They exist. They are human. We agree on that. The thing we disagree on is whether they should compete in the category that they want to be in, or the category based on who they are and their biology.
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That shows, that you have not much knowledge about the topic. The birth certificate just shows the interpretation of the genitals at birth. This isn’t always as easy as you might think. First, there are babies, where it isn’t clear, if the genitals are a penis or a vulva (compare Sex assignment - Wikipedia and Quigley scale - Wikipedia). But even if the genitalia, according to the quigley scale seem to be clearly male or female, that does not always have to line up with the bodies real sex and also nit with the persons gender. Then you have a whole lot of medical conditions, summarized unter the term intersex (compare Intersex/Prevalence - Wikipedia).
People still believe in the misinterpretation of the early days of human genome sequencing when it was believed, that the X an Y chromosomes define all sex and gender related issues in the body like a hard wired trigger. This hypothesis is disproved for decades now and I really don’t get it, why people still believe in this nonsense. If the embryos at first sexless tissue that will later form into mal or female gonads, genitals, or brain develop either in the one or the other directions is triggered by hormone levels, not by chromosomes. The X and Y chromosomes are the most important part in defining, what hormone levels are to be produced in the fetal body but by far no the only ones. There are other chromosomes, that have effects on how sensitive the receptors for certain hormones are. The embryos hormone levels are affected by the ones of its mother. And there are other environmental factors that have effects either on the hormone levels or on the hormone receptors (e.g. Endocrine disruptors). As all the body features of the fetus develope in different stages of pregnancy (compare Fetus - Wikipedia), all of those factors may result in different features developing other than expected from just looking at the chromosomes. A male fetus may develope female gonads, or female genitalia or a female brain and vice versa.
And this was only the fetal development. But a humans body development doesn’t stop at birth. All of those factors (except from it’s mothers hormone levels) will have an influence on how certain body characteristics develop: bone structure, muscle mass, secondary sexual characteristics, …
Oh, and not to forget, that all of the gender related body characteristics (as well as all other body characteristics) aren’t just two defined states with no variance (like black and white) but a spectrum. (Just like there are not just people that are 1,7m tall and a second group that is exactly 1,85 m tall.)
Looking at a birth certificate tells you near nothing about a person except from it’s birth date.
The question on where to draw the line, aiming to categorize people into two categories is not as easy as some would wish it would be. The whole concept of gender binarity as two solid states instead of a spectrum is a scam and has always been. It is a concept that those who’d fit in it claim, makes thing easier but does not match reality and excludes and discriminates all of those who do not fit in (that aren’t as few as someone may think).
P.S.: I cant believe, that it’s 2026 and we still have to explain those basic principles of human biology that have been known for decades now.
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I don’t think I’ve interacted with this subject yet. Not that I didn’t want to, but I don’t want my opinions to be held against me (it is also why I didn’t go to the meeting during unicon).
As a cis male, I am mostly not concerned, and could absolutely not bother about it (and that is what I do most of the time).
First of all, I think there are several “categories” of events :
- convention events,
- technical competitive events,
- physical competitive events.
For convention events, I don’t think there should be any subject, anybody should be allowed to participate, without any concern for their gender, nationality, age (except if riders are really too young for some events) or anything else maybe health condition, but that should be the rider’s concern, not other people.
For technical competitive events, I don’t think gender as a real influence, since the main component is brain to body “wiring” and amount of training. So, same as before, gender and nationality shouldn’t be a concern but age does, since younger riders can’t possibly have got the same amount of training, and coordination is quite a lot age dependent.
For physical competitive events, however, muscle mass and bone density has a lot of influence. And since muscle mass and bone density is very hormonal dependent, hormonal levels might be a real concern. As far as I know, for most riders, gender is the thing with the most influence on hormonal levels.
Therefore, I think that separating men from women would work for most people (and promote women’s sport).
For the genetically intersex riders, with hormonal levels in between men and women, I don’t know what should be done to guaranty fairness for everybody.
I think that for most people, when speaking about trans people, they think about men or women not intersex, with fully developed secondary sexual characters going through hormonal sex change. They would most likely keep their original secondary sexual characters, with an evolution through time muscle mass diminution / augmentation for example. That might be a problem for women’s sport, since a genetically male rider, with slightly reduced muscle mass could ride among women, and thus dominate the category and invisibilise other women the problem currently happening with Lia Thomas. The other way around female to male transition would not be that big of a problem, since they would probably need really high testosterone levels to actually over compete cis men.
I think many riders are afraid of the problems that might happen (mainly cis males deciding to compete with women for fame / money if unicycling happens to get some money for race winners).
