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news
UCI world road race championships, Wollongong, 2022 (Simon Wilkinson/SWpix.com)UCI bans transgender female cyclists who have transitioned after puberty from competing in international women’s races
The UCI has updated its rules concerning the participation of female transgender cyclists in international competition, by prohibiting women who transitioned after male puberty from competing in all women’s events on the UCI calendar.
The world governing body’s decision, which comes into force on 17 July, follows British Cycling’s announcement in May that it was introducing a new ‘Open’ category to run alongside the women’s category as part of an update to its Transgender and Non-Binary Participation policies.
> British Cycling updates transgender policy, introduces new "Open" category
According to the UCI’s new rules, the men’s category at International Masters events will also be renamed ‘Men/Open’, permitting the participation of any athlete who does not meet the conditions for participation in women’s events.
The updated policy, which was agreed upon at an extraordinary meeting of the UCI on 5 July, follows a seminar organised by the governing body on the “conditions for the participation of transgender athletes in women's cycling events”, held on 21 June, which saw the “various stakeholders” in the debate present their respective positions.
According to a statement released by the UCI today, “From now on, female transgender athletes who have transitioned after (male) puberty will be prohibited from participating in women's events on the UCI International Calendar – in all categories – in the various disciplines.”
The banning of female trans cyclists from women’s events comes just over a year after the UCI tightened its own rules on transgender participation by doubling the time that an athlete transitioning from male to female needed to wait before being able to compete.
Those rules, which came into effect on 1 July 2022, stipulated that athletes transitioning from male to female needed to have had testosterone levels below 2.5 nanomoles per litre (nmol/L) for 24 months. Previously, the rules required testosterone levels below 5 nmol/L for 12 months.
> UCI tightens rules on transgender female cyclists by extending transition period to 24 months
However, the UCI has today stated that its management committee “has taken note of the state of scientific knowledge, which does not confirm that at least two years of gender-affirming hormone therapy with a target plasma testosterone concentration of 2.5 nmol/L is sufficient to completely eliminate the benefits of testosterone during puberty in men.”
The statement continued: “In addition, there is considerable inter-individual variability in response to gender-confirming hormone therapy, which makes it even more difficult to draw precise conclusions about the effects of such treatment.
“Given the current state of scientific knowledge, it is also impossible to rule out the possibility that biomechanical factors such as the shape and arrangement of the bones in their limbs may constitute a lasting advantage for female transgender athletes.”
Based on what it describes as these “remaining scientific uncertainties”, the UCI concluded that “it was necessary to take this measure to protect the female class and ensure equal opportunities”.
However, the governing body also emphasised that their stance on the matter “may change in the future as scientific knowledge evolves”.
“With this in mind”, the statement continues, “the UCI will begin discussions with other members of the international sporting movement on the co-financing of a research programme aimed at studying changes in the physical performance of highly-trained athletes undergoing transitional hormone treatment.”
UCI President David Lappartient added: "First of all, the UCI would like to reaffirm that cycling – as a competitive sport, leisure activity or means of transport – is open to everyone, including transgender people, whom we encourage like everyone else to take part in our sport.
“I would also like to reaffirm that the UCI fully respects and supports the right of individuals to choose the sex that corresponds to their gender identity, whatever sex they were assigned at birth. However, it has a duty to guarantee, above all, equal opportunities for all competitors in cycling competitions.
“It is this imperative that led the UCI to conclude that, given the current state of scientific knowledge does not guarantee such equality of opportunity between transgender female athletes and cisgender female participants, it was not possible, as a precautionary measure, to authorise the former to race in the female categories."
Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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95 comments
No by your logic trans men should compete with women.
So why don't Trans women (that is the ones pretending to be men) compete against men then?
I said "by your logic" not by mine.
It's a fantastic decision. Women have their sport back and not invaded by men wanting to be female.
Those men wanting to compete as trans are welcome in the open category.
I bet we don't see any turn up
"I bet we don't see any turn up"
Right because you agree trans women after years of hormone therapy would on average perform worse than cis men.
It's a conundrum, there's no "fair" way to include trans women in competitive women's cycling, deal with it? It's a fact of life. Boohoo, life's a b***h sometimes.
What do you do, be unfair to 50% of the population, just to be "nice" to 0.25? You can bet that if you allowed trans women to do so, they'd be winning more than 1:200 races, do the maths.
If you're a trans woman, you are just that, a trans woman. Not a woman.
Ideally there'd be a trans women category to race in, but the sheer lack of numbers would preclude that possibility for anything less than a national championships, but even then, are you gonna get a field of say, 60 riders?
Nice transphobia, asshole.
"but the sheer lack of numbers would preclude that possibility for anything less than a national championships, but even then, are you gonna get a field of say, 60 riders?" Then that makes it obvious that trans women will never dominate any sport ever, and any trans women who do compete are not at all likely to win anything just because they are trans. Same pattern with every sport.
.
Way to go! You got it! THAT'S how you change people's minds on a subject.
.
Ah do you show civility towards racists, sexists, homophobes etc? They didn't show any to trans people.
In case you're new here... Flintshire normally pops up to cheer on "controversial" commentors* , to mock those who decry the "right wing" or gleefully point out when non-conservative politicians and councillors do anti-cycling things. * "Controversial" in the "why don't cyclists just dismount when a car appears / stop whining when someone almost hits them while breaking the law" category. On this site these are often serial returnees who at some point after that start getting personal and then posting racist / anti-semitic / homophobic or bizarre conspiracy stuff.
