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The premise that gender is merely a separate thing from sex was used as a foot in the door twenty years ago. No modern gender ideologue operates on the basis that biological sex is real and important today.
If you disagree, I will ask you the same thing as I asked Rae: go ahead edit the fact that Imane Khelif is male and that Elliot Page is female into their respective Wikipedia pages. If you manage to do that, I will concede that gender ideologues in the real world separate sex from gender identity.
Sure, that's what gender ideologues believe, but why shouldn't it be? Especially if they use their false claim to get special privileges, like Imane Khelif falsely claiming to be a woman to compete in the women's boxing tournament.
Again, that's perfectly reasonable up to the point where they make false claims to access resources they shouldn't have access to. The analogy fails because people with embarassing skin conditions or missing limbs don't generally claim to have flawless complexions or complete bodies.
The closest case I can think of is someone like Oscar Pistorius who is a sprinter with artifical legs who was eventually banned from competing against natural humans because he had an advantage over regular athletes. If we can ban Pistorius from men's sports, why can't we ban Khelif from women's sports?
Imane Khelif isn't even trans! By all accounts, she has a vagina and was raised as a girl, and she and her entire family have believed she is female her whole life. Even if she does have XY chromosomes (not confirmed), a hundred years ago we wouldn't have even known that and no one would have questioned her womanhood.
Whether Khelif is trans or has a vagina really depends on which definition you use, but let's talk about something more interesting:
I'm willing to believe that Khelif and her family assumed her female until puberty, but after that, they must have noticed something was up.
I find it hard to believe that even in a relatively poor country like Algeria, a teenage girl can go through puberty without ever menstruating or developing secondary sexual characteristics like breasts and hips, and nobody questions it or takes her to the doctor. Algeria is a poor country, but they're not that primitive. And even primitive peoples understand the basics of male and female anatomy pretty well.
And then of course there were all the failed sex tests: first by the IBA, and then by a private doctor in France in 2023, which Khelif later admitted confirmed he has male genetics and male typical testosterone levels.
Note that his was before the 2024 Olympics, when it became known that he had failed the IBA tests, but the results of his private tests weren't public knowledge yet. The IOC and various useful idiots spread the lie that the IBA results had been falsified by evil Russians. Khelif knew this wasn't true, because his own private results confirmed the IBA tests, but he never spoke up. This seems calculated.
Then later, in 2025, Khelif tried to participate in the boxing championship held in the UK, organized by World Boxing, the Western organization that was created to replace the IBA. They also required a sex test, which Khelif refused to take, despite being desparate to compete (he even sued the organization to force admission without doing the test, but lost). Why would a person who legitimately believes himself to be female refuse to take a sex test designed to confirm that fact?
So it's clear at this point Khelif knows he's genetically male, and that therefore he will never pass any test designed to screen out genetic males. He probably knew this at the 2024 Olympics, too, because he had already failed the IBA tests and had them confirmed by his own doctor. He was intentionally witholding that information.
A hundred years ago, she'd have been seen as a weird female. No one would have concluded she's actually male because she doesn't menstruate. She has a vagina! Or something that looks exactly like a vagina, if you want to nitpick. And what about people who have a set of chromosomes other than XX or XY? What about people with mosaicism?
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Photos from the Olympics clearly show Khelif being carried on their coach's shoulders and their coach's hands touching Khelif's bare skin. In theocratic MENA countries it's a big no-no for a man to touch the bare skin of a woman who isn't his wife (many women won't even shake hands with a man when meeting him). The coach definitely knew.
Strange, given Khelif has admitted it.
Algeria is relatively secular by MENA standards, and by no means "theocratic".
My bad, I haven't kept up with the news and it's not mentioned in the lead section of her Wikipedia article (it's buried at the bottom of the article).
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Sure, I'll happily keep my mouth shut about that should I ever encounter an obviously trans person in real life (by the way, that's another claim I've seen: 'you do know trans people, hundreds of them, you've met them, they're all around you'. Er, no.)
But when someone starts in about "how about we all share our pronouns?" or the likes and makes it about "let's not embarrass trans people by relying on visual identification where they don't pass, let's all share our pronouns so we're not outing anyone, even though we are in fact outing people" (and I'll admit that's often or mostly the allies, or some other branch of the LGBT+++ movement, not the trans people themselves doing it), then they make it about "I am clearly pretending to be something I'm not and demanding you openly accede to that verbally". If you're going to demand I say out loud "yes, Sally is a girl" then I reserve the right to say out loud "We all know Sally used to be John". I'm willing to exchange courtesy for courtesy and live-and-let-live, but not if I'm asked (or strongly encouraged) to participate in the pretence.
I did see an example in my own work life of someone firing off emails with their pronouns in the signature line, I don't know if this was something mandated by where they worked (because it was a couple of different people in the same organisation doing it) but thankfully that seems to have died a natural death. If you can't tell by my obviously female name what gender I present as, and we're never going to meet face-to-face, and you don't need to know my gender/sex/number of limbs, then why make a big deal out of it? I did not need to know that Susie was going by "she/her" in order to send back the completed form as requested per your last.
My mum argued that pronouns can be helpful, not for the purposes of trans inclusivity, but because sometimes she gets emails from people from foreign countries and isn't sure if their forename is a boy's or girl's name.
I pointed out that we used to have a perfectly effective means of solving this problem: Mr./Mrs./Ms. This seems like a great example of jugaad ethics.
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Also, the euphemistic "should" in "should keep that to yourself" is playing the part of a motte. I have no problem with the idea that it's just as impolite to point out that a transwoman looks ridiculous as it is to call attention to somebody's missing arm (although I would hope the transwoman had someone in their life who was honest with them). The actual bailey is "you MUST keep that to yourself, or you are a declared Enemy and we will publicly advocate for doxxing you, getting you fired, and (in the UK, at least) jailing you".
I agree. Part of the problem with the skin condition analogy is that the issue doesn't normally come up in ordinary life. The way you address a person isn't normally based on whether the person has clear skin. By contrast, you normally call a person "sir" or "ma'am" based on whether they are male or female. Similarly, people don't use a particular locker room based on whether or not they have a skin condition.
I think A better analogy would be if people with serious skin conditions were given access to special resources, for example more convenient parking spaces during the summer months so that they wouldn't have to spend as much time walking outdoors. And if a person with perfectly healthy skin was permitted to identify as having a skin condition and take advantage of this special access. And if anyone who complained about the situation (or who didn't go along with pretending that the person had a skin condition) were ostracized.
Indeed. Another real-world analogy would be "service animals" vs "pets". Nobody disputes that there are people who genuinely need the help of animals to get by (even if your definition is narrow enough to only include guide dogs). But a sensible policy of allowing exemptions for them very quickly escalated to an extreme level of abuse.
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