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We met Ava at the Santa Vall, and after chatting with her for a while, we were captivated by her story and the clarity with which she reflects on sport and inclusion. We invited her to write for POLVU, and she accepted without hesitation.
Ava was a whitewater kayaker until 2022, when she left the sport after being excluded from the World Championships. She now rides gravel and is part of the organisation Toutes des Femmes, working in the branch that tackles issues related to sport. Drawing from her own experience and with a critical eye on the current political context, she offers a powerful reflection on the inclusion of trans women in sport, the exclusionary mechanisms that hide behind seemingly protective narratives, and how gravel—thanks to its recent history and open spirit—can (and should) become a space of resistance.
Over the last few years, the debate around trans people in sports has grown to occupy what now feels like an absurdly large space in both mediatic and political spheres. The issue has been sparking controversy for as long as women’s sports have existed. At a time where the existence of trans women was most likely unknown to sports officials, they were already worried that some men would cross dress for the sole purpose of winning competitions, and imposed tests on athletes in an attempt to make it impossible.
In the past decade or so, the issue has resurfaced at an unprecedented scale, being dealt with with an ever growing level of aggression. Yet, I believe that if more people knew a few more things on the matter, it would never have become such a prominent subject, and want to use the following lines to give this all a much needed contextualisation. And do not worry, we’ll circle back to gravel.
As ideas of equality started becoming more popular over the last century or so, and as discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preferences or religion started becoming less publicly and legally tolerated, a problem arose for those that seek to maintain inequalities in society. Being too upfront about their goals tends to reveal them as what they are : bigots. And bigotry is bad press. It has become quite hard for them to win elections, or to make their ideas progress in the public opinion by presenting them as outright intolerance. So the far right and reactionaries of all kinds have developed strategies to go around this and make things less obvious. One of the most efficient of those strategies consists in presenting themselves as defenders, both of values, but also of individuals perceived as needing protection.
They won’t get invited on TV if they portray themself as openly xenophobic. But when they say that their only concern is protecting the so-called “honest worker», they get invited to talk about it on prime time.
The very same strategy has been used with trans women. If they just said that they didn’t want trans women to use the women’s bathroom because of who they are, they would be deemed as too obviously intolerant. But by adding a twist, and saying they’re doing it to “protect children” it suddenly becomes acceptable enough to be debated in mainstream media.
The issue of whether trans women belong in women’s sport has been weaponized in the very same fashion. People who never once cared about the problems truly plaguing women’s sports (lack of funding and visibility, sexual abuse, objectification of athletes bodies etc.) suddenly rode on their white horse to defend them from supposedly overperforming trans women. And they found out that the subject of sports had two advantages for them.
One, sports are supposed to be universal. They are meant to be a welcoming environment, where performance should be the only thing telling athletes apart. Not race, neither social or economical status, nor anything else. This is obviously not actually the case, but if someone does not belong in something so supposedly universal as sport, it’s very easy to move to the next step and push the idea that they don’t belong in society as a whole.
The second advantage of using the theme of sports to deny trans people rights is that very few people actually understand the diversity and complexity of performance factors in sports, and that even fewer people actually know how radical the changes brought by hormonal replacement therapy can be. If you add to this the fact that because of internalized misogyny, people tend to overestimate the actual performance gap between men and women in sports, the average brain is hence a very fertile soil for the idea that the presence of a trans women in women sports cannot result in anything else but outright and unfair dominance.
Anti-trans bigots have figured this out. This whole situation allows them to easily present cisgender women in sports as facing a peril, which in turn renders sensible the idea that trans women participation should be opposed.
This is why they’ve been milking this cow relentlessly over the last few years. Always going further, starting first with elite and professional sports and because exclusion in highly mediatised fields tends to have a trickle down effect, pushing it to amateurs, and worse even, school kids.
I hope that this gives some context and brings some light on this issue, and with that done, we can actually ask ourselves if trans women should be competing against cisgender women. I believe that they should for a few reasons. First of all, where should women compete, if not in the women category?
When it comes to biomedical aspects, the amount of serious studies on the matter is limited and somewhat inconclusive. But it tends to point towards little performance differences between trans and cisgender women, after at least a year on hormonal replacement therapy. An Olympic Committee-founded study published last year found that trans women might actually be at a disadvantage compared to cisgender women in some fields. This leaves sport governing bodies with the choice of excluding trans women on the basis of their transness, or including them on the basis of their womanhood. The latter option sounds a lot less discriminatory to me but some organisations (I’m looking at the UCI here) thought it better to use studies comparing the performance of cisgender men to those of cisgender women as a justification for exclusion.
The last and possibly most important factor in favor of inclusion to me is that the exclusion of trans women is detrimental to all women. To enforce rules keeping trans women out of sports, regulating bodies are forced to control all women and their bodies. And depending on the metrics used, this will doubtlessly result in the exclusion of cisgender women as well. Athletes discovering that their physiology does not fit their federation’s definition of womanhood is no news. And athletes forced to go through invasive testing followed by life altering therapy to comply with those definitions should never have existed, and should by all means become and remain a thing of the past.
Now where does gravel fit in this? For the last few years, there’s been talks about the death of the so-called “spirit of gravel”. The discipline used to be a special cycling space, close to road racing, yet different. People did not take themselves as seriously, racing was not as cut throat, everyone knew each other. But the rising level and speed of races as well as the professionalisation of the sport would have made it a thing of the past. Yet gravel racing remains very dissimilar to its tarmac counterpart, and for the better.
As an exemple, a large part of the gravel scene is maintaining, if not growing, a commitment towards making the events and races as sustainable as they can be. This is possible not only because of the very nature of the sport, which by allowing riders to navigate areas much closer to natural environments, tends to incite them to protect those same environments, but also because gravel, as a new discipline, does not yet cary the industrial and cultural momentum of something like road racing or even XC mountain biking.
Changing a system over when it’s been the same for a long time can be much harder than creating something new from the ground up.
This is also valid when it comes to bikes. Gravel is a lot more permissive than most of its heavily UCI regulated counterparts. There is no other max tire width here than the one that your frame can take. There is no banned position, no hoods turned too much inwards nor saddle set up too close to the bottom bracket. Innovation and experimentation remain the only rules.
We should be conscious of the fact that this is made possible because our sport is relatively new, and we can keep on developing it without making the mistakes that might exist in older cycling disciplines. We can avoid the pitfalls made before us, and we should push to make the events we take part in or the products we buy look like what we wish them to be, by taking into account the environmental and social challenges or our times, rather than letting them be shaped by purely economical logics and political fear mongering.
Gravel should remain a trailblazing discipline. When so many countries are making trans people’s lives increasingly harder and when so many sports organisations are jumping on that bandwagon either with the same motivations, or just because they lack anything resembling political courage, we should be committed to prevent this from happening in our sport and spaces. Not only that, but we should be proud of it.
Ava Vales Toledano was a whitewater kayaker until 2022, when she left the sport after being excluded from the World Championships. She now rides gravel and is part of the organisation Toutes des Femmes, working in the branch that addresses issues related to sport.
Ava Vales Toledano