RIP Norm Macdonald: How Macdonald's Simple-Truth Logic Could Help Solve the Transgender/Intersex Crisis In Women's Sports

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I'm afraid and horrified by the attack on women's rights that is currently happening under the banner of inclusion. The very same people who accuse others of trying to "erase" their existence are, in fact, hellbent on erasing the legal definition of woman and confusing the public so that many no longer recognize the facticity of biological sex. We can and should protect the rights of people who feel more comfortable presenting as the other sex, but it's a big mistake to substitute these self perceptions for material reality. As always, I appreciate your thoughtful commentary, RunRagged.

Jogger262 wrote:

Disko Eric wrote:

I don’t know if Rojo knows this, but norm was a comedian.

So are Kimmel, Trevor Noah, and Colbert, although not nearly as funny as Norm. They present news through their leftist lens as truth all the time.

Rojo makes a very valid point, and people try to come up with every little exception. There is an open category and any DSD athlete can compete in it.

It is a tough situation for DSD athletes, because they have a distinct advantage over biological females, but they will never compete with the elite males. There are not enough at a high level to have their own division. Maybe eventually their can be a trans woman and DSD division. That would actually be pretty exciting to watch.

No he wasn’t. Norm was disingenuous on many topics for the sake of comedy. And just plain wrong on other topics. Even the great Chappelle misrepresents and changes facts of stories. Noah, Kimmel and Colbert are also not comedians. Noah himself has even mentioned that fact about himself. And Rojo never makes valid points. Are you his mom?

I know and care for someone with CAIS too. We met many decades ago whilst working as lifeguards and taking a course to get certified as water safety instructors. I've seen her most summers all my adult life. We've competed over the years in in tennis, swimming, sailing and contests involving the kinds of stuff lifeguards do.

I have no problem considering persons with CAIS to be women socially and legally, but I disagree with you that anyone with CAIS is "fully female." My friend with CAIS would disagree with you too. She's not happy about that, but she's a realist - as are most of the other persons she knows from her CAIS support group who are into or past middle age.

Yes, a person with CAIS "literally looks like any other girl" - particularly when in the bloom of youth as it sounds like your friend is. But sex is about far more than outward phenotype. Being XY and SRY positive, fetuses with CAIS go down the developmental path meant to equip them with the capacity to fulfill the male role in human reproduction upon maturity - meaning they have male gonads, testes, whose reproductive purpose is to make sperm. But because their male androgen receptors don't work, their bodies convert the T their testes make into estrogen and they develop to appear outwardly female. Their testes also do not make sperm, so they are sterile.

But being an androgen-insensitive, sterile XY person isn't the same as being "fully female" as you allege. Biologically the two are very different. Whilst persons with XY CAIS don't go through the male puberty of infancy or adolescence, they also don't go through female puberty.

internal female genitalia are also absent because the abdominal testes normally produce AMH, which impedes the development of the uterus, cervix and proximal vagina. However, the distal part of the vagina can be observed because it is not under AMH control, but it is always shorter than normal and blind-ending. In patients with CAIS, puberty typically appears later and has a slower advance than in the general female population. However, breasts and female adiposity can develop regularly due to the action of oestradiol deriving from the peripheral aromatization of testosterone. In contrast, pubic and axillary hair is absent or very rare because it mostly depends on androgen action. In regard to final height, CAIS patients are typically taller than the healthy female population due to the presence of the Y chromosome, which intervenes on statural growth independently of hormonal status.

Interestingly, patients with CAIS seem to have a different hormonal status that does not follow a physiological male or female profile. In particular, postpubertal CAIS patients with intact gonads show increased levels of LH with normal levels of FSH and of sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) for the female range; moreover, basal testosterone and oestradiol values, free androgen indices and androgen aromatization indices are in the normal male range.

Contrary to what you say, persons with CAIS don't have fully developed vaginas, either. They have what is known as vaginal hypoplasia or vaginal agenesis, and often other urogenital features different to what XX females have. This causes persons with XY CAIS to have the blind lower end of a vagina, or a structure that resembles one. It's common for persons with CAIS to require regular dilation and vaginoplasty surgery too in order to have penetrative sex. Moreover, their vaginas are not the same as XX female vaginas in terms of muscularity, elasticity (in length as well as width), mucosa or flora.

