Last week, USA Cycling (USAC) sent out an anonymous survey to their members seeking opinions regarding the participation of transgender athletes in sports. That survey is now being heavily criticized.
According to a report from Bicyling.com, the survey asked respondents to agree or disagree to several statements like “At UCI events, transgender women should be eligible to compete in the women’s category regardless of when they transitioned” and “At UCI events, transgender women should be eligible to compete in the women’s category if they transitioned before puberty.”
The survey has been criticized for being dehumanizing.
USAC membership director Randy Locklair was particularly angry at the survey, responding with an email to various leaders at USAC and filing a SafeSport incident report. Locklair gave Bicycling.com permission to quote the email he sent. to the USAC leaders.
“You have failed to diversify this sport. You have failed to keep your membership safe. You have made tokens of the few marginalized people you ‘support’ and you have ignored the rest,” Locklair told the leaders.
Multiple times, Locklair told the leaders, “You are going to get someone killed.” He also had a pretty jarring comparison to the survey.
“Your survey questions are equivalent to asking your membership if Black folks should be allowed to race,” Locklair said.
More than that, the survey has several issues resulting in a lack of reliability.
Kim Coleman, Ph.D, who is an Assistant Professor at State University of New York – Plattsburgh, explained that the survey results are not valid because there is nothing keeping people from filing out the survey multiple times.
“I was able to click the link to fill the survey out multiple times, meaning that if I felt strongly enough, I could just resubmit my responses over and over again, biasing the results towards my perceptions. USAC would have no way of knowing, because they have designed a totally anonymous survey, rather than de-identifying data after collection,” Coleman wrote.
It’s safe to say the survey had a lot of backlash.
