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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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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 insisting arguing 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:

LGBTQI advocacy groups say excluding trans athletes amounts to discrimination but WA President Sebastian Coe has said: "Decisions are always difficult when they involve conflicting needs and rights between different groups, but we continue to take the view that we must maintain fairness for female athletes above all other considerations.

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.

As @rae alludes to below, the culture war implications of trans women in sports overshadow any actual concern for female athletes. The attitude of conservatives towards women's sports in my lifetime has been blase at best and condemnatory at worst. The most popular women's sport by far is tennis, but even there, a quick perusal of the world rankings reveals no household names. The biggest women's college event of the year is the NCAA tournament, and that isn't exactly a hot ticket. When Pitt basketball student tickets were hard to come by, the lottery system in place gave you credit for the number of women's games you went to just to boost attendance. The discussion about Title IX below had an air of incredulity about it, suggesting that if it were costing OCR this much to enforce equality among men's and women's sports, perhaps we were better off without it. I doubt many conservatives would care too much either way; they might not exactly rail against the idea of a school being forced to spend ungodly sums on unprofitable women's sports because they spend millions on the football team, but if the law changed tomorrow and colleges started shutting down women's teams or at least restricting them (playing locally as independents rather than flying them all across the ACC footprint or whatever) I imagine the arguments would mirror those they make when one someone suggests WNBA salaries should be on par with the men.

And then when a trans person goes from being ranked 400th nationally to 38th in a sport no one cares about regardless of what gender is playing it because they won some tournament that most people haven't heard of but is supposedly kind of prestigious, women's sports become a sacred thing that must be protected at all costs. I understood that there was real concern in the early days of the trans saga when advocates were arguing that personal identity trumps all and it raised the specter of failed male athletes ticking a box differently just to get a chance to compete, or for scholarship money, or whatever. But the relevant governing bodies imposed testosterone limits, and while we can argue that those limits are too high or too low, we can't argue that no man is meeting the most lenient ones without taking supplemental estrogen. The effects of taking supplemental estrogen are such that it's doubtful that any man would undergo this treatment just for a shot at playing organized sports in a discipline that offers no hope of making any money as a professional. Do they have a competitive advantage? Maybe, but I don't really care. The trans population is small enough that it's probably not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, and you never hear about the trans athletes who don't win anything. One thing you never hear about is what the actual women athletes have to say about this. Governing bodies don't seem to be too concerned, and polls have repeatedly shown that the competitors aren't either. And if those most at stake don't care, then why should we? After all, when it comes to the priority of things, sports are pretty far down the list.

With the talk of tran mma competing as women can someone give me a run down on how this ever came to pass? I would have assumed mma = not woke. And trans men would have always been banned from fighting women.

An mtf tranny in MMA was actually one of the earlier men in women's sports controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallon_Fox

An mtf tranny

Don't do this. Directly using slurs (as in "use," not "mention") is a direct violation of several of our rules.

Didn't realize it was considered a slur here, sorry.

Come on, dude. It's a slur everywhere. Nobody uses it except to be insulting. (No, don't point to the handful of trans people who use it to refer to themselves. You also can't call black people "niggers" here just because some black people use it amongst themselves.)

Not objecting to your original modpost, but I think you're incorrectly excluding the "is clueless" category here. This strikes me as a thing where lots of people are clueless, and more than that as a thing where there's a fixed supply of clues.

Yeah, the original modpost even makes for a very nice clue.

Personally, I think banning slurs here is a good idea, just because it's really hard to regulate the actual principle.

Which is, you can use whatever language you want as long as you don't start wielding it as a tool of war. We're fine with calling ourselves "tranny gayfucks" or whatever because we know each other's motives well enough to have faith in it's lightheartedness. Or on 4chan because threats aren't credible anyway and desensitizing to toxic language is fun.

A semi-anonymous internet culture war thread where you're not supposed to be waging culture war is a trickier situation.

Nah, it's just what spending too much time on 4chan normalizes