Man in surf contest lineup brings debate over transgender women in sports to Santa Cruz

On Saturday morning, Oct. 19, on Capitola Beach, a 40-year-old veteran surfer named Calder Nold (6-foot-2, 220 pounds) took to the waves to participate in a well-known local surf contest that has been taking place for almost 30 years. The name of the contest is Women On Waves, and it is exactly what it sounds like – a longboard contest for women surfers of all ages.

Calder Nold, it should be noted, is not a woman.

Nold’s entrance in the lineup that morning surprised everybody — spectators, competitors and the contest’s organizers. Many called for his immediate disqualification, and the event’s organizers moved quickly to confront him after his heat. 

Some have been protesting women-only events and spaces for years, on the grounds that such events are unfairly exclusionary to men. But that’s not what happened in Capitola. 

Nold, a local surf teacher whose students include many women, is an outspoken advocate for women’s competitions, and has trained several women for the Women On Waves event. He was registered for the contest by his friend and student, EmilyAnne Pillari, a female surfer who had participated in the event herself in years past. In the moment, Pillari instantly took responsibility for the stunt. She did it, she said, not for the benefit of men, but to protect other women competitors – against potentially bigger, stronger and faster trans athletes.

The incident is the latest flare-up of a debate that has emerged specifically around women’s sports nationally and even globally. As women’s events become more accessible to transgender and nonbinary participants, some like EmilyAnne Pillari are asking: Who gets to participate? And where are those lines drawn around women’s competitions?

For the record, Women On Waves is open to women and those who identify as women, which, according to Pillari, creates a loophole in which cisgender women would have to compete with other surfers who might have an unfair physiological advantage over them. 

Pillari was not suggesting that Nold had an inherent right to compete in Women On Waves as a man. She said only that the contest’s rules allowing transgender women open a door that undermines the entire point of women-only athletic events. 

“The struggle when transgender women are competing in women’s events,” she said, “is that nobody feels like they can speak up and say, ‘Hey, that’s not fair. That person is a biological male.’ Because it would violate how that person identifies. And so my point was, it really doesn’t matter how you identify. That is not the issue.”

The issue, she said, is the potential for women’s athletic achievements to be erased by transgender athletes on the basis of biological and physiological differences between women and men. 

“What really got me thinking about this issue,” she said, “was realizing that my sister-in-law holds records at her high school for track and field from 20 years ago, and thinking about those records being broken, and my nieces not growing up to see my sister-in-law’s name on the wall, because a guy broke her records. That just broke my heart. When you think about all the hard work that we put in to have our own sporting events and divisions and then to have it be shattered by men, it’s just not right.”

One of Women On Waves’ coordinators, Corey Grace, sees it differently. “We’ve had some really good and healthy conversations with other entities around this topic,” she said. “I think the disappointing part in the way that EmilyAnne had approached things was that she kind of created a spectacle of what’s a great event, instead of just coming to us directly to have a conversation like a mature adult.”

Calder Nold, the man in the center of the controversy, said he participated in the event to draw attention to the loophole in any guideline that allows for the participation of anyone who claims to identify as a woman. He did it, he said, because he knew many women who didn’t feel free to protest: “My goal was to give a platform for women to speak on a topic [on which] many of them feel their mouths and hands bound.”

Nold called the organizers of the events “bullies” for the way they confronted him on the beach. “The interaction was a bullying interaction,” he said. “They came up to me aggressively. Their tones, their body language, the way they walked. They were like, ‘You’re messing this up for everybody. You are just destroying this. Hope you’re happy with your decision to destroy this.’ And they asked me, ‘Do you identify as a woman?’ I said, ‘I’m not answering. I don’t have to answer it. I don’t feel comfortable answering that.’”

It is a telling indication of the supercharged political environment around gender these days that a controversy over trans participation in sports erupted in an athletic event that actually included no transgender athlete — or, at least, was not believed to include a transgender athlete.

The flap also comes at the tail end of a year in which the Trump campaign and other Republican campaigns used trans women’s participation in women’s and girls’ sporting events as primary talking points in political ads and debates. 

There is little to no evidence that trans women or nonbinary athletes are crowding out cis women in sporting events on any significant level. There are a tiny number of trans women and nonbinary athletes who have achieved success in high-level competition, including swimmer Lia Thomas and middle-distance runner Nikki Hiltz, who grew up in Santa Cruz County. Still, trans people make up less than 1% of the U.S. population, and trans women are an even smaller segment of that. The percentage of that population that participates in sports is smaller still, and there is no evidence that the percentage of trans women participating in competitive or professional sports is any different than that in the general population.

Those kinds of small numbers fit in with the experience at Women On Waves. “We have one trans person who participates in our event, out of 300 people,” said Aylana Zanville, one of the event’s organizers. “And the one trans woman [who participated in 2023], none of us knew she was trans, nobody questioned it, and she had a great time.”

Still, some high-profile cisgender athletes have spoken out on the issue in what they see as defense of cisgender women, such as British Olympic gold medal-winning runner Sebastian Coe, who is now president of the international sports governing body World Athletics. Coe is on record as stating that “gender cannot trump biology.”

