The WSL’s announcement yesterday that it would mirror the ISA’s policy for transgender athletes soon set tongues wagging. As the women’s CT surfers work hard to weave their way into the Pipeline Pro narrative, beachside car parks and comments forums have been alive with opinions and hypothetical scenarios relating to the WSL’s new transgender policy. While there are many facets to the debate it’s worth noting that the issue is not without precedent. Last year Sasha Jane Lowerson became the first transgender woman to win a major surfing event when she claimed the West Australian Open Log title. That means a state surfing organisation in Australia had already grappled with the vexing issue. Similarly, Surfing Australia had its policy firmly in place before the WSL took an official position. When Lowerson won, both Bethany Hamilton and Kelly Slater posted comments advocating for a separate transgender division in surfing.
Last year Tracks’ scribe Ben Mondy spoke at length to Sasha. Whatever your view, it’s worth reading the story below to gain a human perspective on the debate.
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TRANS CANS OF WORMS
“ I am 100% pro trans. I am also 100% pro woman and 100% for women’s equality,” wrote Keala Kennelly after Sasha Jane Lowerson had won the Western Australian logger state titles.
“When it comes specifically to women’s sports, it is hard to be all three of those things at the same time.”
KK, admirably, had cut through the noise to highlight the complicated nature of the issue of trans athletes competing in elite sports.While many mainstream sports such as tennis, athletics, and swimming have dealt with a complex balance of inclusion, sporting fairness, and safety, Lowerson was surfing’s first trans athlete.
Sasha is a West Australian surfer and shaper who describes herself as a proud woman with a trans experience. Now aged 43, in 2019 she had won the same title in the men’s Division, surfing as Ryan Egan. Her recent win forced surfing and surfing fans to deal with the trans issue, that until now, had been a largely theoretical issue.
The thing is this wasn’t the first event I’ve competed in as a female. I competed in the Noosa Festival of Surfing in March. So that was technically the first time a trans athlete had ever competed in surfing,” Lowenson told Tracks. “And there was no hoo ha then because there was nothing to talk about. I came 10th. Unfortunately, when a trans athlete is successful a lot of people want to jump up and down. But there’s also a lot of people that want to celebrate it, which is a positive thing.
If you can gauge reaction from comment boards and many high-profile surfers, the response was fairly one-sided. “Oh hell no, let people think and be what they want, but at least make a separate division,” commented Bethany Hamilton (Bethany recently spoke against the new policy in her insta below). Kelly Slater also provided the same solution, “Make a trans division and we don’t have this confusion.”
It’s a neat solution, albeit an an impractical one. First there just aren’t enough trans athletes to make that viable. In surfing, that division would currently feature just one surfer, which isn’t exactly competitive. Also, most trans athletes don’t see themselves as some in-between category. They identify as a man or a woman, and so want to compete as one.“Look with longboarding, even if you make the World Tour, you still don’t earn money. So, you have to ask yourself; why do it?” said Lowerson.“And the answer is we do it for fun. And a win or a loss will never define you. It’s how you win or lose and whether you do it with respect and dignity that is important.”
Yet that ignores the issue of competitive fairness which most people are most concerned about. Like in all sports, the belief is that it will be unfair for the women surfers who have so long fought for, and only recently gained parity.
Lowerson said that she had given respect to her fellow athletes in the State Titles and had been granted much in return. Very few of her competitors said anything publicly, though Zali Every posted that many feared the back-lash if they did speak out. She said many of her competitors, some like her who were just out of the junior ranks felt, “they’d been thrown in the deep end.”
“I must say that my ‘general view’ is shaped mainly by the emotions evoked in me as a professional female athlete,” Clair Bevilacqua, the West Australian former CT surfer told Tracks. “Now that I see the names of my friends in these heats, I feel compelled to speak for them when they are afraid to step up. It’s the early days of the discussion, so I don’t want to see us boxing ourselves into a corner and then being labelled bigots or conservatives when the topic moves past certain views. I would like to see people able to voice their opinion in a safe, respectful, and non-judgemental space.”
