Twitter Mailbag: Fowlkes on transgender fighters, GSP-Diaz and MMA rankings
by Ben Fowlkes
on Mar 08, 2013 at 2:10 pm EThttp://www.mmajunkie.com/news/2013/03/twitter-mailbag-fowlkes-on-transgender-fighters-gsp-diaz-and-mma-rankingsQuote
How can a transgender "woman" be allowed to fight in MMA, against woman? There is an obvious advantage for "her", right?
6:31 PM - 06 Mar 13
First of all, let's not put her in quotes when we refer to a transgender woman. You go through years of hormone treatments, get gender reassignment surgery, deal with what can't be an easy situation with your friends and family, and you have undoubtedly earned the right to sincere pronoun use. Nobody goes through all that on a whim, just because they woke up one morning and felt like a change, or because they want to totally rule at women's sports. It's a process that would be intolerable to most of us, and you'd only do it if not doing it seems even more intolerable to you.
Fallon Fox is a woman. No quotes.
As for the question of whether she retains any physiological advantages of having been born a male, I'll point you to an article by Steph Daniels at Bloody Elbow, who talked to a couple experts in the field about exactly what happens to a person's body as a result of this transition. The "tl;dr" version: muscle mass and bone density both decrease after years of hormone treatments, and as a result "she probably does not have a significant advantage, if any at all."
That "probably" matters. It's the kind of thing that we'd want the state athletic commissions to be keeping an eye on, making sure that trans fighters are maintaining the proper hormone levels and not gaining an unfair advantage, either deliberately or accidentally. In order to do that, state athletic commissions need to know when they're dealing with a trans fighter, and Fox admits that she did not inform the Florida commission because, according to Loretta Hunt's
SI.com story: "If she'd revealed her status, there was a chance she could have been asked to sit out the March 2 fight to give the commission more time to review her application. After months of grueling training and sacrifice, Fallon simply wanted to fight. She wanted to seize the opportunity she felt she'd earned."
We're told that she meets the requirements to compete as a woman in the Olympics or in the LPGA. But in order to verify that, most regulatory bodies require a lot more medical documentation from trans athletes. After all, how do you know the person has wiped out any potential hormonal advantage if they don't show you the paperwork from the endocrinologist that proves it?
It seems like Fox didn't want to go through all that here. She wanted to fight, to be treated like any other woman, and that's understandable to some extent. She has the same right to medical privacy that any other fighter does, but that privacy shields her from us. It doesn't entitle her to withhold relevant medical information from the commission. I don't necessarily think Fox is benefitting from an unfair advantage, but I also think we have to give the commission the ability to make that determination, even if it's temporarily inconvenient for Fox. Whether she should have told her opponents, if only as a matter of professional courtesy, is debatable.
