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Gender Identity and Sports - Once More Around The Track
There has been ample discussion regarding whether trans women should be able to compete in women’s sports, ranging situations as unpopular as Fallon Fox celebrating the bliss of fracturing women’s skulls in cage fights to the silliness of the Boston Marathon extending women’s qualifying times to anyone that says they’re non-binary. For better or worse, some of this is starting to wash out to actual policies at the highest levels of sports, with World Athletics banning trans women from competing as women in the Olympics. Personally, I would regard this as an obvious and easy decision, with no reasonable debate to be had. For the other side, here’s trans sprinter Halba Diouf’s feelings on not being allowed to compete as a woman and here is Science
insistingarguing that the null hypothesis should that be trans women don’t necessarily have an advantage.This is sufficiently well-worn territory that I don’t really expect anything fresh to be said at this point. Instead, I want to focus on something that I’ve always personally thought was quite a lot more difficult to judge correctly, which is athletes that were assigned female at birth, but have conditions that cause them to have abnormally high testosterone, such as XY chromosomes. In recent years, this seems to be coming up more often, possibly because of awareness of it being a thing that happens, possibly because the increased money and visibility of women’s sports has begun to select for increasing levels of biologically unusual people, or possibly because of something that’s not occurring to me. The first one I was aware of was Castor Semenya, who I’ve always had a soft spot for because it seems like a really tough break to have been born labeled as a girl, lived your life as a woman, competed and won at the highest levels, then get told, “nope, sorry, your chromosomes don’t match, so you’re banned in the future”. I hope that regardless of my positions on these issues to always extend that basic level of empathy to someone who truly was not at fault in the creation of a difficult situation.
I recently bumped into an article tying the plight of Diouf to a Senagalese sprinter who turned out to have XY chromosomes and high T, resulting in a ban from the Olympics and this is what gets to the heart of the matter:
First, I’d like to note that this objectively is discrimination and that takes us right to the heart of the point - having a women’s category in sports is inherently discriminatory. That’s the whole point, to discriminate men from women and create a category that is feasible for the best women to win, hence we must determine what a woman is for the purposes of that competition. That a policy is discriminatory simply cannot suffice as an argument against it, particularly when the whole point of the category is to implement a form of discrimination!
Second, I think Coe’s answer is correct and neatly covers all of these scenarios. I used to have a tough time with them, precisely because of the desire to be fair to women like Semenya, but the reality is that Caster Semenya simply isn’t a female and the whole point of women’s sports is to allow women to compete on equal footing against other women. That this will feel unfair and exclusionary to some tiny percentage of the population that has either a gender identity disorder or chromosomal abnormality is barely an argument at all - elite athletics isn’t actually an inclusive activity, it is exclusive and filters for the absolute best in the world for a given ruleset. Within track, use of performance-enhancing drugs is strictly monitored, with spikes in biological passports used to ban athletes even if what they used cannot be identified. With such tight constraints and rules on what physical specifications athletes are allowed to have, I no longer favor something so inclusive as to allow XY or other gender-abnormal athletes to compete - the women have to be actual women competing against other actual women. If nothing else, Lia Thomas has helped provide me some clarity on the absurdity of muscle-bound, testosterone-fueled males in women’s sports.
Do people on both side of the debate actually care about women's sports, or is it just an excuse to wage the culture war? I don't care about sports one bit so I'm perhaps biased, but it's fairly obvious that testosterone is a (natural) performance enhancing drug with permanent effects, and that you're not separating by sex/gender as much as by hormonal level - it's not "women's sports" as much as "women with T levels below X sports", otherwise women with endocrine conditions wouldn't be barred. I assume if a female took T during her teenage years but later detransitioned and then had normal female hormone levels, she would still be barred from women's sports - otherwise isn't that a huge loop-hole?
In the more general case, I also assume if there was a doping agent that had permanent effects even if the athlete stopped taking it and had undetectable levels during drug testing, they would also be banned from competing.
As a compromise, I think trans women should compete in sports where there testosterone does not give you an advantage, such as long-distance swimming, fast climbing, equestrian sports, shooting, etc.
I love sports and I love women's mma but otherwise I have zero interest in women's sports.
I do, however, care about living in reality and living in a world that acknowledges some truths.
One of those truths is someone who went through male puberty will always, in every single case, have a competitive advantage over a woman.
I don't even really care that some weightlifting record has been broken or some high school girls might lose a scholarship. If anything, I think it's funny.
I just care that people are pretending about the realities of this situation.
Are you saying that every single person who went through male puberty can beat any woman, including top-level female athlete? That would be blatantly false. Obviously the average male beats the average female, and top-level male beats top-level females, but a top-level female will beat the average male. See average mile run times: 6:30 for top 1% of males, 7:48 for top 1% of females, 8:18 for top 50% of males, 9:51 for top 50% of females. Interestingly enough, the female mile run record is 4:12.33 while the male world record from 1913 was 4:14.4 - the advantages of modern nutrition, sports science etc. can outweigh male puberty without it.
The extreme of rightist gender essentialism is just as wrong as leftist blank slatism, humans aren't that sexually dimorphic a species that you can make such blanket absolute statements. Personally, I went through male puberty, but in high school the female athletes routinely trounced me in every sport or measure of physical fitness. In phys ed I even remember having to play with the girls because I had 0 chance with the boys. This is despite me working out a decent amount - I just didn't have the bone structure or metabolism the other teen boys did.
