In a conversation on What Now with Trevor Noah, the comedian and former Daily Show host sat down with author Malcolm Gladwell to discuss the deeply contested question of transgender women competing in women’s sports.
Noah opened by drawing a direct parallel to boxing’s weight division system. “If a skinny a*s man is allowed to be a boxer, a man who weighs less than a bag of cement is allowed to be a professional boxer, a man that I can pick up and throw to the other side of the room, he’ll beat me in boxing, but I can lift him. If that person gets accommodated, why can we not accommodate a trans woman is what I’m saying.”
His argument leaned heavily on the idea that sports rules are invented constructs, not natural laws. Malcolm agreed, saying sport is “the willing acceptance of arbitrary constraints.”
From there, Noah challenged the assumption that current categories are permanent or sacred. “We make it seem like in some sports it’s just man, woman, right? But then in another sport, we’ll go no, no, it’s not just man, woman. It’s also age.”
Malcolm pointed to swimming as a particular example of how categories multiply without controversy. He said, “The swimmers, they’ve just created a sport to maximize the number of medals they give out. There’s like the 50 meter freestyle, the 100 meter freestyle.”
He noted that no one questions the addition of strokes like butterfly, despite the fact that “no one ever uses those strokes outside of competition.”
During the conversation, Noah also invoked the Paralympics as a model for creative thinking. He said: “I found some of the most creative thinking because they went, how do we find a measure of fair in a thing that we’ve also invented in terms of fairness.”
He praised the Paralympic organizing bodies for working through complex classification problems rather than defaulting to exclusion.
Noah was careful to acknowledge the counterargument. He referenced Gladwell’s experience moderating a sports analytics panel where researcher Joanna Harper told opponent Ross Tucker, “Ross, you have to let us win,” conceding that trans women hold a biological advantage while arguing the issue was about human rights.
Noah agreed the two sides were “arguing across each other” and would never reach resolution on those terms alone.
His conclusion was not a policy prescription but a plea for imagination. “If we think to ourselves that it stops where we are currently in time, I don’t care what it is, technology, education, then I go like, man, we’ve become that homogeneous society. But what I’m saying is we can create a category where skinny men compete against skinny men. And that’s what they’ve done.”
