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This assumption probably won’t count as anything new, but it seems to me that the overall leftist strategy in the current culture war over (in essence) MtF transsexual boxers in the Olympic games hinges entirely on the following unstated assumptions: a) TV viewers generally aren’t that interested in women’s sports in the first place b) the sort of sports where these particular MtF athletes seem to predominantly want to excel at are generally seen as low-status in the eyes of suburban middle-class Blue Tribe normies c) the relative number of cissexual women genuinely interested in such sports is insignificantly low.
Imane Khalid is not trans. There’s a reasonable- but not ironclad- argument that she has an intersex condition which should preclude her from competing in the women’s division, but she just objectively isn’t trans.
Something just finally clicked for me.
For years, and years and years and years, the bailey of trans was defended with the motte of intersex. Arguments about how it occurs in nature played loose and fast with definitions of trans or intersex. Arguments about how it's genetic or something you were born with involved similar free association between trans or intersex. For 10 years the steelman for trans acceptance and "the science" involved quoting studies about intersex people.
And now, suddenly, when the wrong people are conflating the two in a bad way "Woah woah woah, she's not trans, she's intersex! There is a huge fucking difference, can't you tell? idiot."
And I almost fell for it. It's so easy to get caught up in current year and that tepid thread of logic from all of only a few years ago that brought us to this point get's washed away.
This is silly, it's important to actually get the facts straight and one shouldn't respond as if attacked when corrected on the facts. The question of how to categorize people with rare genetic defects and whether to rule them in or out of sports competitions are entirely different to the same questions applied to natal males or natal females who identify with the opposite sex and undergo treatment to approximate as much as possible the body and experience of the opposite sex. One can come to the same conclusion on both, and I broadly do, but we must actually keep our thinking straight here.
Who has corrected anyone on the facts here? The actual status of the controversial athletes is being deliberately hidden from the public, and the other side is just assuming that these hidden facts are always on their side.
Also please give me a definition of "trans person" that doesn't cover intersex people, before making fun of my "ignorance".
A trans person is a natal male or female that identifies with the opposite sex and seeks to undergo treatment to approximate the experience of the opposite sex as close as possible. An intersex person is someone who is born with a rare but identifiable physical ailment that complicates the standard XX/XY binary options that naturally describe male and female people. I'm very sympathetic to annoyance that the various authorities haven't clarified the situation but as far as I know no one who has looked into it seriously thinks this is a trans person.
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