Seb Coe: "Biology trumps gender.... I’m really over having any more of these discussions with second-rate sociologists"

You wish to be inclusive to some at the expense of others.

I wasn't going that far. I just said if you have a Y chromosome, you don't compete in certain women's sport (eg track & field and swimming), as you have an unfair advantage.

Ok fair enough. At least there is some agreement.

Sports have always been divided into two divisions based on the biological sex of participants' bodies, on whether the people partaking and competing are physically male or female. Not on how masculine or feminine they appear, feel, act or "identify" - and not on whether and how much they conform to the sexist stereotypes, roles and expectations associated with their sex.

The idea that sports has been and should segregated based on the sex stereotypes that constitute gender instead of on the sex of participants is bollox made up and advanced by gender identity ideologues who promote male supremacy and misogyny masquerading as "diversity, equity and inclusion."

By continually pretending that sports is and always has been divided based on the sex stereotypes that constitute gender rather than on the biological sex of participants, you are intentionally distorting the facts.

Children are forced to choose one of two genders, with all the rules and expectations that come with it, if they want to participate in sports. This forcing (in sports and other activities) may be part of the reason why nearly 10% of American adolescents are rejecting to be either a girl or boy.

But the gender identity ideologues are the ones pushing sex stereotypes on kids - not people like me. I'm all for kids not conforming to the sexist stereotypes that traditionally have gone along with being a girl or boy as much they want. That's what many in previous generations did.

The lie that the gender vendors are telling kids today is that they can surmount and escape the reality of their sexed bodies by adopting new "identities." When none of us can. We all will still be physically female or male as long as we live no matter how we "identify," feel, dress, cut and style our hair, groom, behave, what names we call ourselves, what pronouns other people use when they speak about us, and what kind of medical interventions and alterations we get.

They don't want any part of this 1950s, black-and-white gender framework.

If kids don't want any part of this framework of sex stereotypes, good for them. The question is: why are so many parents, teachers, doctors, corporations, politicians, celebrities, media influencers, institutions and powers-that-be today teaching kids to embrace wholly regressive gender identity ideology - an ideology whose entire aim is building this framework back up in a big way, boxing everyone into it, and using it to roll back and remove the gains women and girls have made over the last 70 years?

Anyone who sympathizes with kids who don't want any part of this regressive framework should be helping them learn to diminish, disregard and break free of sexist sex stereotypes. Instead, huge swathes of adult society today are telling kids to spend their every waking hour focusing on regressive, sexist sex stereotypes and classifying everyone and everything according to sexist sex stereotypes. Worse, many are encouraging kids and adolescents to pursue pipe dreams about somehow being magically transformed into the opposite sex by adopting the stereotypes and superficial trappings associated with the opposite sex - and screwing up their endocrine systems and destroying their health, fertility and future sexual function in the process.

Oh c'mon.

In this thread - and in discussions about this topic generally - the issue is not about female athletes who are doping on exogenous T. The issue is the natural levels of endogenous T of athletes competing in women's athletics.

Specifically, it's about the natural levels of endogenous T of XY DSD athletes with male androgen receptors whose natural T is in the male range because it comes from their testes versus the natural levels of endogenous T of XX female athletes with female androgen receptors whose natural T is in the female range because it comes from their ovaries, adrenal glands and fat.

I said: "In males, natural T made by the testes is the major controller and driver of development and a key factor in health, fitness and wellbeing at crucial stages of life - during gestation in utero, the male mini puberty of infancy in the first year of life, and puberty of adolescence and beyond. But natural T made by females - only half of which comes from the ovaries, the other half of female T comes from the adrenals and fat - appears to play relatively little role in female development, physiology, anatomy and sports performance."

In response, you linked to an article about a study in which "48 healthy 18- to 35-year-old women were randomly assigned to 10 weeks of daily treatment with10mg of testosterone cream or 10mg of a placebo."

Then you say "it is findings like this which lead me to wonder if unusually high levels of endogenous testosterone are more beneficial, and common among unambiguously female athletes, than we realize, and that the androgen gap to the DSD athletes is not quite as wide as we imagine."

Bringing the issue of women taking exogenous T into the convo is clearly just an attempt to muddy the waters and sow confusion.

There is no question that female athletes who take exogenous T obtain physical benefits from it that improve sports performance at least in the short and medium term. That's been proven incontrovertibly time and again by the example of numerous individual athletes over the course of decades - and by the large-scale doping of elite female athletes by former Soviet bloc countries like the former GDR in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

It's also been shown more recently by research on females who take exogenous T to try to match male levels for purposes of "gender transition."

But women who have levels of T above the normal female range because they are taking exogenous T manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry are not at all analogous with, or comparable to, women who have levels of T above the normal female range because they have something going in their bodies that's causing an over-production of natural, endogenous T by their ovaries, adrenals and/or fat cells.

For the umpteenth time: when female persons have levels of natural T elevated beyond the normal female range (0.02 - 1.7 nmol/L), it is always because of a complex medical disorder or disease - PCOS, CAH, LOCAH, Cushing's disease, cancer - or because of pregnancy, which is a complex medical condition but not a disorder or disease.

All of these conditions have wide-ranging impacts on myriad organs, body systems and overall health. None of these medical conditions leads to or is associated with the kinds of tip-tip shape and peak physical fitness required for elite sports performance; and none are known to result in improved performance in elite track and field. Not even the healthiest, most physically-fit women going through the healthiest pregnancies imaginable do better in track and other sports because of the elevated levels of natural T that come with pregnancy.

