Oliver Brown: Sport's transgender taboo

Laurel Hubbard started with a weight 7kg more than her nearest rival on the Gold Coast. Photo / Getty Images

In 1976, Renee Richards jettisoned a career as an ophthalmologist to renew her love affair with tennis.

There was just one problem: the 32-year-old, born as Richard Raskind in New York, had undergone gender reassignment surgery a few months earlier, at a time when transsexuality was not just condemned in some quarters, but considered a form of insanity.

After taking legal action to avoid an invasive examination insisted on by tennis authorities to test her chromosomes, Richards began four extraordinary years in women's professional tennis, reaching a US Open doubles final in 1977.

What is perhaps most striking, though, is the jaundiced view that she has formed of such feats since.

"I know that if I'd had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 gone on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have come close to me," Richards said. "There is one thing that a transsexual woman unfortunately cannot expect to be allowed to do, and that is play professional sports in her chosen field."

Her words have hung heavily over the Commonwealth Games this week, after Laurel Hubbard, the transgender Kiwi weightlifter, made a controversial Gold Coast appearance.

Richards' thesis - that young athletes who have transitioned to being female could wipe the floor with those born as women - appeared to come true when Hubbard, formerly Gavin, started with a weight 7kg heavier than her nearest rival. Ultimately, only a dislocated elbow derailed her march to the gold medal.

As with Richards, the one physiological factor that militates against her crushing dominance is her age. Hubbard is 40, and at last year's world championships in Anaheim, her best was still not good enough to deprive American Sarah Robles, 11 years her junior, of victory.

Now, it seems that she is desperate to reclaim her anonymity, with her elbow injury so serious it has ended her competitive ambitions.

"My arm is busted," she said. "It looks like it's probably going to be a career-ending injury, which is a real shame, but I'm glad I've gone out trying to achieve my best on the platform."

And so another transsexual athlete slips sadly into the ether, her aspirations unfulfilled and her legitimacy never anything less than hugely contentious.

Despite the 2003 Stockholm Consensus on Sex Reassignment in Sport, which decreed that trans athletes were eligible - so long as they had completed surgery, received hormone therapy for a minimum of two years, and had legal recognition of their switch in gender - the number who have taken the opportunity remains vanishingly small.

Mianne Bagger, the Danish golfer who in 2004 became the first openly transitioned woman to qualify for a pro sports tour since Richards, still stands alone in her sport.

Likewise, US mixed martial artist Fallon Fox, a former truck driver who had operations in Thailand to change gender in 2006, has yet to embolden anybody to follow suit.

The great unresolved issue of Hubbard's retirement is whether she is stepping away purely because of physical distress, or whether she is sparing herself the inquisition that would surely come if she pressed on to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

Even doctors acknowledge that a case such as Hubbard's risks creating an uneven playing field.

"A man transitioning to a female has physiological advantages that they take into their new female life," argues Alison Heather, a professor of physiology at the University of Otago.

On the one hand, it is deeply vexing in moral terms to suggest that Hubbard and those in similar circumstances should be barred from following what they love simply because of who they are.

But should the rights of an individual, especially in a sport as determined by strength as Hubbard's, override the rights of women who stand no chance of gold with her on the same stage? Such an outcome runs contrary to the very notion of sporting fairness.

For that reason, and for all that we live, mercifully, in more enlightened times, the spectacle of a transgender weightlifter is perhaps still a taboo-breaker too far.