One benefit of working at Quillette is that we are permitted—indeed, encouraged—to take deep editorial dives into subjects that other publications might regard as obscure. My recent article, “Disc Golf’s Lia Thomas Moment,” offered a case in point. While I may be passionate about disc golf, I freely concede that it isn’t what some might call a high-profile or prestigious sport. (One of my friends uncharitably refers to it on Facebook as “dork discus.”) Yet humble though the sport may be, it offered Quillette readers a detailed case study in a thorny issue now affecting pretty much every sport on the planet: What to do with trans-identified biological men who seek to compete in women’s sports categories? On one hand, we all want to be humane and “inclusive.” Sport should be for everyone. On the other hand, permitting larger, faster, stronger, male bodies into protected female spaces can destroy the integrity of women’s sports.

I am pleased to report that shortly after my Quillette article appeared, the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA), which formerly had taken an extremely permissive attitude toward biologically male players, announced a much stricter policy that, at the highest levels, forbids bio-men from competing with women unless the player in question “began medical transition (for example, by taking puberty-suppressing medication) during Tanner Stage 2 or before age 12, whichever is later.” In other words, no one who went through male puberty is eligible.

The PDGA’s abrupt change in policy was based on (a) the results of a mass-participation survey, which showed that a majority of disc golfers, especially at the elite levels, wanted female-protected divisions to be reserved for biological women; and (b) a PDGA Medical Subcommittee report on “Considerations for Women’s Sex-Restricted Divisions in PDGA Events,” which noted as follows:

At the 2022 PDGA Long Drive competition, Natalie Ryan, a transgender woman, finished in fourth place among the women competitors with a throw of 430 feet. That distance would have been last in the men’s competition. Of 18 sport activities presented in Figure 1, a 26-30% advantage for males in the disc golf drive would place that event close to the top in terms of being most disadvantageous to women. This would appear to demonstrate a clearly disproportionate disadvantage to women in competition with chromosomal (cisgender) men. In support of this point, the most powerful argument that males have innate advantages in disc golf lies in examination of PDGA ratings data, which is based on quality of play in tournament competitions. When well over a thousand of the top-rated players are males, any argument against their having a significant advantage over girls and women falls woefully short.