The IUF Gender Committee is offering a webinar of the workshop they presented at Unicon 22 for those that were unable to attend. We’d like to encourage anyone who’s interested in learning more about our work or wanting to share their feedback to attend! The webinar description is below:
Description: The IUF Gender Committee was created in 2024 to evaluate the IUF Rulebook regarding rules related to sex and gender in competition, and update the rulebook with research-backed recommendations. We’ll provide an overview of the work we’ve completed to date, including community survey results (sent out in 2025) and proposed rule recommendations, followed by time for questions, discussion, and feedback. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Do you think there is a major risk of cis dudes competing as women in order to win unicycle competitions?
How do you imagine that would be perceived by the community?
A real risk, for cis girls and women, is that anti-trans bigotry will be applied to them. This has happened in the Olympics, to Imane Khelif and Caster Semenya, for example, because they are muscular and skinny. Which has to have been horrible for them.
I ask if you’ve engaged with the work of this committee, because they have reviewed the policies of the IOC and other sports agencies, and they’ve surveyed the unicycle community, and have come to a different conclusion than yours. You might want to try to understand why.
When this work was presented at UNICON, the crowd was mostly appreciative. Every critical comment came from a cis dude, which I’m guessing describes you as well. Why do cis dues care about this issue?
A meaningful comment there from a cis woman was, “I’d rather lose to a trans woman who’s better than I am, than for that person to not be able to compete.”
I’ll share a little bit here about the work of the gender committee. I am a member and we put in countless hours for this so I’d appreciate a little room for nuance here.
Some basic guiding principles of our effort:
Changes to the rules should represent an improvement for all competitors
Access to sport is a human right, per the UN
Unicycling does not have the capacity for robust testing, be it hormone levels, genomic, or anti-doping
We had a rule from 2017 that makes explicit the that your competitive gender is self-declared. To give a very brief summary of what our committee is recommending, we would like to offer competitors the opportunity to compete without selecting a competitive gender category for any reason they might desire. Along with that we would like to recognize overall top 3 results across genders and make competition more comparable between genders.
What has a pen*s to do with competition categories? There’s no discipline where this would matter. And I would also not dare to be this disrespectful to call Lia Thomas a man. (That said, being on HRT for over 7 years now, she is likely not that competitive in the male category anymore.)
As said before, the matter is complex. As aslo said before, our niche sport has no capabilities in doing tests (however they’d be working or even possible) to determine the “correct” competition category, whereas age (your not so well matching example) can be checked easily. And, as also said before, in the recent (2019) rule set, she’d compete in the female category if she wanted and would unicycle. The committee worked on a proposal, giving a third option. So what’s actually your problem with the committee? I see it solving a problem, that you have with the recent rule set and you seem to still argue against it.
If you’re suggesting genital inspections, please stay away from the rest of the unicycling community.
[The specific answer to your question is, IUF doesn’t perform age verification. Like gender, it’s self-reported when you register for the event. Also like gender, self-reporting hasn’t been a problem.]
Genital inspection is far from necessary. And I doubt that @OneWheelWay meant that at all. I think a birth certificate would be enough to determine the category of a person. This hasn’t been a problem for all of sports history, and I can’t see why it would need to be one now.
This hasn’t been a problem for all of sports history, and I can’t see why it would need to be one now.
Yes, trans people have always competed in sports, and you’re right, it hasn’t been a problem until now, and it shouldn’t be one now, either. The findings of the committee are that we already have a rule about it, and it hasn’t been a problem, and we should keep that rule.
Looks like we agree. If a man registers as a woman, he’ll most likely dominate, even if he wouldn’t have done so well in the men’s category.
For clarification, what is the best possible outcome this committee is looking for? What problem is it trying to solve? I’ve seen above the prospect of a third category. I don’t see the need.
No, we don’t agree. I don’t think people lying about their age or their gender in order to win unicycle competitions is a real problem.
The committee is trying to solve the problem that transphobic people are currently inventing reasons to attack trans people for existing. Trans people exist, trans athletes exist, trans unicyclists exist, and they should be able to compete in our events.
Fortunately it turns out that the rule we already have allows them to do that, so the committee doesn’t even need to recommend a change.
