Biological Advantage
I was getting brunch in Portland the day after a 300 mile bikepacking race when I first found out I had been doxed. It was a casual, surreal moment where the person I was talking to offhandedly mentioned that I, along with her and several of our friends, was the target of an online campaign to “save women's sports” by continually outing and harassing trans woman cyclists. I reeled with this information but the conversation shifted to lighter subjects and I tried to let it go.
That evening, my curiosity got the better of me and I got on Twitter to see what was being said about me behind my digital back. I found a photo of myself standing on a podium in third place, the poster referring to me as my deadname and asking, “Is Kloiber yet another male women's bike racing phenom?!” The comments below the post, as you can imagine, were filled with the garden variety transphobic comments about my appearance, cycling ability and intent to harm women.
Initially I was taken aback by the rude comments but what really struck me was that they had used a photo of me getting third out of nine racers in a beginners-level crit to fuel the narrative of trans woman dominance. Come on, I had actually won races earlier that year! Also unknown to them was that the (cis) woman standing in second place, who had pipped me in a two-up sprint at the finish line, was a good friend and the person who had convinced me to spend six hours in the car for a thirty minute race. The race director had been working hard to get a large women's field and thanked us personally for coming out.
Unlike the fabricated narrative of trans women transitioning to dominate in women’s sports, I would never have even considered racing without the encouragement (and occasional heavy-handed peer pressure) of my female friends. I had never seriously competed in any sport as an adult until moving to Pittsburgh and connecting with the local community here. It’s a small enough town that especially in the niche-within-a-niche of women’s cycling, everyone knows everyone and I quickly got a reputation for being excited about riding fast. I was reluctantly recruited to join in the weekly local crit series which eventually escalated to traveling to the occasional crit or road race.
My favorite part of racing in a small community is knowing that whatever happens at the finish line I’ll be excited, either my friend wins or I win! Even if it’s not the result I was hoping for, it’s always an honor to be bested by people I love and care about. There is a unique form of vulnerability in racing where you push yourself to the absolute limit around others doing the same. I’ve found a deep humility in this experience - to have laid it all on the line and seen someone else dig even deeper inspires a reverence to their skill and fitness.
It’s perhaps this feeling that made me realize the biggest disconnect between myself and the folks who complain about trans women competing with cis women. I fundamentally believe that women are strong, whereas their narrative relies on women being weak. My lived experience of what it means to be a woman is one of resilience, defiance, and fortitude. As I came to cycling later in life, I met women who worked incredibly hard to carve out their place in the sport, often fighting continual uphill battles to be recognized and taken seriously.
When I first came out and started transitioning, I tried to shrink myself as much as possible. The ideal of femininity that I had internalized through two decades of male socialization was small, weak, and thin. I attempted to starve myself to lose muscle mass, led a sedentary lifestyle to keep it off, and wore clothes that deemphasized what muscle I had. To me, my body was a vestige of an era I’d rather forget and I did anything I could do to make it smaller. I look back on these years with an empathetic sadness - the alienation I was feeling as a trans woman manifested in body image issues that plague women cis and trans alike.
What snapped me out of this harmful view of femininity was taking up rock climbing and seeing the myriad body types of women who possessed a seemingly inhuman amount of strength. Through that community, I met women who were open and honest about their own struggles with body image and how it impacted their enjoyment of the sport. As I progressed and gained strength, I was able to embrace how my body was changing even if it meant traditionally “unfeminine” larger shoulder and arm muscles. I surrounded myself with strong women whose self-love inspired me to love myself in a way I never had before. I was able to recontextualize my body as powerful and useful and even if it didn’t fit the normative mold of femininity, my view of womanhood had expanded to include chiseled back muscles, strong forearms, and beefy shoulders.
It is with that context that I found myself years later jarred by the outspoken reactions to trans women competing in sports. The overwhelming narrative seems to be that women are inferior (to men), need to be protected (by men), and don’t stand a chance competing with trans women (who they view as men). In the decade of my life spent living openly as a woman among women, I know all of this to be so incredibly false. It’s a philosophy fundamentally based on misogyny and fueled by the moral panic around trans people as a threat to conservative values. It took one trans woman winning one race for the UCI to backpedal their policy on inclusion demonstrating just how fragile this system really is. The reality of the situation is that trans women are allowed to be women if they’re quiet (or lose) but as soon as they speak up (or win), they’re out.
