Opinion: New Trump policy baselessly undermines ESL Impact

As has been the case with other multinational organizations, the previously reported new Trump administration priorities have placed the United States official policy in direct conflict with the established guidelines of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), whose Framework on Fairness, Inclusion, and Non-Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations was released on November 16th, 2021.

Based on my personal interpretation, there are pertinent areas of the IOC framework that would potentially clash with the content of EO 14201 in Sections 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 of the IOC document. For context, there are 10 sections in the document total and the 10th is simply a section that outlines the ongoing review of eligibility criteria as there are further developments in the world of medicine, law, and science. Essentially a logistics section. Feel free to explore the document to draw your own conclusions about which guidelines may clash with the new Executive Order.

Objectively speaking from a medical perspective, the logic behind EO 14201 lacks merit with regard to the participation of transgender athletes in esports, as transgender participants pose no threat of physical harm to biologically female participants. Safety is a major point of focus in Section 4, Subsection a.i and Subsection b.ii of EO 14201 and though this subject matter got particularly nasty during some of the combat sports in the Paris Olympics in 2024, there is no reason that safety would ever be relevant in CS2, or any esport for that matter.

Additionally, the other facet of Section 4 of EO 14201 focuses on fairness, and there is no scientific evidence of any biological advantage for transgender Impact players over their biologically cis-female peers.

There is no scientific consensus on the sex-based differences in reaction time, with one study even suggesting that when one accounts for the physiologic differences in muscle mass when testing reaction time in sprinting track athletes, the female athletes may actually process neural stimuli faster and the slower burst out of the starting blocks is more attributable to their muscular development to generate force quickly than their neural perception of auditory and visual stimuli.

With no clear consensus on this matter, and the difference in average reaction time between the sexes in this study being 25 milliseconds, there is no actionable advantage in reaction time from a biological perspective in esports, despite there being a statistically significant difference between the sexes in the study. Skill ceiling within the esport is much more likely to be based on experience and learned or trained behavior as a result, rather than biological traits.

Other studies actually suggest that age has a bigger impact on performance on fine motor precision tests (ie. using a mouse) than biological sex. So, from a purely scientific perspective at this point you may have more reason to be concerned about enlisting the services of Jarosław "pashaBiceps" Jarząbkowski than a biological female if you're trying to keep your ESEA Intermediate team's playoff chances afloat with an elite head clicker.

Obviously Papito's experience, knowledge, and previous skill ceiling tip this calculus in his favor, which only further highlights the absurdity of hanging one's hate on parameters like reaction time and other measurables to gatekeep a transgender participant from playing in a biologically female esports league.

You can have the world's best reaction time and still lack the skills to be an effective CS2 competitor, while conversely you could become an elite talent while still having a non-elite reaction time. ESL Impact's intent is to make the game of Counter-Strike more accessible to communities that struggled to find representation within the esport, and permitting transgender competitors does not erode that mission or ruin the experience for other players.

So, while science does not conclude that transgender participants in ESL Impact offer their teams an advantage, nor do they pose a safety threat to their opponents, we will still likely see the quality of competition in the ESL Impact Season 7 Finals decreased by teams needing to field stand-ins to replace players who encounter visa issues.

Alexander “DoktorWaldo” Waldherr is a board-certified family medicine physician and is the current sports medicine fellow at Southern Illinois University.