or... wrote:
Armstronglivs wrote:
While women's sports remains a biologically-determined category there is no "solution" to trans participation in women's sports. Their participation defeats the purpose of having women's sport a protected category, and reducing t-levels remains only a partial compromise because there are still many other advantages that biological males will have. With "inclusivity", women must lose - literally. We see that is unimportant to trans advocates when they declare - falsely - that sport is inherently "unfair" because some competitors have advantages (like speed, strength and stamina) that others don't. That fundamentally distorts the whole meaning of competition, which is to determine who are the best amongst those who share the same common features, like age, weight - and sex. Men and women don't share common features that are crucial to competition in a way they do with others of their own sex. It is a reality some in this debate simply cannot see or accept.
Here's how I see it:
* The debate about where transgender women belong in sport has valid questions with no clear answers. I think it can be both a moral panic (in the sense that some people are losing their minds over hypothetical scenarios as a cover for their subconscious discomfort with the way gender roles are changing in our society at large), and raise good questions.
* In a weird way, the debate is making me re-assess why women get to compete in a protected category to begin with. That was initially done in the name of fairness, because women were missing out on opportunities to show their (relative) speed due to (relatively) less-talented men taking their spotlight. In a zoomed out sense, by this same token, there is some argument that we should figure out a way to handicap races based on each individual's genetic potential. As it stands, we just chose to protect a specific class because it was intuitive to do so - it's easy to observe that full-grown women are generally slower than men. But what about a protected class for people born with cystic fibrosis who have barely any VO2max to speak of? People who are on anti-psychotic medications that make them gain weight? To me, the moral panickers are actually running the risk of protecting the status quo so fiercely that they force a larger reckoning that ultimately upends it in a more fundamental way. I, for one, had just taken it for granted that male and female categories made sense, but now I'm fundamentally questioning the structure we have chosen. I am thinking about what fairness means. Is there room for a clear and distinct male/female dividing line when we introduce the modern understanding of sex and gender? I'm not just talking about transgender individuals, I'm talking about people born XXY, people with two sets of genitals, people with external genitalia of one gender but internal genitalia of the other. It's exactly these edge cases that it's really hard to sort in an intuitive way that everyone can agree with. So basically we started sorting people by eyeballing them, but then we realized that there are more nuanced cases in the gray zone, and here we are, screaming about how men are faster than women. No duh. So how do we take this generally true population-level fact and apply it to individuals who challenge our understanding of how to sort people?
To your other point about making a protected and separate sports class for, say, people with cystic fibrosis and people taking anti-psychotic meds: the examples you chose actually serve to bolster the case for sports to be segregated on the basis of sex rather than undermine it. Myriad sex-linked differences that are quite dramatic have been documented in the ways CF affects males and females, which helps explain why females with CF generally die sooner of it than males do and are more gravely ill for longer parts of their lives too, starting at an earlier age. (I had a brother and a sister with CF and am a carrier myself, so this is a topic that's in my wheelhouse.)
Anti-psychotic medications affect the two sexes very differently too - including in the area of weight gain and the metabolic dysfunction and disorders weight gain can trigger or signal.
More than 6.500 distinct physical differences between male and female humans have been documented, and more are being found all the time. The more research that's done on physical sex differences, the more evidence there is and will be for "a clear and distinct male/female dividing line." You might want to believe that the line gets fuzzy "when we introduce the modern understanding of sex and gender." But if we separate sex from gender, you'll find that modern science shows that there are two entirely separate, physically distinct sexes and a multitude of genders, all of which are open to members of both sexes. Sex, after all, is physical, biological and a matter of verifiable, objective material reality. While gender refers to a person's individual feelings, self-image, dress style, hairdo, mannerisms, affect, interests, aesthetics and personality; it's based on stereotypes of masculinity and femininity; and it's totally unverifiable since it consists of an invisible inner sense that some people claim to have (but most don't) that's basically a disembodied ethereal essence akin to a soul.
The same thousands of physical sex differences can be found in all groups of people affected by all diseases and health conditions and taking all kinds of medications and therapies. Having a disease like CF or taking AP drugs does not lessen the number or impact of the physical differences between the two sexes. On the contrary, when people have a disease like CF or take AP drugs, the differences between the two sexes come into even starker relief.
Also, there are special sports programs and divisions for persons with various kinds of physical disabilities and developmental impairments that put them at a disadvantage when competing against the rest of the population. But within those special programs and divisions, there are still two sex categories, one for males and one for females.
As for the 40 or so different conditions known as DSDs: they've all actually been pretty well sorted for quite a long time. People with DSDs are either male or female; with the diagnostic tools and information available for several decades now, no one is in "a gray zone." Anyone who says otherwise is spreading misinformation that does a disservice to people with DSDs generally, though it might serve the interests of specific individuals like Caster Semenya and Francine Niyonsaba.
In addition to being untenable and a logistical nightmare, the idea you threw out of creating separate niche protected categories for people who have various congenital diseases, physical and mental health conditions, medical histories and "genetic potential" would fly in the face of all human rights, medical privacy and anti-discrimination laws in both their letter and their spirit.
It's one thing to make accommodations and special sports categories for people with disabilities (though there's actually a lot of contention amongst athletes with disabilities over how that works); and it's reasonable to make the female category protected to insure that girls and women have an opportunity to participate and compete in sports under fair conditions. Rules banning particular medications that constitute PEDs and excluding people with a history of doping are clearly necessary. Making broad divisions in sports according to certain criteria that affect everyone - sex, age, weight, pro or amateur status - is necessary to insure fairness. But creating sports ghettos for people with specific conditions based on things like VO2max due to disease, weight gain due to psych drugs or "genetic potential" (whatever that means) strikes me as unjustly invasive, prying and discriminatory - and stigmatizing, patronizing and paternalistic. Pigeonholing like this could easily end up sowing division and ostracism instead of fostering fairness, acceptance, "diversity and inclusion."