By Carla Jaeger
Two leading doctors who were on the panel that denied a transgender basketballer’s application to play semi-professional basketball have called for nuance and empathy in the debate about eligibility in elite sport.
Diana Robinson and Peter Harcourt have been made members of the Order of Australia (AM) in this year’s Kings’s Birthday Honours for their contributions to sports medicine. They said assessing transgender athlete eligibility at the elite level was sport’s great challenge and could require decades to resolve.
Diana Robinson and Peter Harcourt have been made members of the Order of Australia.Credit: The Age
Robinson and Harcourt have spent decades working with elite athletes throughout their careers, and between them, have advised several international sporting bodies on anti-doping, integrity and medical matters.
“To be honest, I’m a heap more open, and much more pro-inclusivity than I perhaps was before. Mainly because I hadn’t thought about it from all aspects,” Robinson said.
“[Athlete eligibility] depends on the sport, and the skills of the sport ... Every athlete needs to be judged on an individual basis.”
The reason for this, said Robinson, was that physical advantages – and whether they were unfair – were dependent on the sport. A higher muscle mass, for example, would be far more advantageous for a sprinter than for a long-distance runner. Teams sports were different again.
“It’s a matrix. There’s a matrix of issues you have to look at to make a reasoned decision,” said Harcourt, Basketball Australia’s chief medical officer and a medical adviser for the Commonwealth Games.
“It’s going to be a tricky journey because a lot of people know very little about it, so that’s what triggers a lot of ill-informed and disrespectful comments.”
In March, Harcourt and Robinson formed part of the three-person panel assembled by Basketball Australia to assess the eligibility of transgender basketballer Lexi Rodgers, who applied to join the semi-professional WNBL1 South league. The application was rejected after a near-month long assessment.
The experts said that case-by-case assessments, such as the way Rodgers’ application was considered, were currently the best way to determine the eligibility of transgender athletes.
The assessment process that Harcourt and Robinson are tasked with conducting is far from simple, further complicated by little scientific research, inconsistent policies (largely due to this lack of research), and the consideration that professional women’s sport is still working to carve out space in elite settings.
Compelled by her recent work with transgender athletes (a “really rewarding experience”), Robinson – a professor at the University of Notre Dame – said above all, the issue must be approached with empathy, sensitivity and with an informed mindset.
“The [transgender] athletes I’ve dealt with thus far are very genuine. They’re very keen,” Robinson said.
“They really want to play and be a part of it, and no matter what the decision, they do face an awful uphill battle because of the various opinions in society.”
Harcourt said: “The gains in women’s sport is significant, and we don’t want to lose that. Not that I think transgender [inclusion] is a risk of that – it’s not, not at all.
“But I don’t think people realise that yet.”
The doctors, who both consider the professionalisation of women’s sport to be the most significant advancement they’ve seen across their careers, are now at the forefront of this new challenge.
“The other aspect of this, of course, is that the new generation coming through have got completely different attitudes to these things,” Harcourt said.
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