For decades, it was common to do "feminizing" urogenital surgeries including vaginoplasty on babies and children with CAIS and some other DSDs. Fortunately, that kind of treatment is being phased out; nowadays, it's considered best and most humane to wait until a child is old enough to make medical decisions for herself. Significantly, there's emerging evidence that persons with XY CAIS who eschew genital surgeries and removal of their testes and instead learn to accept and love their bodies "as is" end up doing much better psychologically - and they report having more satisfying sex lives and intimate relationships too. Moreover, it's been shown that many of those who do have their testes removed and thus have to take exogenous estrogen do best if they do not try to achieve female estrogen levels.

Also, FWIW, the person I know with CAIS has led a life that has been different to her friends and family who are female in significant ways. For example, though she's had to deal with disappointment and sorrow over being infertile, because her infertility comes from being born with testes that never matured to make sperm, she's not experienced any of the social pressure or arduous, invasive treatments that middle-class female people with infertility in well-off countries typically have gone through for many decades now. Since the reason she is infertile is clear, there was no need for her to get invasive pelvics, vaginal ultrasounds and laparoscopy surgery to investigate what's wrong. No worried tracking of her cycle, taking her temp several times a day, checking her cervical mucosa, etc. No pressure to take awful drugs to hyperstimulate her ovaries so a tube can be inserted in her vagina, piercing each side to reach each ovary to extract eggs for use in a lab. No expectation that she undergo invasive, grueling rounds of IVF or medical IUI.

Moreover, since my friend with CAIS has never had to deal with any of the downsides of having a female reproductive system and female physiology, she has been advantaged in sports training and performance over us bog standard female people in numerous ways. I'll spare you the details, but never having to deal with periods, contraception, pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, tokophobia, labor, childbirth, childbirth injuries, breastfeeding, weaning, Pap smears, perimenopause, menopause, gynecological conditions etc really is a huge advantage. My friend has never had to miss a single practice, lesson or competition - nor has her performance in any sports or physical activity ever been impaired even in the slightest because of any of the female-specific physical issues that XX girls and women have to deal with as a matter of course starting from about age 11-12, the average age of menarche.

Because I have done some research into this area, I've also come to know and personally like a number of other people with other kinds of DSDs beyond CAIS. I wish them and all people with DSDs well, and support measures advancing greater understanding of DSD conditions, full social acceptance of people with DSDs, as well as respect for their dignity and rights. Nevertheless, the individuals whom any one of us knows and likes personally shouldn't be the basis on which sports policy is made. Particularly when it comes to a protected category that is supposed to be tightly ring-fenced to insure fairness for the sex class for whom the category was created in the first place.

There is a simple solution to all this that doesn't require Norm MacDonald logic. The Biden administration shows us the way. We need a new category of sport that caters to Birthing People. This would be a category that covers all genders, but restricts participation to those individuals whose biology is inherently capable of giving birth. It might well include some XXYs (I'm not sure about this), but it would definitely exclude all XYs including those who selkf-identify as women. We could keep the category Women as well (indeed, there would be a great deal of overlap between the two), and some competitions might have both Women and Birthing People, but for championship and record keeping purposes Birthing People would be a distinct category.

Thanks for your response. You brought up some good points. I'm definitely interested in reading more about this and read your entire post and I learned some things. As far as I know, my friend isn't taking estrogen (she didn't tell us this part though) so that must mean she still has testes inside if I understand correctly? She seems to have gone through somewhat of a female puberty like you said.

Yes, you're right. She won't have to deal with periods or pregnancies and have period cramps impact practices/performances. When she told me and my sister (we are the only people she's told and have known each other since 6th grade) it was clear she was very sad about not getting periods or being able to have children. I mean, that really sucks having to be different from other girls and come out to your partner and hope they accept you and aren't "weirded out." it made me really sad actually to hear her tell us about it - if my girlfriend told me she had CAIS it wouldn't be a dealbreaker for me, but it probably would for others. She hasn't even told a close friend of hers. she does feel alone and like there is no one she can talk to, so I was glad she told me and my sister at least.

as for competition, she literally had no noticeable advantage. she was not winning meets at all, and was literally finishing middle of the pack. her mile time was 1:20 behind the leading girls. here's how I see it - everyone has varying amounts of testosterone, longer legs, naturally skinnier builds...we can't choose what we have. her intersex condition should not disqualify her from competing with girls. where it gets trickier is other intersex conditions and MTF trans people.

I wish her the best. It must not be easy. it's not her fault either. One of my siblings is also transgender, and despite what others think, it actually isn't a choice either just like these intersex conditions, so I really hope people can be accepting and willing to work with/include these athletes in sports.

