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Notes -
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.
Why do crocodiles ambush prey crossing the river instead of coming on land to snatch them?
Sports is where the weakness of the "trans(wo)men are (wo)men" is most visible, and where the apparent moral highground of progressives defending the weak against bullies is reversed. It's the ideal terrain for conservatives. So that's where they choose to fight, hoping victory there translates to victory elsewhere.
Exactly, which is my point in general. It's not about sports, it's about using sports as a pretext to attack trans people. This is why I'm not as quick to dismiss progressive claims of racism, or sexism, or various phobias as I used to be. There is a core of true believers who are genuinely concerned about women's sports, and then there's a huge cadre of bandwagon jumpers who are simply disgusted by the entire notion of trans people and fear that any concession, no matter how minor, is going to poison the well and lead to a slippery slope where as Homer Simpson would put it, "the entire world's gone gay".
No, that's not my point. Sports is the best terrain to attack the idea of transgenderism. The fact a man is not a woman is never more manifest than when you set trained men and women against each other athletically. For anti-trans activists to choose the most favorable situation to make their case suggests nothing about their motives. Some may be motivated by phobia, others by reason or tribal affiliation or whatever; for anyone, it's the best place to set the battle lines.
I apologize that the language I used was probably stronger than what was warranted. But the general point remains—it's a less relevant side issue to attack a bigger idea. The problem is that attacking the bigger idea doesn't make sense unless there are concrete reasons to do so. If the best concrete argument you have for attacking the idea of transgenderism is that it has the potential to create unfair disparities in women's sports, then it doesn't come across as much of an argument to me, especially if criteria are put in place to mitigate those concerns and keep people from abusing the system. If the real reason you want to attack the idea of transgenderism simply boils down to "I just don't like the idea of it", then that's a pretty thin rhetorical reed.
There are a lot of people with comprehensive and well articulated arguments to trans issues, but an even bigger group of people who don't want to listen to them.
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It's the one that is most obvious but the implications are much broader. We have protections for women's spaces in our society for very real reasons and allowing males into those spaces because they want in has real harms. Prisons are another concrete example but people care more about athletes than criminals so this is a better wedge issue.
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