Also, many persons myself included don’t understand well how transition works, and why people would go through that.
Lastly, for many people, gender isn’t a spectrum, because that’s what they’ve been taught at school. It is just XY or XX chromosoms. The variability could come from XY trisomy such as XXY or XYY, but is really uncommon. Also, many people haven’t even understood this basic “rule” and just think that male is with a penis, and female with breasts.
I still don’t understand why it is mostly cis males that have a problem with this subject though, since we are the least actually concerned.
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As far as I know, for most riders, gender is the thing with the most influence on hormonal levels.
On hormonal levels:
The committee concluded (reasonably) that the IUF does not have the resources for hormonal testing, even if we thought that was a good idea.
We also don’t have the resources for drug testing. At UNICON 22, there were 1100+ competitors; of those, how many were trans/non-binary? Maybe 10 or 20? I will guarantee that the number of people using banned substances is an order of magnitude higher. Why aren’t we wringing our hands over that?
[The answer is, because it’s not a problem.]
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Sex assigned at birth by a medical doctor trained in identifying external genitalia, that winds up on a birth certificate does largely determine “sex.” (Meaning 23rd chromosome pair: XX, XY, not how you happened to feel when you woke up this morning) Sure, there are cases where the genitalia may be ambiguous, but those cases are exceedingly rare. I believe that the ambiguous cases are about 1:4500 (which is roughly 0.02% of the population). Since birth certificates are also dated, they are also a good way to verify age.
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Since birth certificates are also dated, they are also a good way to verify age.
So we could take on a massive amount of new work, and make registration for events substantially harder, to deal with these non-problems.
Sports are separated into two different genders for a reason. Most women are physically unable to fairly compete with men. To have a biological male compete with women is unfair. The issue is nothing to do with whether it’s wrong to be trans. It has to do with how transgenders are wrecking women’s sports and taking records away from the actual women that deserve them.
I think it would be perfectly valid to have people use their birth certificates to verify gender. However, it might not be doable for smaller niche sports like unicycling, due to less manpower for organizing events. But for larger sports, I think eventually organizers might have to start using people’s birth certificates.
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sounds like a perfect use for an AI tool … should anyone decide that it is worthwhile.
Eh, I’d think twice about hypothetically submitting my birth certificate to an AI tool 
My take on the subject in general: Although it’s the closest thing to Unicycle Olympics we got, it’s still not the Olympics. There’s no big $$$ or worldwide fame to be had for winning in Unicon as far as I can tell. Why, then, should we have to (hypothetically) fork over a birth certificate for a comparatively low-stakes event?
I do agree results should be separated on a male-female basis, but has trans competition really stirred up any controversy in terms of results so far? I think it should be taken as a case-by-case basis after the fact if there’s any disputes whether somebody should be grouped as a male or female.
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sounds like a perfect use for an AI tool … should anyone decide that it is worthwhile.
Leaving aside the fact that UNICON includes people from 30+ countries and probably 20+ languages, and an AI tool ingesting all of that would spit out completely unreliable results, and also that many people don’t have easy access to a birth certificate…it would be completely trivial to forge a birth certificate to say whatever you want it to say.
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Different sources show different values, but around one in every 2000 newborns show genitalia not being clearly identifiable. On top comes the amount of the ones that are clearly identifiable but do not align with the bodies sex.
I don’t remember correctly, but I saw a documentation on some area (I believe it was somewhere) in Central America or northern South America, where roughly one in every three newborns was somehow transgender with either wrong or malformed genitals or not matching brain. The reason was an excessive use of agricultural chemistry that worked as endocrine disruptor.
To sum it up: under the given circumstances, it’s almost impossible to be fair to anyone.
Of course trans people have the same rights as cis people. They have the right to compete in our sports, and it’s an absolute must for us to make this possible. Also, everybody has the right to compete in a category, that guarantees a fair competition and that matches their identity. But having been to many competitions with less than a dozen participants, I also know that as an organiser, you are sometimes lucky to even have enough men and women to fill two podiums. The chances of being able to fill a third podium with trans athletes are near to zero. So, I appreciate the suggestion of the committee to have men, women and overall. I think, we should give this a chance.
I am definitely unsure about what that. And even if that was true, most of them would not be among the top riders. That is why it isn’t a problem. I feel like this kind of accusations shouldn’t be made without at the very least some proofs.
I disagree with the second part. If the problem isn’t anticipated, it might be really hard to take care of some situations in the future. And it would likely cause problems linked with the actual person in front of you what if the race director, responsible for taking care of the situation is transphobic ? Or if the director is very trans friendly ?
