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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.
This entire conversation gets to the root of 2 questions about segregation:
Is sex based segregation fundamentally different from every other kind of segregation by group ?
Is all segregation a form of affirmative action ? There are always group level differences, and the lower-performing group benefits from segregation.
I've always figured the common sense reasons were still applicable: safety, and fairness.
Weight classes in combat sports are another form of segregation (although one is allowed to move up or down in weight, of course), but I think it is nearly universally agreed that this makes for more fair and exciting competition and ensures more safety since smaller fighters won't have to duke it out with guys who have 100 pounds on them.
We could lump everyone into one big class and just let people fight with whomever they want, but I daresay that they would naturally recreate the existing categories as smaller fighters wouldn't want to risk injury in fights they can't even win, so they'd opt to fight each other, only.
I expect almost the exact same would occur if we did away with all distinctions between athlete classes and let them 'voluntarily' choose who they are and are not willing to compete against. Women would probably clump together since they'd not want to risk injury by larger males and would want to feel they have a chance at winning on their own skill. And there'd probably be a, uh, selection effect whereupon women who chose to compete against men would get injured and drop out of the sport or get so bored with getting trounced continually that they just quit.
So in sports competition it's often the case that they're aiming for fairness in competition, and the underlying safety of the sport, while honestly trying to open up eligibility to as many as possible.
All of which are pretty handily achieved by separating out women's sports.
There are other ways to partition things, of course. We do have sports leagues specifically set aside for disabled athletes, and I think absolutely fucking NOBODY would seriously suggest doing away with those leagues in the name of equality. So in short yeah, we kinda do find certain sorts of light segregation to be acceptable.
Marketability and aesthetics matter here too. When I discuss MMA with other fans, I don't think I've ever met someone whose favorite weight-class is heavyweight. If we take the general claim that people want to watch the best athletes in the world at a given sport, this is actually a pretty interesting result! Elite heavyweights would surely handle lighter fighters without any real trouble and we've even smaller jumps like Izzy Adesanya moving up and struggling against Jan Blachowicz because of their visible power differential. And yet, the guys I like watching the most are welterweights (170 pound weight class), and I think that's a pretty common opinion due to the depth of the weight class, excellent speed and conditioning, while retaining enough power for knockouts to be a constant threat.
I think sports that are banning trans women and placing other restrictions on sex anomalies are certainly focusing on safety and fairness, as you mention, but it does seem like there might be a bit of marketability and aesthetics involved in decision-making for sports where revenue is involved. Is it possible that people just think it looks stupid to have mannish-looking XY women dominating track races? This could be a combination of fairness, marketability, and aesthetics.
I know nothing about MMA. If all weight classes were abolished, would it essentially just be the heaviest fighters at the top? Is weight such a dominant factor that there's no point where some combination of diminishing returns, weight/agility tradeoff, and the larger population in the lower weight classes would yield a smaller top ranked fighter?
Maybe that point exists, but it doesn't exist below cutoff for moving into the heavyweight division, which is at 205 pounds. Above that, the tradeoffs apparently do start happening with speed and coordination, because heavyweight is the only UFC weight class that isn't strictly dominated by people fighting right at the weight limit for their class. Heavyweights must be 265 pounds or less, but there are occasional champions and many competitive fighters that weigh in around the 230s.
In lower divisions where the gaps are only 10-15 pounds, fighters due move between weight classes with some success, thanks in part to how weight cutting works - a guy that fights at 145 often weighs 155 before their final cut and may walk around at 165 before starting their training camp and leaning up a bit. With proper notice, fighting at 155 instead of 145 becomes feasible for quite a few guys. Connor McGregor won titles at 145 and 155, then tried to move up to 170 and failed pretty badly, losing the power advantage he had at lighter weights while also losing speed as he gained weight.
So, yeah, to a first approximation there would be no such thing as 155-pound fighters if weight classes didn't exist. Guys that currently fight at 205 or in rare cases 185 may be able to bulk up enough to compete in an open division, but it would be more or less strictly required to be 220 pounds or heavier to be competitive.
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