Contributor: Josh Hall
In the past few days, the MMA world has had to pull back the curtain and look into the realm of transgendered athletics. As reported by SI’s Loretta Hunt earlier in the week, it has become public knowledge that WMMA fighter Fallon Fox was actually born a man. This has caused an unsurprising uproar in the MMA community, and has left a ton of fans, myself included, wondering what the right thing to do is. Fighter safety must always be paramount. However, that conclusion cannot be reached by the eye test, or common sense, or any argument that does not bring forth solid medical evidence to substantiate it. If you are unsure where I stand on the issue at this point, so am I. I have done a great deal of research in the last day though, and I will try to let all the facts I have found do the talking.
I am not going to editorialize much in here, so I will get it out of the way now. My sole intention here is to look at the delicate balance between the safety of competitors, the fairness of the contest, and the issues regarding gender equality that will always be an underlying subtext. For the record, I have nothing against transgendered people. I was blissfully ignorant about the topic for a long time, and I fully admit that. I am 100% in favor of social and legal equality for everyone, no matter what sex organs a person was born with or may have changed to. I won’t pretend to understand the horrible things transgendered people go through on a daily basis, but the more I read on the topic the worse I realize the problem is. Having said all of that, I am going to delve into this situation from an evidentiary perspective regardless of my own personal feelings. Approaching a polarizing story such as this with an agenda would be a terrible mistake, and would frankly be irresponsible of me.
OK, now that I have gotten that out of the way, let’s get to the facts. Fallon Fox is a woman now. Whether she should be able to fight or not is a different issue, but she has gone through all the necessary steps to become a woman. I have heard a lot of disparaging remarks about her being a man simply missing a particular appendage, but that discounts all the other physical changes she has gone through to transform herself into the person she felt like on the inside.
Fox took estrogen for a period of 5 years before getting into MMA competition, 3 years longer than the standard set by the Association of Boxing Commissions in July 2012. She took an 8000 mile trip to Thailand in 2006 for complete gender reassignment along with other procedures to complete her physical transformation. A detailed look into the background of Fox was covered really well by Loretta Hunt in the initial story that made all of this public knowledge. It is definitely worth a read, and you can check it out here: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/mma/news/20130307/fallon-fox-profile/
Now that we have established that Fox is no longer physically a man we have to move on to the hard part of this topic. Does male to female gender reassignment negate the biological advantages male athletes naturally have? I would love to be able to give you a simple, concrete answer to this, but dealing with the human body it is rarely (i.e. never) that easy. I have no medical background whatsoever, so I will defer to the professionals that actually have some expertise in this sort of thing.
Stephie Daniels at Bloody Elbow has done a great job of finding doctors in relevant fields to get some answers to the medical questions. She spoke with Dr. Marci Bowers, one of the preeminent surgeons in the sex reassignment surgery world about exactly this. Dr. Bowers had the following to say:
“Most measures of physical strength minimize, muscle mass decreases, bone density decreases, and they become fairly comparable to women in their musculature. After as much time as has passed in her case, if tested, she would probably end up in the same muscle mass category as her biologically born female counterpart.
The IOC (International Olympic Committee) now allows transgender athletes to compete in their games once they’ve had the required hormone therapy and surgery. People think it should be based on chromosomes, but the problem with that is when they went back in 1988 and tested female athletes, they found that nine of them had tested positive for Y chromosomes, so there are a lot of intersex conditions that basically dictate that the only way you can do it (gender verification testing), is by genital and hormonal status.”