I doubt it is a good solution. Cis men would still most likely dominate the categories, which would mean that trans people still couldn’t get medals and women would be invisibilised more. In the end, that is a really big subject for very few people probably around 1% of the population at most, maybe a bit more in unicycling since we tend to have some over representation of some socio professional categories, to an extent where people willing to use those rules to their advantage might be an order of magnitude higher.
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In addition to my previous message, I want to speak about the treatment of this subject in our environment. It might not be the subject here, so if admins want to move it somewhere else or consider it is too political for this forum, please move / remove it.
I 100% agree with the LGB messages. Sexual orientation should not be anyone concern (as long as it is in between willing adults obviously).
About trans people, I don’t have any problem with them, but the current way it is “promoted” is already a bigger problem for me (I’ve seen a stat of 0.8% of adults that consider themselves trans, against 3.3% of 13-17 years old). Among those, I am pretty sure many have a problem with their puberty for example and wish they were the other gender for some reason. I’m pretty sure that if all those persons went through transition, a pretty big part of them would end up regretting it.
The big problem I encounter with this movement is the way it is brought up most of the time. I won’t speak about the activists seen on medias, I know many of them aren’t exactly liked by a big part of the community. During unicon, I encountered several things that did put me uncomfortable :
- during the parade, I was with other french riders just behind a group of people carrying pride flags and shooting something like “unicycling will be queer” and other things like that. Once again, I don’t have a problem with queer peoples, but I am definitely not an activist of this community and don’t want my sport to “be queer”, I just want it to be “a sport anybody can enjoy”. As a cis man, I sometimes feel like it is actually bad to not be part of any of the communities of LGBTQIA+…
- During many of the finals, there was a pride flag. It might seem like a small thing, but I come to unicon to enjoy unicycling, having constantly a reminder that “LGBTQIA+ people have their place here” made me feel like I didn’t have mine since I am not part of them.
I hope you understand that I said that with all due respect to this community, I just wanted to bring up some things that made me uncomfortable during unicon.
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Thanks all for the discussion! I’m chiming in as an organizing member of the committee. Like mentioned before, we’ve put in countless hours to this project over the past 2 years, including speaking with members/directors/competitors across the unicycling world, analyzing past Unicon results, and doing tons of research to inform our recommendations.
We’re working on a final report that will detail our process and results. I can’t promise when that will be released, but I would encourage those of you with questions and concerns to read it when it comes out.
If you have any specific concerns or feedback about the rule recommendations, our committee has and always is open to feedback. That is why we led the workshop at Unicon and subsequent webinar. This is not a closed door process, and ANYONE is encouraged to get involved. Due to our limited capacity, reaching out directly is the best way to get your voice heard as we’re not monitoring online discussions closely.
And, if you have issues with the current rules, I’d strongly encourage you to get involved in the IUF rulebook committee (the new committee should be starting in the new year). This sport is run on volunteers, and if you want to see change you have to step up to make it happen.
Our email: unicyclegendercommittee@gmail.com
Thanks all 
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One thing I really want to address here is the idea that speaking up may be held against you. It is not the intention of the Gender Committee to enforce a particular worldview upon the riders. I won’t use names because I would rather let others speak for themselves, but a rider you and I both know by name has opinions that differ from the committee. He asked his questions at the meeting at Unicon respectfully and has well reasoned arguments behind them. Rulemaking is always a balancing act between different priorities and respectful disagreement is a vital part of that.
On the visibility of pride flags (not a function of the gender committee), I would offer you a counter example. A young rider in my club in 2024 expressed to me how much safer they felt at the event because someone there felt it was important to visibly signal that inclusiveness. So I guess all I can ask is that you take a step back and weigh the way you feel when you see it against the way others may feel. I can promise that those who insist on flying it intend for it to be welcoming rather than excluding
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I have no doubt about the gender comitee intentions. But I doubt it is the case of other people in the community.
I absolutely understand that, but yet, as a diplomed white heterosexual cis male in a good physical shape the ultimate “privileged” person, I often feel like I am by default classified among the “bad persons”. And since I have some ideas going in a way not promoted by the LGBTQIA+ community (or at least by the loud part of the community), I have troubles feeling included when it is brought up.
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You’re also not part of the Moroccan or Japanese communities; did you have a problem with those flags, or any of the other flags for communities you’re not a part of?
It’s OK to not be queer. Fair, it’s not as cool as being queer. But we cis het dudes just need to get over that.
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No, but none of them were the single flag on the judges podium…
I disagree with you. It is as cool as being queer. Why would anybody need to follow a rule created by somebody else to be cool ?
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Why would anybody need to follow a rule created by somebody else to be cool ?
You might want to consider the history of coolness.