Often the narrative of trans women competing in sports comes down to the perception of “fairness.” Trans women are assumed to have an innate advantage over cis woman competitors that invalidates their results. While the reality of this is politically charged and scientifically murky, the larger bone I have to pick with this sentiment is that sports have never been fair. No one is arguing to outlaw generational talents like Tadej Pogacar or Marianne Vos on the basis of them having a “biological advantage” over their competition, they are just seen as dominant forces in the sport who won the genetic lottery. Likewise I have shown up to races where people on entry-level bikes were racing against folks with $10k+ top-of-the-line gear which is hardly a level playing field. Perhaps most unfair of all is the time, energy, and resources required to train, something that is disproportionately more available to people of a higher socioeconomic class. Fairness has only ever been an illusion in sports and perhaps trans women are just the litmus test to see what happens when that house of cards starts to fall.
As someone who takes cycling seriously, I’m incredibly invested in my own training and understanding my body’s physiology. Whenever new research comes out about the performance of trans women in sports I read it no matter the findings. While the anti-trans-inclusion crowd cherry-picks studies that seem to hint at trans women having an innate physiological advantage from going through a testosterone-fueled puberty, there are an equal number of studies refuting that data, showing that a sufficient duration of having an estrogen-dominant endocrine system negates those advantages. What all of those studies have in common however, is very little statistical significance - there just aren’t that many of us trans woman athletes out there competing at a high level. But then why, as the trolls suggest, are we “dominating” the sport?
The very quick answer is “we’re not,” but one explanation as to why many trans women do continue to win the disciplines they race in would be the diagram-turned-meme of an airplane riddled in bullet holes. We can look at trans women who compete in sports through a similar lens of survivorship bias - those of us who persevere in spite of discrimination do so with a resilience that lends itself to dedication, perseverance, and ultimately winning. I personally didn’t start entering competitive events until I was sure that I could perform at a relatively high level. I knew that I was exposing my vulnerability through competition and couldn’t stomach being criticized while also not succeeding. This is a huge privilege that I have had and I’ve witnessed many folks shy away from competition unwilling to bear the double gut punch of not placing well and the inevitable transphobic comments that follow.
When I go into a race knowing that a podium shot of me will grace some transphobe’s twitter page along with a name I haven’t used in a dozen years, it impacts how I ride. I can’t shake the feeling of having my privacy invaded, of being surveilled by someone with nefarious intent. I wish it didn’t matter but any prospective employer needs just search my name on Google and a slew of offensive posts outing me are at the top of the results. I’m not bothered by being out - I’m proud of who I am - but to be so publicly vilified ultimately has the possibility of being consequential. In this era of the internet there is little recourse for someone walking the tightrope of exposing enough personal information to incite targeted harassment, but not enough to warrant removal by a social media platform.
So what is one to do? I can talk a big talk about resilience, perseverance, and determination but it’s psychologically exhausting to be persistently haunted by the specter of harassment. I feel safe in my small bubble of community who I ride with regularly, but venturing by myself to larger events brings with it a level of fear. At any moment, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the virtual harassment to turn physical. It’s an isolating experience that saps joy from moments I’d normally be celebrating. The last thing I want to do is to “let the bad guys win” and bow out of competition, but it’s a delicate balance with my perception of safety. I’ll occasionally race in the non-binary category when it feels like the safest option but that feels like a half truth and a cop-out for how I truly identify.
I wish that every trans woman could be surrounded by the community I’ve been fortunate enough to find. I don’t for a second take for granted the real allyship I’ve experienced from my friends, teammates, and race “rivals.” Even the smallest acts of inclusion by cis women have had transformative effects on my performance and happiness in competitive environments and I am so deeply grateful for them. It’s all I can do to attempt to pass on that welcoming energy to everyone I encounter on the start line or the local group ride because truly competition is best when we can all lift up one another.
💛 - Eva Kloiber, Fabulous Fabricator
