- biological gender is not binary
- there's more to it than XX and XY
Unless we embrace gender is - like many things - a spectrum, there will be debate.
I'll add, that equal is a high - perhaps unattainable - bar. It might make sense to first focus on fair / fairness, and that at times the many might have to take precedence over the few.
C'est la vie.
Honestly it seems like the easiest solution is eliminate sports groupings by their references to sex or gender, and just divide up by those sciencey things which are generally known to provide the athletic advantages.
Group 1 Above a testosterone baseline and/or if you have XY chromosomes
Group 2 Below a testosterone baseline.
If you don't feel binary grouping is fair, set up multiple groups to accommodate.
There is a female athlete who identifies as a man currently competing in the Olympics: Hergie Bacyadan, in women's boxing.
This doesn't seem to have caused any actual disadvantage. In fact, Bacyadan is reported as saying:
> I'm very thankful that I got to the Olympics. It's a big deal to me.
Why not just eliminate the gender/sex delineations and focus on benchmarks we know create competitive differences?
Additional criteria can be added to take care of the edge cases but sex is most important and impactful.
True equality can only be achieved by not considering if someone is a man, woman, or whatever they might want to classify as. Lump everyone together, equal opportunities given, and may the best man as in mankind win.
And no, don't give me "Women will almost always lose!". That is sexist bullshit. Equality is equality, we can't have our cake and eat it too. There is no line to be drawn.
If we want to remove gender from the equation, perhaps we should have "testosterone classes" where athletes compete against others with a similar testosterone level.
The past few weeks have seen men in droves mansplaining to women.. ‘what is a woman?’
XX or female is the default setting. If there is any deviation from the default, then there is a change or transformation. And the result is no longer female. It could be male. Or not. But it’s not ‘female’.
Putting equal aside (because it's not realistic) leaves "What is fair? To all?" and that's a different question.
Not to make light or sound snarky (but to make a point), if we use equal as the goal, then what's to stop those who are height-challenged from demanding to play basketball?
The opposite binary and other uncategorised versions are not the default female.
The genders are not equal. I lost my farm after 12 years because I was in ‘violation of farm management policy’ because I didn’t follow their list of 6 different PTO implement.
As a female, I don’t have the upper body strength to operate and change all those PTO implements. I spent not a small amount to fabricate and fashion my own small implement that was originally imported from Italy.
And yet.. even though my design was better..I was constantly compared to male farmers .. “why are you not following their methods and same equipment as the dudes? Well..because I have breasts, shorter arms and lesser upper body strength, you idiots!”
And this was the State of California public agency that controlled my land access that I lost and subsequently lost my farm due to lack of land access.
I am particularly depressed now because there is no way I expect a fair hearing ..the world has gone mad. Daft as a drunk duck, I am telling you.. and it’s just depressing. They have stolen 12 years of my life and my work(I was working on automating my farm equipment) because I am not a man.
I don’t want to be equal to a man. I want to be myself. I empathize with those training for female sports. We can’t win anywhere. Soon we will only be relegated for one job..for the one thing only we can do..and what only we possess: wombs. I don’t even want to live in this world anymore.
The question when it comes to competitive sports is, which of these DSDs confer male physical advantage onto the individual?
As an example, though we can speculate with some now quite strong evidence on these two Olympic boxers, perhaps it's best to look at an athlete whose DSD is already known and confirmed: Caster Semenya, who won gold in the Women's 800m of the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
Because of a ruling published by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, we know that Semenya has 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), a male-specific (XY) DSD that, due to a recessive gene mutation, impairs the conversion of testosterone to DHT such that the penis is underdeveloped and the testes typically remain internal to the body.
Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation. This is what happened with Semenya.
However, the testes are still functional. Individuals with 5-ARD go through male puberty, produce testosterone in the normal male range, and in athletic competition, will therefore have male physical advantage.
In response to Semenya's case, the IAAF (now World Athletics) instituted a rule change so that 5-ARD individuals, and others with DSDs that are known to confer male performance advantage, are by default deemed ineligible to compete in women's events.
That is: on the basis that being male is not a talent, they chose policy that does not reward male physical advantage in competitions that should be about celebrating female athletic excellence.
So I think this isn't really about if sex or gender can be thought of as a spectrum, but what policy decisions, regarding DSDs, need to be made to ensure fairness in women's sport. And in the case of contact sports like boxing, safety as well.
And remember we can't see chromosomes. You say this with apparent certainty:
>> Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation.
Who is to say that a baby born with female external genitalia is "erroneously" observed to be female? If we observed them to be male, how would that not be erroneous? Again: we don't observe chromosomes directly. The line between the categories of "male" and "female" we understand was drawn long before anyone knew anything about chromosomes and there is no reason why knowing that a majority but not all individuals in the male or female category have the same "chromosomes" (the same karyotype, really) should eliminate the criterion we used before that, i.e. external genitalia at birth.
