The Biggest New Cheat in Professional Women’s Sports

The East German women’s Olympic teams were known for doping their way to victory. Their cheating, long suspected, took longer to be discovered. But today there is a new cheat happening in the world of women’s sports, only this time it’s perfectly legal. It is transgender women — biological men, in other words — who are dominating in women’s sports.

While still rare, a growing number of sports organizations are allowing men who identify as women to compete against women in sports such as weightlifting, mixed martial arts, and basketball. To no one’s surprise, these individuals are winning.

Born a man, Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand recently bested all competitors in the Australian International women’s weightlifting competition — by 42 pounds. Many of the biological female competitors felt they’d lost because of biology. But that controversy was not an issue to the sanctioning body of the competition or the International Olympic Committee — which has adopted a policy of allowing athletes to compete as whatever gender they choose to identify with.

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The head of the New Zealand Olympic weightlifting team, Gary Marshall, told the New Zealand Herald, “We have to follow the policy of the International Olympic Committee and the International Weightlifting Federation. They do not acknowledge in any way the gender identity of an athlete other than male or female; they’re not described as transgender.”

In the arena of mixed martial arts, there’s Fallon Fox (shown in this article’s main images), who was born Boyd Burton. Fox made news when she damaged the orbital socket of her first professional opponent so badly that the fighter, Tamikka Brents, needed seven staples to repair it.

Fox won her first three fights, then was knocked out in her fourth.

Not having fought since September 2014, Fox was inducted into the National Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame that same year with a professional record of 5-1.

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In 2012, Gabrielle Ludwig was a 51-year-old playing college basketball. As if that fact were not odd enough, Ludwig was born a man and was playing girl’s basketball at Mission College, a community college in California.

Ludwig is 6 feet 8 inches tall, and joined the team less than a year after having sex-reassignment surgery. Playing in 18 games, Ludwig only averaged 5.9 points per game.

Not all transgender students dominate their sport, it seems — though age may have been a factor in the case of Ludwig.

The story of Mack Beggs is slightly different. Born a girl, Beggs is a high school wrestler in Texas. But Texas law requires student athletes to compete in sports of the gender on their birth certificate, not their identity. As such, Beggs, who is undergoing hormone therapy with the intention of having a sex change operation in the future, competed against other girls.

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Beggs had been taking testosterone therapy for the future transition and dominated her weight class, achieving a perfect 56-0 record and easily winning the state championship.

After Beggs’ story generated national attention, USA Wrestling, the governing body of wresting in the United States, changed its bylaws to allow wresters to compete in the gender they identify “in off-season, non-school events.”

As ABC News reported, “USA Wrestling has adopted the new policy that says wrestlers who transition before puberty shall be regarded as the gender with which they identify.”

The rule change won’t impact school events, which are covered by state law, but it will allow Beggs to wrestle boys in the near future. Still, for school events Beggs, a high school junior, will have to continue to wrestle girls.

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What these changes mean for the future of sports remains unclear. There is no actual standard for what constitutes membership in a gender. One could easily envision former male pro athletes of marginal talent simply declaring they now identify as women — and going on to dominate the Olympics or the WNBA.

One school board member in a Virginia county was a vocal opponent of implementing a transgender policy in her school district. She pushed back on the unquestioning social pressure to support transgender policies without studying the ramifications.

“If the Lance Armstrong and other athlete scandals created such pushback worldwide about the unfair competitive advantage doping creates, how does that get overlooked in these cases?” Fairfax County School Board member Elizabeth Schultz told LifeZette.

While there will undoubtedly be protests should that possibility materialize, there would be no grounds on which to stand. Gender identity activists have decreed gender to be open to interpretation and the sole domain of the individual.

Recently, a judge in Oregon declared a man to be “genderless” — belonging to neither male nor female. Into which category that person would fall, should he or someone like him decide to play sports, will undoubtedly be a whole new can of worms — and perhaps a new set of controversial events in the ever-changing and now uncertain future world of sports.