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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.
Any organized competitive activity will certainly require a set of rules (and will inspire a corresponding set of rules lawyers). Those rules almost always include some element of eligibility ("This is a human running race; horses cannot enter; humans aided by segways cannot enter...").
Which brings to my mind an analogy that might be useful to get more left-leaning folks thinking about the topic differently: the special olympics/paralympics. I have no idea what rules they use, but I am 100% confident that they must have some set of eligibility rules. At some point, people sat down and said, "No, your specific condition does not qualify you to participate in the special olympics/paralympics." Any such set of rules is invariably going to have edge cases. (It's invariably going to inspire a set of rules lawyers, too.) There are going to be people who think it's unfair that they're not allowed to compete. There are going to be people who think it's unfair that someone else is allowed to compete. I think everyone can be aboard the train this far.
First off, I cannot possibly fathom someone on the left agreeing to a proposed rule of, "Anyone who self-identifies as 'special' is automatically eligible." This at least gets them into the right ballpark and out of the bailey.
Then, the motte about burden-of-proof shifting. The much harder position to crack is the claim, "We just need you to provide extensive peer-reviewed evidence that this person would have a competitive advantage." Here is where they set up a hundred foot wall and say, "If you can't crack this, we're back to the bailey of self-identification." However, again, let's go back to the special olympics/paralympics. There is an absolute myriad of specific situations/conditions that someone might think should qualify them for the special olympics/paralympics. It would be an utterly impossible standard to say, "Whelp, if you can't bring metareviews of peer-reviewed research showing that this particular condition, experienced by like 100 people on the planet (99 of which aren't competitive in the sport in question), does not unfairly situate them with respect to the other competitors, then you have to just go back to accepting everyone who self-identifies as 'special'."
Perhaps I'm wrong. If anyone here is "pro self-identification in women's sports" and also "pro self-identification in special olympics/paralympics" on the same grounds of requiring this type of peer-reviewed evidence, I'm all ears.
As an interesting note, I learned recently that the best bench pressers in the world, by the typical measure used, are all in the
special olympicsparalympics. This is because the typical measure used is a ratio of weight lifted to bodyweight (or essentially this using weight classes). And, well, the people who max out this metric are all some form of leg amputee or other condition that results in extremely underdeveloped legs. They don't get the same "leg drive" strength that other lifters get, but the simple fact that they're not "wasting" bodyweight on a part of the body which isn't that useful for the bench press is more than enough to make up for it. I imagine that powerlifting federations don't have to go out of their way to exclude these people, because they probably are just happy doing what they're doing and have no need to jump into a powerlifting meet. Powerlifters are supposed to squat and deadlift, too, which they just can't do, so they probably don't bother, because all they'd be accomplishing is putting their name at the top of the bench board and everyone else being annoyed, mentally ignoring them, thinking, "Well, of course, there's that guy, but I set the real top bench number." Politics is dumb, though, and I sort of view the whole drive to require trans eligibility as politically-motivated; it would be akin to a political movement to do something dumb like try to wreck powerlifting federations with amputees just because your politics tells you to be an asshole.I think it’s a bit simpler than that. The biggest drawback to natal males in women’s leagues is that it’s basically legalized cheating. And the real harms are economic: scholarships for women going to men, women being shut out of the Olympics (which often gives athletes enough recognition that they can endorse products), and women’s professional sports being entirely populated by natal males.
Women’s soccer is a case in point. Most colleges have a female soccer squad. But the physical abilities of women who play soccer is such that just about any decent male high school player can get a full-ride scholarship to play soccer on the women’s team. And schools knowing this will absolutely run with it. Find a guy willing to take just enough blockers and estrogen to qualify as a woman, wear a dress on campus, and get a free college education. It’s kind of reverse doping. But schools who make money by having really good female teams wouldn’t care much and would want as many natal males on their teams as possible. Which naturally means that for sports like that (and probably softball and tennis and lacrosse as well) any women trying out would be denied opportunities. They simply can’t keep up physiologically. So if these women needed a scholarship to be able to afford school, it sucks to be them.
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