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While Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared sex mutilation surgeries for minors to racial segregation and Justice Sonia Sotomayor mused about girls who “don’t want … breasts” last week, some women’s sports advocates applauded the Ladies Professional Golf Association’s new “gender eligibility” policy.

Even a golf clap is more than the LPGA deserves, as the new policy is riddled with bogeys.

To begin with, the criteria allow the participation of male athletes who “establish to the satisfaction of the Medical Manager and Expert Panel that they have not experienced any part of male puberty either Beyond Tanner Stage 2 or after age 12 (whichever comes first)” and who have maintained their testosterone levels below 2.5 nmol/L continuously since their “gender reassignment treatment” and for the duration of their time with the LPGA.

The policy ignores the reality that male advantage exists in sports before puberty. Gregory Brown, along with Brandon Shaw and Ina Shaw, published a paper earlier this year demonstrating that boys outperform girls in sprinting and distance running as early as age eight. His research cites evidence ranging from 60 years of the Presidential Fitness Test to peer-reviewed studies of “muscular strength, muscular power, aerobic fitness, and muscular endurance” being higher in males than females by age six. The research literature contains similar findings from around the world.

In one of the rare times where it’s good that we don’t have more data, there is no research on the effects of puberty blockers on athletic performance. However, research has shown that puberty blockers do not eliminate the sex-based differences in height and lean body mass. 

Because prepubescent males have physical and athletic advantages over females of the same age, and male puberty magnifies these differences, there is no evidentiary nor inferential basis for assuming that a puberty-arrested male will not take some amount of that advantage into adulthood.

By including the criterion of testosterone levels, we see that the LPGA has learned nothing from 15 years of Caster Semenya being a pivotal figure in global sports, nor from this past summer’s Olympic Games. Track and field’s international governing body has done more than any other institution to mainstream the idea (within sports, at least) that sex is a matter of blood chemistry. Its 2018 regulations established 5 nmol/L of testosterone as the upper boundary for any legally female or “intersex” athlete. The intent of this limit was sufficiently blunting the male advantage of athletes with particular differences in sexual development (DSD) to hopefully level the playing field against female athletes.

Notably, the LPGA’s policy holds the door open for male DSD athletes to compete on the professional women’s golf circuit.

The testosterone criterion necessitates monitoring and enforcement, which is problematic in and of itself. The LPGA policy states that during any investigations regarding athlete eligibility and compliance, the athlete must “[provide] serum and/or urine samples upon request for analysis, and/or [submit] to medical examination.” These tests will be physically and psychologically invasive: Anti-doping tests require an official to monitor athletes throughout the sample collection process, i.e., while urinating.

This intrusive monitoring regime is necessary only because the LPGA has rejected the actual, biological definition of a female. If it wanted to, it could mandate a simple cheek swab and reduce the policy to a single paragraph.

At best, the combination of puberty blockers before age 12 and subsequent, continuous testosterone suppression will make the males less masculine as they compete against women golfers. At worst, it encourages ongoing self-harm by these athletes.

Semenya, who sued the track and field governing body over the question of testosterone limits, later described the physical and emotional pain caused by the testosterone suppression drugs. “It makes you feel sick, nauseous. You have panic attacks. It starts creating a little bit of blood clots in your system,” Semenya said. “Your stomach is burning. You eat a lot. You can’t sleep. You sweat a lot each and every day.”

Given that the LPGA’s limit is half of what Semenya had to satisfy, it’s valid to ask if such side effects will be even harsher for individuals attempting to stay eligible for women’s golf.

But the most insidious aspect of the LPGA’s policy is that it further desensitizes sports and society to the surgical and chemical mutilation of children, euphemized as “gender reassignment” or “gender affirming care.” The “gender eligibility” policy speaks of “reassignment surgeries or pharmacological treatment” as matter-of-factly as a different set of golf policies describes the weight and angles of putters and clubs. The combination of cluelessness and nonchalance is akin to that displayed by Justices Jackson and Sotomayor in the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti.

Similarly, the policy is practically a road map for trans-identifying males to effectively “pass.” One of the questions that continues to hover over even those of us who cover this topic is how Blaire Fleming managed to “pass” in the locker rooms, bathrooms, and hotel rooms of the women’s volleyball teams at Coastal Carolina University and San Jose State University until his senior year. Before that, Fleming played on girls’ high school and club volleyball teams for four years. Fleming “only began presenting in feminine clothing in 2016 when he would have been approximately 14 years old.”

What could facilitate that? Puberty blockers by age 12, testosterone suppression thereafter, and “any reassignment surgeries or pharmacological treatment the Player has undertaken.”

The subterfuge will start to give way if an LPGA player drives a tee shot that flirts with 300 yards — similar to Fleming’s “unstoppable” vertical jumps and kill shots — but by that point, it’s too late.

The LPGA’s “gender eligibility” policy will restrict males in women’s golf, but it does not prohibit them. Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules in Skrmetti, women’s sports are going to be chipping out of a very deep bunker for the foreseeable future.

George M. Perry is a sports performance coach, sports businessman, and writer. Before going into the sports industry, he was a submarine warfare officer in the United States Navy and briefly attended law school.