Moreover, any female person who has natural, endogenous T even approaching the bottom end of the range that's customary for the XY DSD athletes competing in women's elite athletics would need urgent evaluation for a life-threatening endocrine tumor. But even a woman with a testosterone-secreting tumor or bunch of tumors would not have natural T anywhere near the level of most XY DSD athletes in women's sports because they usually have natural T levels in the middle to high end of the normal male range. In fact, adults with Caster Semenya's DSD, XY 5-ARD, often have natural T considerably exceeding the normal male range.

So how many people are going to be on the genitalia inspection unit? Do they later sync up with the testosterone unit to look at video to decide who is male and female?

It’s clear you many of you have a lot of repressed anxiety over how male or not male you are 😂

It's worse than that, though. The kind of inclusivity moultonk is advocating for places a disproportionate burden on female children.

The sports that gender activists want to be inclusive of the opposite sex are almost entirely girls' and women's sports.

Female children and adolescents who've adopted trans identities outnumber males by a ration of 3:1 nowadays, but female youngsters are not turning out for boys's sports in droves. The push for intrusion - oops, I mean "inclusion" - is coming pretty much exclusively from males who want in on female sports. Moultonk and others who speak of generally of children in these convos all want girls' sports to be inclusive of male children at the expense and exclusion of female children.

This is a great time to remember that:

1) This trans athlete panic is an entirely fabricated freak-out brought to you by your good friends the right-wing culture warriors. Sport governing bodies will evolve appropriate rules without panic being exploited and driven by the likes of Laura and Tucker, thank you very much. Shame on LRC for playing into this as well, although not surprising.

2) Subjective experience of gender is clearly much more fluid among a large number of people than society recognized previously. If you aren't comfortable with that fact, you'll get there. If not, you'll be marginalized as more generations grow up freely exploring where they fit without the outdated gender dichotomous paradigms.

3) At its heart, being 'woke' is nothing more than trying NOT to be a raging as-hole to those different from us. How the right-wing culture warriors successfully recast being decent and considerate as something else entirely reveals how threatened right wingers are by equity and justice.

just, like, one doctor should do it...

Being woke means viewing reality through the ideological lens of postmodern and critical theories. There is a huge difference between accepting individual diversity of expression and forcing institutions to accept a quasi-religious view of human beings as having gendered souls. The former is consistent with liberal values and a peaceful society. The latter is repressive/totalitarian.

You can carry on thinking that this is a rightwing attack and a moral panic, or talk to people outside of your bubble. Gender critical feminists are not rightwingers. Moderate democrats in the US are not rightwingers. Biologists who understand what sex is are not rightwingers.

You have no idea. The trans thing in sport has had minuscule impact and sporting bodies are more than capable of shifting rules to account for fluidity in today's youth. You also talk about "quasi religious views" which is both wrong and ironic considering that the current hysteria is driven by right-wing, supposedly evangelical leaders.

Young people in the west are coming to view gender on a spectrum whether you, who are old, likes it or not. They push for recognition of their right to exist, which means that institutions must change to accommodate them, again whether you like it or not. You and your right wing authoritarians find a way to bend the narrative as a projection in which you wish to force time not to march on, but for culture to remain frozen in a state in which you are comfortable. However, a dynamic and evolving culture will ALWAYS challenge its older, reactionary members. The fact that you are so uncomfortable with the trans movement is OK, and your rage against it will prove futile.

And yes, the current focus is a politically/religiously motivated hysteria, a fake moral panic designed to drive donations to right wing reactionaries and draw money to the donation trays of mega churches. How many young kids and their families are you willing to destroy to make an extra million?

It's completely fine to reject that framework. But you know what? That framework is useful. And if people cannot find ways to be useful in society, then they are at the whims of those whose productivity makes the wheels of society turn.

It's like the meme of the ax with the wooden head and a metal handle. Doesn't matter how creative you are if you're useless.

The trans sport issue is not a minimal impact situation. It's a complete rejection of objective reality.

This is a philosophical argument that goes back 100 years, and we know how well that worked out in the early 20th century.

OMG. I assume this is sarcasm?

That poster is conflating freedom of expression versus unwilling endorsement.

People are free to be as weird and useless as they choose, but I am in no way obligated to endorse their lifestyle.

Yeah that’s what I meant. Got majority downvotes in a thread where most people agree with my sentiment so the phrasing maybe isn’t great.

I think our main disagreement here is a sort of chicken and egg scenario. I think some people are transgender by birth, meaning there’s a “wire crossed” in their brain where they feel like a person of the opposite sex. We can’t exactly uncross the wires, so what are we to do about that? I agree that trans women should not compete against biological females, but rejecting their condition outright makes life harder, not easier, for trans people.

I don’t think kids are choosing to be trans because they don’t like the stereotypes of their sex. I think the stereotypes of their sex are what initially signals to them that there is a mismatch in their brain. There are some trans people who don’t experience dysphoria and there is debate on the legitimacy of this. Contra’s transtrenders video is pretty good on this. I don’t think adults should be encouraging anything, but they should be accepting of everything. Are you encouraging a child if you tell them, “No matter who you like or how you identify, you will be accepted.” Because that’s not encouragement, just acceptance.

"I don’t think kids are choosing to be trans because they don’t like the stereotypes of their sex. I think the stereotypes of their sex are what initially signals to them that there is a mismatch in their brain."

What happened to tomboy girls? Or effeminate men? These used to be understood and acceptable personality traits.

Who is making such a strong push for these folks to become part of the alphabet mafia?