Yeah, but I think Norm was serious on a lot of his comedy, like thinking Pistorious had an unfair advantage and OJ was a murderer.

Noah and Colbert both are both hosts of shows on Comedy Central, or at least were at some point. Kimmel was on “The Man Show”, which was actually really funny.

The truth hurts sometimes, and comedians are the only ones who can get away with telling the truth.

I’m sure it pained Kara Goucher to commentate on Niyonsaba’s amazing trajectory in distance running and moving up in distance without a single mention of her advantage over the rest of the field.

I wish your friend well. I hope she finds more people she feels she can open up and talk to and becomes comfortable in her own skin. Like you said, none of us can choose what we have. Many people can't reproduce for one reason or the other. That's life. Moreover, more people than most realize are born with conditions that make them/us different to the norm; and a much larger proportion of the population than most people realize carry genetic anomalies of one sort or another. A couple of rare genetic "orphan diseases" run in my own family, so I've spent a lot of time in children's hospitals where I've seen kids, adolescents and young adults dealing with all sorts of issues they were born with.

There are a number of CAIS support groups online. Maybe you and your sister can check them out with your friend. But it's best she does this with others who care about her like you rather than alone because unfortunately a lot of online"support groups" nowadays are covers for dodgy, toxic types looking for vulnerable, gullible young people to groom them into nefarious, cultish, exploitive and sexually abusive relationships. Also, many today are claiming that "intersex" is a gender identity and a lot of creeps are pretending to have DSD conditions they don't have to hoodwink others and lure them into relationships. So if you look into CAIS support groups with your friend, avoid places like reddit and look for ones affiliated with medical practices, bona fide charities or orgs like the UK's NHS.

I have a longer message for you on the general topics we've been discussing that I will post later.

Star wrote:

Norm MacDonald was one of my favorite comedians.

That means he said funny things. And the entire point of anything he said would be to make people laugh.

I don't know why people keep referencing comedians to make a point about politics or anything serious.

Bill Maher said this. Joe Rogan said that.

Let's not have any discussions about what any comedian said and try to apply it to anything in real life.

Unless it's Carrot Top.

This is incorrect. Sometimes making people laugh isn't the entire point.

For example, you made a joke ("Unless it's Carrot Top"), but that doesn't mean you didn't intend to make a point.

Thanks. Will definitely look into. If like nearly 2% of population is intersex, there's a good chance there's someone else who I've crossed path with that is intersex and I just haven't realized. Thanks also for providing a lot of info on this topic, as a potential biology major (idk we'll see), it is kinda interesting.

A major Belgian fashion model, Hanne Gaby Odiele, came forward a few years ago to reveal she is intersex. I've seen her and her husband around NYC, I was shocked to learn she was intersex. It made pretty big news in the fashion industry at the time.

Just thought I'd share.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/24/model-hanne-gaby-odiele-reveals-she-is-intersex

Some of the points being pushed are close to those leveraged by the trans-exclusionary feminist movement (predominantly in the UK) - seemingly to focus on the unique physical challenges that come with becoming/being an "adult human female" and the ensuing societal pressures.

I find these arguments a tad disingenuous or at least oblivious to the vast variation in life experience that all humans experience, especially those that present female in modern society. For instance, acting like female puberty or fertility treatments is a prerequisite for womanhood and thus for competing in women's sport is gatekeeping around experiences that vary wildly between women and have no more or less effect on their athletic endeavors than other parts of life.

The goal should be to develop succinct biomarker (testosterone? other androgen? etc...) thresholds that accurately capture the performance divide between men and women. Relying on genetics/epigenetics/chromosomal structure is a case-by-case issue that is 1) time consuming and expensive 2) inaccurate - we don't understand all the biology 3) prone to bias based on phenotype 4) a privacy concern.

The IAAF was off to the right start.

That's the part I guess that's bothering me, and I agree with you... I didn't even know much about intersex conditions until my friend, but to say that women with CAIS and an XY chromosome will never be fully female because they never will get to experience periods and childbirth and all that goes along with that is very exclusive and is basically saying "they're not real women". I know enough about periods to know that some women gets really sick during their periods, others don't. Not all women can have kids anyway. I even know someone who felt faster during her period and PRd so yeah. Your last paragraph was very well said and I agree.

Dwightarm wrote:

rojo wrote:

A trans woman is a trans woman. She's not a biological woman.

Sure, that's correct.

