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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.
The actual utility of determining who is the 'Fastest Woman' or 'Fastest Man' is non-existent and society's interest in elite sports is in entertainment and propagandizing physical fitness. Anyone who is an Olympic finalist at something like the 800m is the recipient of profound genetic gifts, and the concept of fairness between them and the average person is laughable. Excluding an extreme outlier in terms of genetic advantage for the benefit of a cluster of the far far right tail of the distribution doesn't seem to have much to do with 'fairness' for the general population.
Semenya differs in that her genetic advantage is larger, traceable to a single chromosome, and used to construct a category of social solidarity. If Semenya wins over and over XX women may be less inspired to participate in athletics since they cannot identify with her as an intersex person. Or if there is a single gene which gives massive athletic advantage among 'women' then women without that gene would be less inspired to compete. The carve out for women's sports is an acknowledgement that it is worth creating categories for people genetically disadvantaged at athletics so that even though they can never really be the best they can still be honored for fulfilling their potential, even if it's limited.
The fun futuristic version of this to me would be if we eventually develop some way of calculating genetic advantage from DNA and creating athletic 'gene classes' for different sports. If we're worried XX women will be less inspired to compete if someone with an identifiable genetic advantage like Semenya wins than shouldn't we be worried about short men, or people born with poor biomechanics not competing? In the short term something like height classes in basketball seems like an obvious starting point.
Perish the thought! How could we, as a society, endorse such a thing?!
Like, I'm sorry, but do you think it's bad to encourage people to be physically fit?
To add onto Ec's reply, I think the argument they were trying to make is that the Olympics and all other televised major sports sell a subtly/deceptively-unrealistic image of human capabilities. Frankly, I think a lot of sports-related marketing also does that (athletes on the Wheaties boxes!), and if, instead, we were honest while still trying to make sports a thing for everyone, we'd probably have to become bio-realist to some degree.
I don't see how the Olympics presents an "unrealistic" image of the human body when it's explicitly marketed as an event meant to showcase the absolute peak of human fitness. If it were marketed as "anyone can do this if they put their mind to it" then fair enough, but I really don't know that that's how the event is marketed. Does the Nobel Prize* present an unrealistic image of the capacities of the human brain by handing out awards to the brightest people in the world?
*Peace and Literature excluded.
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