Flintshire also favours "safe spaces" within their posts, which they protect with punctuation bollards. I'm not informed whether they exclude anyone (except possibly "trendy lefties")...
He's like a modern day Oscar Wilde.
Transphobia, terf, cis...
You've got all these great invented words for basically sane people.
Keep looking for more ways to be outraged.
I know you are just trying to wind people up but I don't think anyone cares what you think really.
The UCI has way overstepped its remit here.
UCI President David Lappartient added: "First of all, the UCI would like to reaffirm that cycling – as a competitive sport, leisure activity or means of transport – is open to everyone, including transgender people, whom we encourage like everyone else to take part in our sport.
The UCI is the governing body for (the vast majority of) cycling as a competitive sport. It has nothing to say on cycling as a leisure activity or means of transport. No matter how much it might like to.
I'm thoroughly and unashamedly TERFy, but even I don't have a problem with an influential cycling organization informing trans people that nobody is trying to discourage them from cycling in general. Indeed, seeing as the noisier elements claim that anyone telling them they can't do exactly what they want is a threat to their very existence, it seems prudent for the UCI to clarify that they're saying nothing beyond "men can't compete in our women's races".
Also Team TERF here, currently enjoying (if that's the right word) Veronica Ivy's meltdown over the decision. I was glad to see the UCI add that bit too.
As to your earlier comment about linguistic hills to die on, while it's too late to recall 'transwoman' (with or without space), it was clearly a mistake to cede the word 'woman' to those who aren't. Oh well.
Veronica Ivy's meltdowns are always entertaining. It's like she's trying to demonstrate the Platonic form of "angry entitled man who's livid that women won't just let him do what he wants".
Fasten your seatbelts, keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle, the doors will close automatically. Here we go again...
The correct decision.
So: they've now got "Women" and "Men/Open"?
Where "Men/Open" appears to be basically anyone who is not cis-female.
Now, I know this is like standing here with a match and a can of petrol but...: that's pretty offensive to any trans-women, isn't it?
Yeah, I'd say it probably is, yes. And its probably unfair too.
However, you could also argue that trans women competing in the women's category is equally offensive to many, if not the great majority, of women athletes. And again, potentially unfair.
I asked my generally very inclusive thinking, and sporty daughter her opinions on trans women competing in the women's class and she was very dismissive. She said she would feel it very unfair and would put her off competing personally.
It's a horrible stalemate... you can't seemingly accommodate one group without compromising the other.
How would you do this so as not to offend the fantastically easily offended? Anything but sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "trans women are identical to biological women" won't go down well.
Theres womens and open. Thats fine.
And it's not offensive to women, to include trans women in women's racing?
Would you rather offend 0.25% or 50% of the population?
That's effectively the choice here.
Not as offensive as allowing trans women(Men) to compete against women.
Is having an under-23 category offensive to 25 year olds? Is having a featherweight category in boxing offensive to heavier competitors?
We have categories in sport because certain attributes correspond very strongly with large differences in ability. I.e., these are performance based criteria and categories. We create the category so that a group of people can compete between themselves, so they can still enjoy competitive sport and (for youth) so they can fairly develop.
Strictly in terms of performance there is - for pretty much any sport based on strength, aerobic capacity - a huge performance difference that arises in puberty between those who go through male puberty and female puberty.
That's simply a reality.
Hence we have sex based categories.
It's not offensive, it's simply the reality of how humans have evolved. If you subscribe to an ideology where some internal, highly-subjective, gender identity must be set above reality, and where anyone who points out that your ideology is at odds with reality and (according to you) akin to a murderer, then I put it to you that your ideology is unsound and needs refinement - and will ultimately be rejected by vast majority of people, at least in the current form you present it as.
And note, the vast vast majority of those who disagree with you on this have a lot of empathy for trans-people, and wish to support them as far as is reasonable.
But you're losing the room when you start calling those people murderers and equivalent.
Reality still matters I'm afraid. Yes, we should respect people's internal identities as much as possible. But to destroy women's competitive sport for it is not reasonable.
Your ideology needs refinement to match what is reasonable.
I consider those far more sensible categories than simply male and female as they are very easy to measure and aren't disputed. Until we have a sex-o-meter that can give a numerical value to how male and female someone is, then there's going to be people that feel excluded.
Sex is trivial to reliably determine in 99.99% of people. And trans-people generally were in that 99.99% set (_not_ the 0.01% set) and so - assuming they are honest - it remains trivial to determine for them too. Just ask "Were you born with male or female genitalia".
It's not hard.
You are trying to conflate internal, subjective, (and often malleable or time-varying) "gender" identity - which is indeed difficult for anyone to determine and describe (often for the person themselves too) - with sex, which is easy to determine. You do so for ideological reasons, because your ideology _requires_ it. It's not reality though.
For a similar reason, you try to conflate trans-identity with physiological DSD conditions.
It's clear that some men are more manly than others (c.f. Brian Blessed with John Inman) and similarly, there's some women that are more feminine than others.
And yet it was still trivial to observe their sex at birth, in 99.99% of cases.
Where are you getting that 99.99% figure from?
According to Amnesty, that should be approx 98.3%: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/10/its-intersex-awareness-day-here-are-5-myths-we-need-to-shatter/
I think you're missing my point - there's degrees of masculinity and femininity and that's fairly obvious if you look around a group of people. Elite sports, though, are going to be selecting for unusual genetic traits (e.g. big lungs), so it would make sense to also have a competition for men who are up to 50% manly assuming that it's an easy thing to measure and put a number on.
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