I wanted to add a follow-up to @KMC 's comment, where he beat me to pointing out the straw-man.
Sex differences do confer tremendous advantages for the median male over the median female in sports. For example, one well-cited study suggested: "The results of female national elite athletes even indicate that the strength level attainable by extremely high training will rarely surpass the 50th percentile of untrained or not specifically trained men".
The difference in athletic distribution between males and females is so great that not only is the combined distribution bimodal, it's qualitatively different. Given tail effects and a roughly bell-curve distribution, this competitive advantage is only exacerbated at the tails.
It's basically a dog-bites-man story nowadays each time some regional-level mid-teens boys team defeats a professional, even-Olympic-level, women's team. Hockey and football/soccer have provided a regular reminder.
Aside from mandatory PE classes, throughout my teenage years I rarely played any sports with girls due to the gulf in athleticism between teenage boys and girls. The limited times that I did was generally because a local girl's team was competitive on the national-level, and thus invited a given team of mine for a friendly to help them prep in giving them better competition than a local girl's team could.
We'd be instructed by our coaches and asked by the girls to play normally, but it was tough. We would basically treat the girls as fine china, playing tentatively and being extra careful not to hurt them. Chivalry runs deep. It felt weird playing in a friendly against opponents who were, on average, so much smaller, slower, and weaker than us. They even seemed to have slower reaction times, like they were running on constant lag. Maneuvering or dribbling around the girls wasn't all that more difficult than doing so around traffic cones.
It would quickly devolve to us going 1 on N_sport against them on offense ("your turn" then "my turn" to solo and shoot), and 0-2 on N_sport on defense (we'd lazily jog or walk back), where N_sport is the number of players typically on the court/pitch/field/or whatever, depending on sport. Our coaches would typically reduce the numbers of players on our side until the play became more balanced. It'd generally have to get under 0.5*N_sport until things got more interesting.
One thing that's really striking to me about this is how the advantage grows when it's multi-dimensional sports like football, basketball, hockey, soccer, and so on. When there is just one dimension to focus on, the best women are very good, with elite female runners coming up only ~12% short of what men accomplish at pretty much every distance from sprinting to marathoning. Suffice it to say, the result is that very few men are even close to the best women. In stark contrast, those multi-dimensional sports demand strength, speed, size, reaction times, hand-eye coordination, change of direction, and so on, making each dimension one where the best women won't be close to the men and even the women that are best at one thing are greatly inferior to male peers along others.
From a personal experience standpoint, I'm a smallish guy that grew up focusing on basketball (bad choice, whatever), then adopted endurance sports in my mid-20s. I'm a better runner than I was a basketball player due to my size and this makes me just barely good enough to beat most local women in a 10K, but still slower than D1 athletes. In contrast, when I'd play basketball, the physical gap is enormous, just absolutely ridiculous that it takes an incredibly skilled woman to even make it close. Even as a slender guy, the strength, coordination, aggression, and leaping are just so large of advantages.
I don't suppose I have a specific point other than that men and women are obviously very different and that I think people that deny this are basically just lying through their teeth or have absolutely no experience with physicality.
Crazy that I hadn't actually thought about this specific point until you made it.
I mean, I get that men having greater muscle density results in them being more physically capable across the board. So same conclusion.
But that is really it. A woman who is a genetic freak might be able to train some specific skill to the point she's actually a notable elite at that skill. Kicking, throwing, running agility routes, SOMETHING.
But her overall utility to a team is based on a whole package of skills, and if she minmaxes so she's competent at one, she'll end up radically deficient in the others, so she'd almost by definition be a liability.
This is even demonstrated in the relatively simplified sport of gymnastics. Females compete in four different categories, men in six.
https://gamerules.com/mens-vs-womens-gymnastics/
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Yeah, it’s always reminded me of (the inverse of) Lewontin’s Fallacy.
Among a pool of athletic women, a given woman might only be somewhat slower and slower-reacting than a given athletic man in those two individual dimensions—and almost certainly much smaller, weaker in the dimensions of size and strength (among others)—thus, as a result, the median athletic woman in terms of overall athleticness is a universe away from the median athletic man when evaluated via the first principal component.
That's also true for psychometric traits and gender expression as well. Women and men overlap massively in each psychometric trait or each way they express gender, but if you look at them all at once in a higher dimensional space the gulf between them is massive and binary. It's why all these claims that gender is really a spectrum fall flat on me. It's easy to tell these 'non-binary' people are really binary if you look at all their behaviors at once.
As someone with the letter X on their driver's license, I find this a little funny. Let's assume you're correct, and I fall smack dab in the middle of the side of a high dimensional bimodal distribution with other AMABs.
It still comes off as weird and subversive that I eat estrogen pills for breakfast no? The doctor is still going to be confused if I tell him I'm a man and hand him my hormone test results. TSA still stops Trans girls for having a dick in their pants.
If some of the dimensions of your gender expression are off the charts outliers, I think it still makes sense to make room for the term 'non-binary' in relevant contexts, if not as a personal identifier.
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