Veronica Ivy on The Daily Show on natural testosterone level having no competitive advantage

An all-round terrible performance that will convince noone. When asked anything that even resembled a probing question, Ivy simply leaned on 'proof by assertion', responding that trans women are not only 'women' but also that they are in fact 'biological females', a claim that requires the kind of logical gymnastics usually reserved for flat earthers.

The 'natural testosterone' comment in fact strengthens the argument against including biological males from women's sport; as Ivy pointed out that 0.5% of male Olympians had extremely low testosterone at the Olympics and competed against men with 80x higher T levels and had 'no competitive disadvantage'! Surely that is the ultimate example of retained male advantage after testosterone suppression? Ivy failed to mention that the most likely reason for this low T was overtraining/coming off steroids and instead made it seem like these Olympians just had naturally low T, a truly idiotic conclusion given what we know from the entirety of sport science.

The fact that Ivy gleefully ended the interview with a threat that trans people are 'coming for you' was no doubt chilling for every woman in sport watching.

What a nothingburger of an interview. She even threw in "global south"... lol. Absolute nothingburger.

That was such a disingenuous point to make, and weirdly racist. Ivy seemed to be implying that Semenya et al didn't meet some sort of western feminine beauty standard and that's why they have been removed from their preferred category. Clearly a bit of racist projection on Ivy's part there, given that the internal testes of those competitors didn't even get so much as a passing mention. If Trevor or his team had done any research beforehand he could have asked:

1) If the powers that be really are discriminating against women of 'the global south' (and their descendants) because they aren't white, why do they allow that group to otherwise utterly dominate all events from 100m to marathon? Is it just sheer coincidence that they are only excluding the ones from that region with testicles?

2) Is it possible that the standard of postnatal care and intersex assessment in countries with considerable poverty is more likely to lead to cases where an athlete reaches puberty believing they are the opposite sex?

Why is it that Dems proclaim to be the party of science, but when it comes to Trans and DSD athletes in women’s sports, they throw science out the window?

She made some excellent points, but the “no competitive advantage” is obviously not true.

Testosterone is not the only hormone that creates muscle or helps performance. As other people here have pointed out, if a person goes through puberty as a male, they gain a huge advantage. There is no way to erase that advantage, but If they block hormones for a year or two, it could mitigate the advantage and make participation more fair.

Not quite. Testosterone suppression is known to affect performance, as is supplementation, just not the natural levels, so her argument is that natural T disparity shouldn’t be used as an argument to exclude trans women from women sports. I agree it doesn’t immediately lead to the inclusive conclusion that trans women have no advantage over women.

(Just to clarify, I found most of her other arguments disingenuous.)

Can’t watch. Don’t know how people can be this stupid. There are other ways to promote acceptance for transgender people that don’t involve ruining Women’s sports.

But Ivy's evidence to prove this point was that of male Olympians with critically low testosterone. As I mentioned, this is meaningless because in this case it *is* suppressed (either by overtraining or steroid use). Therefore you can't glean any meaningful data about 'natural testosterone' from that particular data set as there is absolutely no way that those males made it to the Olympics with 'natural' lifetime T levels below that of the average woman, any sports scientist with 15 minutes of experience will tell you that, and I suspect even Ivy knows that but chose not to mention it.

They gain an advantage even before puberty according to our local LRC expert.

The trans sports issue is pretty complicated and there are some good arguments on the side of more inclusion, but McKinnon/Ivy is truly one of the most toxic and deluded people I've ever come across in the social justice realm, and that is saying a lot. Just embarrassing that this cry-bullying ultra-narcissist continues to have a mainstream platform.

No, it is not complicated at all. There are two sexes. And the idea of removing male advantage by manipulating testosterone levels makes the "conservative" side as foolish and presumptuous as the transexual side. We don't know enough to manipulate hormones.

GG

The Dems are very good a proclaiming up is down and down is up with a straight face. Man-made global warming, vaccines, 2nd amendment vs mental illness / SSRIs, CRT, Putin caused inflation, previous dudes competing with women… none of it is surprising anymore. Dems are the anti-science, anti-critical thinking party.

Yes, that point that you did mention earlier as well would detract from the natural T irrelevance claim. I didn’t look at the paper to see how/when the measurements were done, and I don’t know whether overtraining can bring natural T levels down by two orders of magnitude for elites. But it does seem intuitively more plausible that a small percentage were overtrained and therefore had low T compared to the alternative of a strange physiological model where the natural level doesn’t matter but upping or lowering it does.

Agreed. I don’t care what gender labels you want to make up. At the end of the day, chromosomes are immutable and tell the full story.

Nice. Queuing up this hit parade of right wing grievances with a straight face had to have been a little harder than you thought, or no?

Anyway, I couldn't watch the interview in its entirety either. The one thing I'll say, begrudgingly in agreement with the right wingers' MSM complaints, is that it seems as though journalistic integrity has been abandoned. Now granted these comedians dressed in journalist clothing are meant to titillate not investigate but still, there is an undercurrent of messaging.

There seems to be a distinct lack of motivation to challenge assertions/talking points in this day and age. All these talking heads can't be that afraid of getting cancelled. Maybe they are but, recently I've become less a fan of Noah, Gladwell, Kimmell, Oliver, Colbert as I used to be. It seems all they do is pander rather than probe.

Of course that being said they are still miles ahead of the hacks on the right that fill the Ebert's of the worlds brains with gobbledygook.

It wasn’t complicated until trans women decided competing against women was fair. It’s not. Trans women are trans women who “identify” as women, but are not biologically women. If society wanted women to compete against men, then Title IX would not exist. Women still deserve equal rights.

Create a “transgender” division for sports and continue honoring and respecting all biological women. Many women, beginning as little girls, train constantly over many years to be the best they can be. Let them continue to compete on an equal footing…not against a biological man.

Who better than to ask what is fair? How about Caitlyn Jenner, a trans women and once superior male athlete?

I don’t watch Noah regularly anymore. It didn’t seem like he was himself convinced by her arguments. He also seemed uncharacteristically nervous and less sharp than usual in phrasing his question-thoughts. I can *maybe* imagine a Jon Stewart pushing back harder on a guest on this topic, but not Noah given how much he is expected to resonate with his own shtick of being “born a crime”.

It’s also hard to push back against a guest you invited when pushing back will inevitably be received as an attack on her self identity as opposed to her politics. It’s easier to do that in a debate panel like setting.

I listened to the first 96 seconds and then stopped as I answered the question she led with.

“It all boils down to, do you actually think that trans women and intersex women are real women and are really female, or not? "

Of course not. A trans woman isn't female. A transwoman is a transwoman. An intersex women is an intersex woman. Biologically, they are either male or intersex - certainly not female.

Next.

What do they talk about for the next 12 minutes? She's right about what it boils down to. The rest of it is nonsense.

VI is confusing the research. As Ross Tucker has pointed out, what the research shows is that percentage of testosterone makes no difference WITHIN the group: that is, you can’t line up all the elite men in a race, test their testosterone level and pick the winner based on that. However, it does make a difference BETWEEN the categories, between men and women.

The example he gives is nobody would argue height doesn’t matter in basketball - but you can’t just predict MVP based on who is the tallest. Once everyone is tall already and has a high level of skill, T won’t be the difference. Similarly, all marathoners are thin so the skinniest won’t win - it’s like if a 95 pound person beats a 90 pound person claiming that therefore you can be 300 pounds and win a marathon.