the terrain of scientism. One should also understand the power structure that is more inclined to further the studies that only affirm their heteronormative worldview. This selective science is compounded, in Anaya's case, by the absence of any policy at all – India’s own cricketing body has not even attempted to weigh in.

It’s unfortunate that she was born in a country whose cricketing body, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), cares little about the game beyond what brings immediate financial returns. The institution responsible for running cricket in the country has no formal policy on including trans athletes. When Anaya reached out to the board for clarity, it met her with silence. This lack of seriousness is not uncharacteristic of the organisation. At least a formal declaration of the policy would have given athletes a basis to contest it. In its absence, the only option to pursue cricketing dreams for trans women in India is to leave India, as Anaya did.

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