No matter how sincere the efforts to make sports “inclusive,” every inclusion initiative ends with the reality that sports exclude.

USA Cycling wanted to “prioritize the balance between fairness and inclusion” when developing its latest Transgender Participation Policy. Its solution was not so much a balance but a Solomonic division that gave a bit more fairness to some and pushed more inclusion on others.

Competition is necessarily an exclusionary process. Each round of a tournament excludes half the competitors from the subsequent round, and most athletes on the starting line are excluded from the podium. But even before the competition starts, most sports organizations mark out category-based exclusions — e.g., age groups — keeping athletes out of groups that had previously included them.

Fairness and safety underpin all sports categories, including the one that everyone knew was athletically relevant and fundamental until about 20 minutes ago: sex. For decades, women were excluded from sports altogether. When women were allowed into sports, men were excluded from women’s sports.

We know how that’s turned out in recent years.

USA Cycling Implements ‘Woke’ Policy

The cyclists in each discipline of cycling are bucketed into categories. Beginners are in “Cat 5” and can progress to Cat 4 simply by participating. Each subsequent advancement is based increasingly on performance.

The new Transgender Participation Policy creates two supra-categories. Pro cyclists and those in Categories 1 and 2 are “elite.” For elite competition, a trans-identifying male cyclist who wishes to compete in the female category — what USA Cycling calls a male-to-female transition — must prove that his serum testosterone level has been less than 2.5 nmol/L for at least 24 months and must remain below that level during the competitive period. That level is the high end of the normal range for women.

USA Cycling declares that “[a]t non-elite competition levels” — Categories 3–5 — “a member may self-select their gender.” The policy lists several ways of resolving questions that may arise about an athlete’s self-selected gender, including “attestation[s] of gender identity” and whether “the member’s gender in their ‘everyday life’ match[es] their specified racing gender.”

The “elite” policy remains unfair to female athletes, given the irreversible effects of male puberty on athletic performance. But the fact that there are exclusion criteria for trans-identifying male athletes implicitly acknowledges the need to provide some fairness to the more competitive female athletes. The question, then, is: Why deny even this abridged level of fairness to all athletes, from Cat 1 to Cat 5?

It’s Not Just Cycling

USA Cycling’s decision to denigrate competitive fairness for lower-performing athletes is reminiscent of Parkrun U.K.’s mantra to whitewash the consequences of its gender self-id policy: “It’s about community, not competition.”

True, each individual parkrun is not technically a race. But runners still go out there and race. Parkrun results are fed into U.K. Athletics’ nationwide ranking system. Each week, Parkrun updates an array of publicly accessible stats: weekly and all-time rankings of runners’ times, number of first-place finishes, number of total finishes, top finishes in each age and sex group, and an age- and sex-weighted percentile for each performance so that you (and everyone else looking at the tables) know to a hundredth of a percent how each individual run stacks up amongst other parkrunners in that sex and age group.

Just don’t call it a competition.

A consequence of that last stat is that a record-setting performance will depress the statistical weighting of the performances of everyone else in the age- and sex-based groups. At least 20 female Parkrun course records are currently held by males. That skews the grading curve for the women, making them look worse off relative to their peers, since their parkrun peer group is now inclusive of males.

Anyone who follows professional and Olympic distance running will see some familiar names on Parkrun’s all-time record tables. Parkrun plays an important role in many top runners’ athletic development, provides a source of recreation and community during their competitive careers, and serves as a way to stay engaged with the sport and inspire the next generation in their athletic retirement. If history is our guide, some of the youngsters on the weekly list of sub-17:00 performances will go on to wear the Union Jack in international competitions.

The same goes for those racing in Cats 3–5 of USA Cycling events. Some participants may not care about their time or performance, but others do — maybe as a matter of pride, maybe because their future hinges on their performance. The one thing they all require and that they all deserve from their sport is competitive fairness, especially as they strive for the exclusiveness of achievement.

Fairness both requires and results in exclusion, whether on the lines of performance or category. The fact that USA Cycling granted greater (if incomplete) fairness to the more competitive categories is of a piece with Parkrun’s waffle that, since it is not a competition, it doesn’t really need to ensure fairness.

Both policies demonstrate that although inclusion and fairness might be side-by-side on the starting line, only one can cross the finish.