Natalie Ryan, other transgender women will be barred from competing in FPO

December 13, 2022 by Charlie Eisenhood in News with comments

The Professional Disc Golf Association announced new gender eligibility guidelines that will effectively block transgender women from competing in the FPO division at Pro Majors starting in 2023. The Disc Golf Pro Tour announced that it is adopting the same policy for all of its Elite Series and Silver events.

The new PDGA gender-eligibility policy for PDGA Pro Majors – currently, Champions Cup, US Women’s Disc Golf Championships, Pro World Championships, and the European Open – says that transgender women are only eligible to compete “if they began medical transition during Tanner Stage 2¹ or before age 12, whichever is later,” which requires that an eligible transgender female must have begun taking testosterone suppressants before going through puberty as a male. This copies the controversial guidelines set by FINA, the international swimming federation, over the summer. 

This will bar Natalie Ryan, Chloe Alice, and other transgender women from competing in the FPO Division on the professional tour. Ryan won two DGPT events in 2022, the Discraft Great Lakes Open and MVP Open. She faced harassment online to the point that the DGPT shut down its comment sections on Disc Golf Network livestreams.

“I’m incredibly saddened and hurt by this announcement,” Ryan wrote on Instagram. “I did everything I could to speak on behalf of inclusion, but the PDGA Board of Directors had a decision made before I ever set foot in that room.”

In some areas, the PDGA’s guidelines are stricter than FINA’s, which are currently the strictest of any Olympic sports federation. The PDGA requires that any transgender women must have a testosterone blood serum concentration of less than 2.0 nmol/L for 24 months in order to compete in any female-protected division, below the 2.5 nmol/L threshold used by FINA, UCI (cycling), and World Triathlon. Normal female testosterone levels range from 0.5 to 2.4 nmol/L concentrations.

Transgender women that meet the <2.0 nmol/L threshold over 24 months are still eligible to compete in female-protected divisions at PDGA Amateur Majors, Pro Master Majors, and all other PDGA events sanctioned at the A-Tier level and below. The current PDGA transgender policy sets the testosterone…