Finding that space isn’t easy though. Lowerson’s win had coincided with the lead-up to the general election in Australia. When Prime Minister Scott Morrison made a “Captain’s Pick” and parachuted Katherine Deves in for the seat of Warringah, the issue of trans athletes was pushed to the forefront of the national psyche.
Deves had been a vocal opponent against the inclusion of transwomen in women’s sport and become the election campaign’s most controversial figure following a series of tweets about transgender people where she had described transgender children as surgically mutilated and sterilised. However, even before the issue had become part of the wider culture wars, the issue of fairness and competitiveness had been very much at the heart of the matter when it came to elite sport. In 2015, the IOC had stated athletes who had transitioned from male to female could compete in women’s sport without requiring surgery, as long as they have declared their gender identity as female for at least four years and kept their testosterone level below certain levels for at least 12 months. A new IOC trans-inclusion framework was however rolled out in 2021. It placed the responsibility of establishing guidelines for trans inclusion on each individual sport. Or in other words, it passed the buck. It also concluded that sporting bodies should not assume that transgender women have an inherent advantage over cisgender women, nor should transgender women have to reduce their testosterone levels to compete. It was a massive pivot.
Instead, the IOC asked each sport to create rules on fairness based on “robust and peer-reviewed research,” and to bar a transgender athlete only if “consistent, unfair, and disproportionate competitive advantage” can be proven.
In June 2022 swimming’s world governing body, FINA, did just that and voted to bar transgender women from elite female competitions if they have experienced any part of male puberty. Fina’s scientific panel however found that trans women retained a significant advantage over female swimmers even after reducing their testosterone levels through medication. Much of the advantage was attributed to changes undergone in puberty.
FINA also promised to create a working group to establish an “open” category for trans women in some events as part of its new policy.
In surfing, Surfing Australia already had a detailed trans athlete inclusion policy, and its messaging posed no barriers, or examinations to Sasha surfing in the State, or the AussieTitles, if she qualified. “I was extra surprised— blown away really — by how welcoming, supportive, and accommodating they were,”Lowerson said after her win.
The trans athlete policies of the WSL and the ISA, are less clear. I was unable to locate them on their websites and received no clarification from the ISA on request.
“I’ve never trusted just the science, as this goes deeper than that,” says Bevilacqua. “I am so open-minded, so I want to be convinced that this isn’t going to hurt the future of female sport. Science is going to have to show me more than hormone levels to make me believe there is no advantage in certain scenarios and sports. We need to see all the studies and the stats to make an informed decision.”
However, this is all pretty macro, big picture stuff. Sasha has the problem that as the first trans surfer she has become the focal point for all these broader issues. For her, the personal has become the political, as the 1970s feminist slogan goes. However, the issues of trans athletes and competitiveness can seem trite when it comes up against the individual stories of the trans athletes. Sasha is a good example.
“Something I say to everyone is that I haven’t chosen this.This is me. And it’s easier than the alternative because the alternative was not to continue with life, you know?” Said Lowerson. “It was just too painful to keep pretending to be the man that I was pretending to be. Now I’m living my truth and so how people react to that is really up to them.”
Lowerson also works in the Gas and Oil industry as a fly-in, fly-out worker, and so being truthful to who she is now in that harsh, masculine environment was also incredibly difficult. Add an 18-month transitioning process involving oestrogen pills and testosterone blockers, six months out of the water, plus a potentially expensive and painful gender reassignment surgery, and you see what it takes to change.
It’s obviously ludicrous to suggest, as some have, that Sasha would endure 20 years of mental health issues and the transition process to ensure she won a State Logger Title. Especially when she had won it just three years before in the Men’s division. Or as Lowerson put it, “No one should have to choose between being who they are and participating in the sport that they love.”
Yet on the flip side is the challenge of making women’s surfing as fair as possible. No one should have an unfair advantage, even if it has arrived through just or ethical means. Circling the square seems impossible.
“If I had a child that was transitioning, I would want them to be included in everything, but at the same time if I had a daughter who lost their position in a team or was injured by a former male athlete that now identified as a female I would be torn,” says Bevilacqua. “Let’s be real, let’s be kind, and let’s start talking about it.”