But then by that logic, an intersex woman IS a biological woman.

On top of that, you have XX women who suffer from PCOS who do have elevated testosterone levels and with greater muscle composition and strength.

My point is: It is *NOT* as black and white as saying 'testes in the men's division; ovaries in the women's division.'

But you knew that already. You've been explained this several times by now.

No. By my logic an intersex women isn't a biological women. When you are XY and dont have ovaries, I don't know why anyone would think you are biologically a woman. What part of xy, has testes makes you think, "biological woman?"

I don't really know enough about PCOS to comment on it.

Post of the year, particularly the first two paragraphs.. Wondefully done.

Have we emailed in the past? Please email me. Amazing stuff.

suburb Stan likes his lawn mowed juuuuuust rught wrote:

kinda funny how rojo never gave 2 shts about women athletes until he started his own personal crusade to 'save' them

What are you talking about? When I got out of college, I worked in women's atheltics - profesional women's tenis.

The first person I ever coached was a person who competed in one of the first USAs in the women's steeplechase.

I actually thought about working for the ABA as I knew they cared about women's basketball unlike the WNBA which I knew just wanted to protect the NBA's interest.

D34Lyfe wrote:

Geez RoJo I don’t know whose side you’re on.

Do you want Semenya and Niyonsaba to compete or not? First you’re saying it’s a travesty Niyonsaba is DSQ from competiting, then DSQ from the Olympics and now you don’t want her to run at all?

Pick a side and quit flip flopping. You either want them to run or not.

DSD athletes have had no choice to have their testosterone advantage. DSD athletes are not the issue. Transgender athletes are the issue. That’s why there are safeguards in place in Elite and Collegiate athletics. At the Elite HS level, there should be safeguards. But lower than that, there should be inclusion at all cases possible.

I dont' want them competing. But once you let them compete, you follow the rules. She was in the Olympics fair and square under the rules and never should have been DQd. You have to respect the rules of the game.

Rojo... a lot of your quoted post intentionally tramples on decades of nuance and improved understanding in both biology and feminist theory. Anyone that leverages "sexism" to dismiss and ignore the experiences of DSD and intersex woman is not acting in unbiased good-faith. These women have existed, and lived as women for millions of years.

To act like this post represents a consensus or even a reasonable view of the issues shows your preconceptions - which is ok - just be careful trotting this out as a "common sense" interpretation of the issues.

I think that OBGYN has been pulling your leg. The claim "that people would be shocked if they knew how many times doctors deliver babies and cannot assign sex at birth" not only spreads misinformation about DSDs, their prevalence and presentation, it also misrepresents the circumstances and customs around childbirth in most of the world.

Most births of the world's children were not and today still are not attended by medical professionals. But when they were and are, it's always been the case that the HCP is far more likely to be a midwife or nurse midwife than a doctor. Even when childbirth occurs in a medical facility and is indeed attended/witnessed by doctors, doctors do not routinely "assign sex" to babies - and they certainly don't do so willy-nilly like you suggest. (Sorry, couldn't resist the pun.)

The idea that doctors pronounce from on high "it's a boy/girl!" to clueless mothers whose role in the birthing process is passive and secondary to the doctors' comes from movies and TV, not from actual births. Normally, a newborn with cord still attached is placed directly on mother's chest/in her arms so she can see for herself what her naked baby looks like in an up close and personal way. No almighty doctor has to tell her what her baby's sex is. Most well-trained midwives and OBGYNs in the modern era would consider doing that overstepping their bounds because it would take away the mother's chance to see with her own eyes.

Moreover, even in medical settings and whether giving birth vaginally or via CS section, it's long been customary for women to use mirrors to watch our babies come out of our bodies - so usually we've seen for ourselves what our naked babies' genitals look like before the babes are in our arms.

Also, in all pregnancies that are medically monitored - whether by midwives or OBGYNs - it's been customary for many decades to do fetal scans in the second trimester that reveal the baby's sex. In addition, prenatal testing for chromosomal anomalies and sex through amniocentesis guided by sonogram and via chorionic villi sampling through the cervix have been in use for circa 50 and 35 years respectively. Now with the NIPT widely available, the sex of fetuses can be ascertained as early as 8-9 weeks simply by testing a pregnant woman's blood taken from her arm in a standard blood draw.

Many parents who get fetal genetic testing and scans have always asked not to be told the sex of their babies ahead of the birth. But even so, for many years now the sex of all babies born to mothers whose pregnancy was medically monitored will have been known and recorded in the mothers' medical records many months before the babies were born.

