Professional surfer, Bethany Hamilton, has announced that she will not participate in the upcoming World Surf League events after the organization announced a change in policies that will allow transgender women to compete in women’s events. In two different videos shared on Instagram, Hamilton believes she is speaking up for other pro-surfer women who fear being ostracized for having the same opinions. The World Surf League’s decision to adopt the International Surfing Association’s policy on trans athletes requires a testosterone level less than 5 nonomoles per liter for the previous 12 months.
Hamilton questions the validity of the policy, asking if a hormone level is an accurate depiction of gender and if it is as simple as that. She argues that this policy would allow for male-bodied dominance in women’s sports, like running, swimming, and others. The debate over trans athletes competing in women’s sports has been in the headlines for a while now, with the recent cases of trans runner CeCe Telfer being barred from competing in the women’s 400-meter hurdles at the Tokyo Olympics, and Lia Thomas, a trans woman, participating and winning an NCAA swimming championship.
Multiple studies in recent years have looked at the competitive advantage of transgender athletes. Joanna Harper, a competitive runner and medical physicist who is transgender, conducted a study in 2015 that looked at eight trans women runners who took treatments to lower their testosterone levels and found they did not perform better in women’s races than they did in men’s races. However, a 2021 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that trans women retained an athletic edge over their cisgender peers, even after 12 months on hormone therapy. Harper believes that most research has nuances and that conversations should be had in the greater context of sports as a whole.
