By Ava Vales Toledano
ISSUE 8
Ava Vales Toledano is in a group called Toutes des Femmes, created in 2020 to fight the attack from different political organizations against trans women, and, trans women and their place in feminism. Ava also works specifically on the issues trans women face in sports, and is a high-performance athlete herself in whitewater kayaking. In this text, Ava demonstrates how competitive sports have both exemplified and been used to create transphobia within larger society.
This article is an edit from Ava’s keynote speech during European Alternative’s Marginal Litterature Festival in Seine-Saint-Denis in summer 2024, which explored the intersection between gender creation and sport. In a current political landscape where gender is being instrumentalized on the policical stage, evident in during Trump’s US election campaign or Macron’s attack on the Front Populaire’s manifesto, the work of groups like Toutes des Femmes is invaluable in challenging the increasing infringements to trans and gender rights.
I lived in France my whole life. Then when I was 20, around the same time that I started transitioning, I moved to Norway as it is great for whitewater kayaking. I started getting much better than I was when I was living in France, so I also started being interested in signing up for competitions. I always felt that there was a bit of friction, but that friction was delayed quite a bit because I kept getting injured before the actual competitions.
When I signed up for my first competition, the European Championships, the organization came to me and they said they knew there was going to be some backlash about it. In anticipation, they copy-pasted the International Olympic Committee (IOC) regulation, whitewater kayaking is an extreme sport, so there’s no international governing body setting rules. A few years later, a rare time I was not injured before a competition, I won.
The next year, I moved back to France, and I was interested in signing up for the World Championships. I noticed a new chapter in the rulebook, specifically ruling that trans women were no longer allowed in the women category, and instead, they created an “open category”, which was for men, and, maybe other individuals. I thought that was bullshit. And I got vocal about it.
This was the point where I started paying more attention to attacks on trans rights, as I understood that the ruling was purely political. Women in sports has always been a topic of debate, originally excluded from professional sports due to their domestic status in society, the first Olympic Games with a significant female presence was in 1928. Even then, women were still not allowed to participate in sports that were deemed to be too masculine and may develop the body in a way that was perceived as being non-feminine (it was not until the 2000s that women have joined sports such as weighlifting and boxing). In the assumption of men’s predisposed advantage to women, there was already fear that men would cross-dress in an attempt to win in women’s sports – which never happened – but from the late 1930s gynecological tests were implemented for all women to see if they were actual women. There was some discussion around trans athletes, mainly because the public had a voyeuristic interest, but mostly people were allowed to compete in their correct category.
Women’s participation was pushed back further when they started performing “too well”. During the first Boston marathon with women in 1967, Katherine Switzer was physically held back by the organiser and had to fight to run the marathon, it was then not until 1984 that women could join the marathon in the Olympics. In the late 1990s, hormonal testing replaced gynecological to see if women were feminine enough to participate in sports, however, aside from anti-doping testing, no longer were all female athletes tested, but only those who “drew attention to themselves”. This style of testing focused on single individuals showed very early on big problems with racism and lesbophobia.
Katherine Switzer at the 1967 Boston Marathon © Boston Herald
In the last 10-15 years sporting regulations have become a huge issue for intersex females, and for trans women. For intersex individuals, athletes are being forced to take testosterone blockers to be able to compete due to lower and lower regulations on testosterone levels, in addition to the health implications, the governing body is trying to rule how women’s bodies should be, how it should perform. For trans women, they are being increasingly excluded from competitions due to an assumption that men have genetic predetermined advantage to women, and that transitioning wouldn’t impact this so-called advantage. It’s a way to reassign trans women to the assigned gender that they had at birth.
The public is not very aware of how high-performance sports work on a biological level, or how gender and transitioning affect the body, therefore it’s very easy to start pushing the idea that trans women do not belong in sports. Then it trickles down. If trans women do not belong in high-performance sports, then they do not belong either in club sports or in all public sports. Then they do not belong either in school sports, some U.S. states have tried to pass laws to restrict the participation of trans children in sports as young as four.
Sports are supposed to be universal. They are a mirror of society. If you make people believe that it is fair to discuss if trans women belong in sports, then the debate goes further and people start to believe that it is fair to discuss if trans women belong in society in general.
The far-right has long figured out that directly attacking a marginalized group is not very good press, they have understood that it’s much easier to attack a group of people by saying you are protecting another who are deemed unable to protect themselves. The Ku Klux Klan claimed all their violence against black Americans were to protect white women, the last decades attack on migrant rights have supposedly been to protect the nations family. The same thing is happening now, the far right and anti-gender groups attacking trans women in sports are claiming to be protecting feminine sports. If this was true, they would have been present for years, calling out the real issues that women’s sports are facing, which is a lack of money, a cruel lack of money, a lack of sponsorship, and huge problems with sexual aggressions. These are the problems that women’s sports have to deal with still today on a constant basis, which are not spoken about. The focus on trans womens place in sport is a strategy that has been used to attack the place of trans women in society in general.
So, the question is what can we do against these attacks?
Obviously, we can try to implement different rules when it comes to sports governing bodies. In 2020, we were hopeful for this when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) changed its rulings on trans women and intersex women in sports, and published guidelines that organizations should follow to implement a progressive and inclusive rulebook, however, for the first time, the implementation was at the choice and responsibility of each sports organization. In practice, most sports organizations have lacked the political courage to keep to these guidelines, when attacked by anti-gender groups they have banned trans women, often without an attempt at justification. For example, last summer, the international governing body for cycling banned trans women, and in justification, shared a single study that compares the athletic performance of cis women against cis men, as if the biology of trans women is the exact same as the biology of cis men, that transitioning has no effect whatsoever on the body. The lack of even an attempt at a convincing justification shows this is an excuse to avoid potential backlash.
Toutes des Femmes and I are trying to change this by advocating amongst different governing bodies, but obviously, it is not enough. The one thing that needs to be done to make sports better for trans women and for intersex women, is to create a wider place for them in society, and to fight for their rights in a much broader way. If we can fight for our rights in society as a whole, and if our place in society cannot be dilated, then it won’t be in sports. The issue is not about sports, it’s about society in general.
Panel discussion on the fight for inclusive sport AT EA’S MArginal Litterature Festival with Sully (Le SASSI), Ava Vales Toledano (Toutes des Femmes), Audrey Chenu (Un ring pour toustes), Fatima Rouina (Cacahuètes Sluts), and Huda Jawad (The Three Hijabis).
Ava Vales Toledano is an activist with Toutes des Femmes, a transfeminist association that campaigns for women’s rights. She is responsible for sport at Toutes des Femmes and lobbies for the rights of trans people in high-performance sports.