This is a compelling argument in favor of Fox. It establishes a number of the changes the body goes through during the transition and it shows that Fox would meet the standard to complete as a female in Olympic competition. She also rises an interesting point about using chromosomes to test for gender, as you will run into scenarios that do not fit the traditional mold. Females with the Y chromosome do exist, even though that was once thought to be the indication of parents having a boy. If you are interested in reading more (it is really interesting), an example of that can be found here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16934-girl-with-y-chromosome-sheds-light-on-maleness.html
Dr. Bowers shed some very positive light on the case Fox’s case, which was supported by Dr. Sherman Leis, founder of the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery. Steph got a brief statement from him as well, and his statement concurred with that of Dr. Bowers. Both interviews can be found in their entirety here: http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2013/3/8/4075434/leading-sex-reassignment-physicians-weigh-in-on-fallon-fox
Both of these doctors are medical experts regarding transgendered people. Their opinions should certainly be weighed heavily, but there is still more information out there. To get the opinion of a specialist in a different but also applicable field, Ms. Daniels also conducted an interview with regular MMA Junkie contributor and orthopedic surgeon Dr. Johnny Benjamin. There is a medical difference between the normal bone length and density from males to females, so he was called to speak given his expertise in this area. You can read the entire interview here: http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2013/3/9/4080712/dr-benjamin-not-on-board-with-transgender-female-fallon-fox-fighting
“The issue here is if it’s safe or not. That’s the only thing I care about. Do we know enough about it to say if it’s safe or not? The problem with the transgender issue, specifically male to female, is that there is not enough scientific information out there to say if it’s safe enough to allow this to go on. If you don’t know if it’s safe, we have to err on the side of safety, which says until we get more information, we cannot go forward with this.”
And this is where the water gets murky, and it becomes questionable what the correct course of action is. Is there enough evidence to unquestionably allow transgendered fighters to compete on a level playing field? From all of my reading on the subject over the past couple of days, I would say that Dr. Benjamin could have a point here. Fighter safety must always be in the forefront for athletic competitions, and it falls on the state athletic commissions to investigate this from a medical perspective.
Or does it? One of the questions I have seen and heard repeatedly since the story first broke is regarding the burden of proof. Does the responsibility fall on Fallon and her doctors to prove she meets all the physical criteria needed to compete as a WMMA fighter, or does it fall on the licensing boards to prove that she does not qualify to fight as a woman? I submit that because Fox meets IOC, WTA, LPGA/PGA, US Track and Field, and NCAA guidelines regarding transgender athletes, the proof aspect no longer falls upon her. She did not set the standard for inclusion, but she qualifies under the rules set by each and every one of these organizations.
So, it’s settled then, right? She should be allowed to compete, end of story. Not so fast. Just because I don’t feel that establishing her womanhood any further falls on Fallon’s shoulders, it does not mean that further testing should not be conducted. Equality is only equal if it works for everyone. Every time a fighter steps into the cage/ring, they are putting their safety in jeopardy. It is the nature of the sport. As such, they deserve to know that their opponent is on the same level playing field as them. Keeping Ms. Fox out of the sport merely because we lack enough data to make a definite conclusion is wrong, but so is allowing fights to happen where a fighter is at an extreme physical disadvantage to their contracted opponent. That, my friends, is why this situation is a paradox.
Female fighters as a whole are not likely to voluntarily step in there with an opponent they know was once a man without concrete evidence that they no longer possess the same physical advantages they previously had. If you are interested in seeing the opinions of female fighters, we have you covered right here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDno8fUcjh4
Even with solid evidence, there is a mindset in many people that Fallon will always be a man, regardless of vastly different hormone levels, a softening of the skin, and all of the physical changes that occurred during her transformation. I would be remiss to act as though that would magically change if new information was to be uncovered, even irrefutable evidence. Trans-phobia is a very real thing, and unfortunately the deeply ingrained hatred/fear of what is different and hard to understand isn’t going to go quietly into the good night. In all honesty, I have thought some terrible things about transgendered people in the past. They were rooted in nothing but ignorance, and I was very wrong in thinking that way. I tell you all this because some of you might be like I was, stuck with antiquated beliefs that should have died off long ago. You can always choose tolerance over hate, even if you have made mistakes in that aspect previously.
To bring this to a conclusion, I am not medically qualified to argue science with experts in their various medical fields. From everything I have read, excluding Fox from competing, at least without further testing that proves she has an advantage, would be tantamount to discrimination. However, she may have a nightmare of a time finding opponents without further testing to prove she is woman enough to fight. I honestly have no idea how this whole situation will turn out, but it has encouraged me to learn a lot more about transgendered people, and I know I’m not the only one. Whether Fallon gets to keep competing as a woman or not (and the equal rights activist in me hopes so), a lot of people have gained a new, more accurate stance regarding a neglected minority and opened lines of communication that didn’t previously exist. That makes her a winner in a bigger way that she could ever achieve inside the cage, at least in this writer’s humble opinion.
-Josh can be reached at [email protected].
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