A level playing field?

Transgender athletes pose new questions about competition

The engaging, feminine voice on the phone belongs to a pro downhill mountain bike racer. A 33-year-old who rode away with the Canada Cup Series last year and whose goal this summer is to make some noise at the World Championships in Switzerland.

Michelle Dumaresq, one of the top Canadian mountain bikers, grew up in Vancouver, B.C., playing rugby and ice hockey. Seven years ago, the former steelworker underwent life-changing surgery -- a three-hour sex change operation.

This kind of news might make some callers scream to the high heavens and slam down the phone. Sport is supposed to be about men competing against men and women against women. Now here we have a former guy riding with the ladies -- and eager to talk about it.

But even if we were so inclined, we can't hang up. Hey, we made the call. And Dumaresq, in the course of a 45-minute interview, is doing a great job telling her story and enlightening us on transgender issues. And she’s onto an ethical dilemma that we’re going to have to deal with in these enlightened times, even if sports leaders prefer ignoring it.

Dumaresq talks of a small underground of transgender athletes who’ve reached out to her, calling to share their experiences or to seek her insight. None are Olympic level, but some could be in the future. At least one is playing college basketball. And sports federations, including USA Track and Field, acknowledge having quietly looked into the transgender issue after fielding complaints from other athletes.

Dumaresq is quick to set the record straight. She only took up mountain biking two years ago and didn’t go through her ordeal to gain a sporting advantage.

“Some people say, ‘Oh, you raced as a male and couldn’t cut it, so you decided to get a sex change and all this garbage," she said. “That is not the case. Nobody would ever change his or her physical sex, because it is forever. It’s one thing to take performance-enhancing drugs. This is a permanent, completely life-changing decision.

“I decided at 18 to change my gender. I’ve known I am a female since I was five."

What do the competitors who have been female from birth say? Well, the rumblings from Canadian riders, which initially took the form of a petition drive seeking her ouster, have died down in her second year on the circuit. Like it or not, the national cycling association has had to stick by her, largely because Dumaresq also went through the legal process to have her birth certificate and driver’s license changed to read: female.

Yet there’s still debate over whether the former Michael Dumaresq enjoys an advantage of perhaps larger bones, more testosterone, larger lung capacity and greater muscle mass than the average female racer. Dumaresq counters -- and some medical people back her up -- that eight years of hormone therapy have offset any previous edge, cutting away considerably at muscle mass and testosterone levels.

The before and after picture is fascinating to ponder. Just imagine a heavy steroid user going cold turkey, deflating in front of your eyes.

As a man, Dumaresq was six feet and weighed 210 pounds. She now stands 5 feet 9 and weighs 180 pounds, claiming her blood testosterone level of two nanomoles per liter is well within the range of an average women.

Sports federations, frankly, want no part of this gender business, despite the fact that there may be other Michelles competing under cover, some even unknowingly.

In 1967, Polish sprinter Ewa Klobukowska was ruled ineligible after sex testing determined she had “ambiguous genitalia" -- although not ambiguous enough to prevent her from giving birth to a child some time later. Another notable Polish sprinter, Stella Walsh, captured the 100-meter gold medal at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Years later, after she was killed accidentally as a bystander in a robbery, an autopsy revealed Walsh had an XY chromosomal makeup normally associated with males.

In the mid 1960s, to address rumors suggesting that men in some cases were competing as women or that at the very least some eastern European athletes were being fed male hormones, sex testing became a part of international sports. By 1999, however, just before the Sydney Olympics, the International Olympic Committee discontinued mandatory sex testing.

So where does Dumaresq and the transgender athlete fit into the equation today? When we asked the Canadian Olympic Committee, officials said they didn’t have a “specific written policy." Nor does the IOC, where a top official described the issue as “tricky situations."

That was the universal response physiology professor David Martin heard when he and USATF legal counsel Jill Pilgrim researched “Far from the Finish Line: Transsexualism and Athletic Competition," an enlightening article in last month's Fordham Law Review Journal.

“As we know there is a men’s division and a women’s division and that is the way life is, but that is not quite the way biology is," said Martin, one of the country’s leading distance running experts. “There are people whose brains say one thing and their body is another. So when they decide to switch sexes, as we look at them anatomically, then this provides an interesting dilemma. Because if you have male on your driver’s license and you become female, then how do you fit in terms of competing in sports?"

Martin has suggested in the past that there be some ruling on the books. Either adopt the sex at birth philosophy or the gender ID philosophy, perhaps on a sport-by-sport basis. Or perhaps require that transgender athletes compete in their birth sex until a specific number of months or even years after their sex-change surgery.

To date, nobody has touched the subject. That’s a mistake. It might be more prudent to deal with the uncomfortable issue head on, out of the blinding spotlight, than to risk being hit with it when the Olympic Games arrive in Athens, Beijing or some other foreign stop.

As Michael-turned-Michelle reminds us, “I have been e-mailed by women all over the world who are already competing in Olympic-level sports. None of them have taken it as far as I have yet, but they are just about there."

So don’t wait for the Games to begin.

Mike Fish is a senior writer for SI.com.

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