What’s at stake here are two competing notions of fairness: the fairness of women to compete on a level playing field in sports and competition, and the fairness of trans people to participate in any and every arena of life that the vast majority of Americans take for granted. The debate also zeroes in on the lack of broad scientific consensus on sex differences and how they intersect with ever-shifting social notions of gender. 

At the heart of the issue is testosterone, the powerful hormone produced in males at much higher levels than in females that regulates sex differences universally associated with men, including facial hair, a deeper voice and, central to this debate, greater and differently distributed muscle mass. But some cisgender women have higher levels of testosterone, and some men have much lower levels of it than the average male. Until 2021, the International Olympic Committee had set limits on testosterone levels for anyone participating in women’s sports. Now, in a reversal of its past rules, the IOC says there should be no presumption that trans women have any kind of advantage over cis women.

However, in her argument, EmilyAnne Pillari cited a 2023 “statement” released by the American College of Sports Medicine that argued: “Biological sex is a primary determinant of athletic performance because of fundamental sex differences in anatomy and physiology dictated by sex chromosomes and sex hormones. Adult men are typically stronger, more powerful, and faster than women of similar age and training status. Thus, for athletic events and sports relying on endurance, muscle strength, speed, and power, males typically outperform females by 10%–30% depending on the requirements of the event.” But it also acknowledged “gaps in the knowledge of sex differences in athletic performance and the underlying mechanisms, providing substantial opportunities for high-impact studies.”

Testosterone levels in trans women are generally affected by gender-affirming hormone therapy, and in many cases, such therapy can drop testosterone levels to the range of most cis females. But a study at Boston University concluded that those results represented only about a quarter of trans women, while another quarter fell below typical male levels but not to the point of most cis females. 

To UC Santa Cruz lecturer Mallory McLaren, much of the protesting of trans women participating in women’s sports is disingenuous. McLaren, 43, is a trans woman who participated in crew/rowing in her 20s when she was studying abroad.

“On the one hand, [critics of transgender athletes] are saying there should be no gender-affirming health care for individuals until they turn 18,” she said. “And then in the same breath, they say, if you did not undertake steps to place yourself in physiological and medical conformity with your intended or stated gender before you’re 18, then you shouldn’t be able to compete. There’s no way that trans folks or non-cis folks can win. It equates to me, when you add it all up, to bigotry, trying to ‘other-ize’ non-cis people.”

McLaren was not aware of the Women On Waves event and knows none of the people involved in the controversy. But she said she calls similar trans-in-sports controversies “a solution in search of a problem.” She feels that trans people already feel the weight of public disapproval in the realm of participating in sports. 

“I just don’t see that many non-cis people who are out playing sports,” she said. “Most people who aren’t cis, and even younger people who aren’t cis, they are, it seems to me, kind of afraid to go out and play sports. They feel like those doors are already closed for them. So we’re talking about a population of people who already don’t feel welcomed and invited, and aren’t present in great numbers on courts or fields already.”

As for the organizers of Women On Waves, they are affirming the event’s openness to all women, cis and trans alike. This year, the event had about 300 participants. Co-organizers Aylana Zanville and Marisol Godínez, who have been spearheading the event since 2018, said that gender has never been an issue at the event.

“I think last year, maybe for the first time, we had a trans person enter our event,” said Zanville. “But we didn’t even know it [at the time]. I mean, if you appear to be female, we’re just not going to question your identity.”

To be fair to cis women, Pillari said that hormone testing is unreliable in determining who can fairly compete as a woman. She proposed chromosomal testing. (Females are identified by two X chromosomes, while males have one X and one Y — although, in extremely rare cases, XX males and XY females do exist.) 

In high-profile competitions with high awards or prizes that make or break professional careers, such testing might be feasible, though it will likely remain controversial. But events like Women On Waves are decidedly low-stakes affairs, and asking volunteer coordinators of a community event to carry out chromosomal testing, as well as requiring weekend surfers to submit their DNA to compete, is something that could wipe out such events altogether.

“It’s an amateur longboarding contest,” said co-organizer Godínez. “It’s basically a fundraiser. The competition aspect of it is there, but it’s not necessarily our main focus. We really just want to highlight the camaraderie between women and provide a supportive environment for women and anyone who identifies as a woman to participate.”

The only change in the contest planned for 2025 and beyond is that it will now require a signed waiver from all people who register saying they will identify as female. Such a waiver would prevent a repeat of an obviously cisgender man competing in the event. But it won’t do much to address what Pillari believes to be the central issue.

“I’m not saying that [transgender women] can’t surf or anything like that,” she said. “It’s just that I want to compete against other biological females. That’s why women’s sports were created.”

Repeating that she does not know anyone involved in the surf contest, Mallory McLaren said that everyone might benefit from an earnest and good-faith conversation on transgender women in sports. But what Pillari did at Women On Waves is not the way to go about it.

“This is objectively not serious,” she said. “It’s sensationalist, and it’s grandstanding and sideshowing. I don’t feel like we can have a serious conversation until we can be serious about it.”

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