In those rare cases where a baby is born with ambiguous-looking genitals, if the baby is taken for medical assessment by physicians, doctors will run a bunch of tests and then inform the mother/parents of the results. Usually the testing will remove any ambiguity because DSDs are conditions affecting the sex development of either males or females. Most DSDs occur only in one sex, in fact. But the ultimate decisions of what sex the child is, what s/he will be named and how the child will be raised and what others will be told about the child are up to the parents. The era when power-mad doctors "assigned sex" to children and parents just did as they were told ended quite a while ago. And the era when "some doctors just take a guess and move on" like they were hurriedly working their way through an endless assembly line of neonates needing quick sexing in a some mad, hectic baby factory reminds me of this:

Finally, throughout the world, the document that establishes a child's legal sex is usually a government-issued birth certificate (or sometimes a baptismal certificate). In those jurisdictions where it's required or customary to register babies' births - and thus their DOB, place of birth, parentage and sex - with government authorities and to obtain birth certificates for them in infancy or childhood, the responsibility for doing this rests with parents, not with doctors. It's usually the mother who has to sign the paperwork legally attesting that the information provided to the birth registry about this baby or child is true. And it's usually the mother's signature, and hers alone, that appears in the registry documents and on the child's BC. If the child was medically assessed, the notes and signatures of the doctors who saw the baby will be part of the baby's medical record, but the child's medical records are separate to the documents on file at the birth registry.

Even so, in many parts of the world even today, it's still common for poor children especially not to get medical assessments or have their births registered at birth, soon after birth or at any time in childhood. In such cases, neither the mother nor any HCPs "assign sex." Sex is something that is told to authorities and becomes part of a person's official, legal identity much later in life - often at or shortly before age 18. For example, Caster Semenya's first birth certificate saying "female" was issued when Semenya was 16 and many in the same government that issued the BC were pinning their hopes on putting Semenya on the world stage as the country's "golden girl" runner. In 2009, the head of Semenya's school told the press that until then he never realized that Semenya or anyone else considered Semenya to be a girl.

(Alternatively, in some countries where rates of registering births of children remain low despite decades-long campaigns to get parents to obtain BCs for their kids, teachers and social workers have been authorized to register children's births and get BCs for them once the kids start school. This is the case in Namibia, where even today compliance with laws mandating parents register children's births by the time they turn 5 remains low particularly among the poor.)

One more thing: a main reason that so many doctors for decades in the past had trouble gauging the sex of babies that in their view had ambiguous-looking genitals is because most doctors were men - and as such, they had grown up and gone through their entire schooling and medical training without often or ever seeing babies' naked genitals except perhaps very briefly in a clinical setting; and they usually left the job of diapering and bathing their own children to the women in their lives. As a result, these men with all their great medical learning were not familiar with the range of what babies bare-naked bits look like, how and from where baby girls in particular urinate, and how common hypospadias was in boys. (Hypospadias is when the urethral opening is located somewhere other than the tip of the penis. Often, the urethral opening is on the underside of the penis, between the penis and scrotum, or behind the scrotum nearer the anus.) Which is why a lot of babies with problems like hypospadias, cryptorchidism of one of both testes, micro penises and large clitorises were mistakenly said to have had DSDs.

By contrast, women who grew up from age 6 or so doing hands-on infant and childcare of siblings, cousins and neighbors - including lots of diaper changing, bottom wiping and bathing - tend to have developed a far better grasp of what's normal - and not - in terms of how babies' urogenital anatomy looks and functions. Which is one of the reasons that in certain parts of the world where particular DSDs like XY 5-ARD occur with unusual prevalence, both midwives and women with a lot of experience in baby and child care can spot the telltale signs by sight - without any special medical training.

Vancomycin wrote:

Rojo... a lot of your quoted post intentionally tramples on decades of nuance and improved understanding in both biology and feminist theory. Anyone that leverages "sexism" to dismiss and ignore the experiences of DSD and intersex woman is not acting in unbiased good-faith. These women have existed, and lived as women for millions of years.

To act like this post represents a consensus or even a reasonable view of the issues shows your preconceptions - which is ok - just be careful trotting this out as a "common sense" interpretation of the issues.

Hear hear. There is a fundamental, and likely intentional, misunderstanding by RoJo, RunRagged, and other posters about biological sex. It is not, and never has been, a strict binary. As you said, these woman have existed and lived as women for millions of years.