In the same vein, who is to say that someone who was assigned female at birth, who grew up as a girl, socialised as a girl, grew up to be accepted as a woman by their entire society - was "erroneously" so?
I think that would be a very lazy attitude to adopt (no offense to you) and that we should instead be prepared to accept that sex determination is hard in the fringes where people are not like most of us and we shouldn't make absolute proclamations like "XY is male".
And we should not forget that telling a person who grew up as a woman that she is now a man, or that she is stripped of some of the natural rights of a woman, like competing in women's sports, is cruel and a form of violation. It's like a forced sex change, a forced intervention to a person's identity that they developed spontaneously by living the only life they have in the only body they have. We should tread very carefully when dealing with people with DSD, especially when it's all in the name of "fairness". Scientists certainly do and not for reasons of fairness but for reasons of accuracy.
>> Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation.
> Who is to say that a baby born with female external genitalia is "erroneously" observed to be female? If we observed them to be male, how would that not be erroneous? Again: we don't observe chromosomes directly. The line between the categories of "male" and "female" we understand was drawn long before anyone knew anything about chromosomes and there is no reason why knowing that a majority but not all individuals in the male or female category have the same "chromosomes" (the same karyotype, really) should eliminate the criterion we used before that, i.e. external genitalia at birth.
I would say it's erroneous because in the present day we have advanced testing and advanced research into developmental biology to much more completely understand the underlying process that builds female and male bodies.
Like we know that the only difference between males with 5-ARD and males who developed normally is they lack an enzyme needed to make the penis grow properly and the testes to descend. They have no female reproductive system: no ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus. With this knowledge, what reason is there to classify these individuals as female?
> In the same vein, who is to say that someone who was assigned female at birth, who grew up as a girl, socialised as a girl, grew up to be accepted as a woman by their entire society - was "erroneously" so?
I think that is more to do with socio-cultural views on women and men than anything else, and not so relevant in the narrower case of eligibility in women's sport, which has to be based around eliminating male physical advantage, otherwise there's no reason for the category to exist.
> And we should not forget that telling a person who grew up as a woman that she is now a man, or that she is stripped of some of the natural rights of a woman, like competing in women's sports, is cruel and a form of violation.
I agree it must come as a huge shock to find out that you're male when you'd believed you were female.
But isn't it also cruel to female athletes when they are being compelled to compete with a male? Is it not a violation for a female boxer to be punched in the skull by a male with significantly greater upper body strength?
My view is that sports organisations have a duty of care and a duty of fairness to all athletes, not just the ones who've received unwanted news about eligibility due to their sex.
We already do: we determine the sex of babies at birth, and each others' sex as adults, by looking at external genitalia and at secondary sex characteristics.
Why would knowledge of chromosomes now change that? Like I say above, we can't see chromosomes. And the people who can, i.e. biologists, have a much more nuanced view of what it means for an individual to be male or female, rather than their karyotype (and not their chromosomes) being male or female. The scientists interviewed for the BBC article all agree that whether an individual, a person, is male or female, is not clear cut and that detecting, or not, a Y chromosome is not enough of a criterion.
Keep in mind that "all X have Y" is not equivalent with "all who have Y are X". Or replace "all" with "most" and the same goes.
>> I think that is more to do with socio-cultural views on women and men than anything else, and not so relevant in the narrower case of eligibility in women's sport, which has to be based around eliminating male physical advantage, otherwise there's no reason for the category to exist.
The BBC article points out that there is no test that can determine "male physical advantage" as you put it. Also note that some athletic associations, e.g. World Athletics, consider athletes with Y-chromosome DSDs to be eligible for competition in women's categories as long as they reduce their testosterone to male levels medically. See:
https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/65051900
As an aside, note in the same article that World Athletics now completely bans transgendered women _who have gone through male puberty_ from competing in the women's category so even having one's sex determined as male as birth is not recognised as an absolute advantage in women's sports; the cutoff is having gone through a male puberty, which a genetic test alone cannot determine.
To be clear, I do think that banning trans women who have gone through male puberty from sports is _on balance_ the fair choice, although it means transgendered women cannot reasonably compete in any category, since it would be unfair for them to compete in the male category and there is no special third category. End aside.
>> But isn't it also cruel to female athletes when they are being compelled to compete with a male?
Yes, but I'm claiming that someone whose sex was determined to be female at birth, and lived their whole life as a woman, and experienced everything that every other woman experiences, is not a male.
>> My view is that sports organisations have a duty of care and a duty of fairness to all athletes, not just the ones who've received unwanted news about eligibility due to their sex.
Of course, but those athletes also deserve a fair treatment. And ruling that they can't compete as women, when they are recognised as women in every other aspect of their lives since birth, is very hard to see as fair. Should we start to treat those women as men in their everyday lives also? That sounds even more unfair.
> Why would knowledge of chromosomes now change that?
If we look again at the case of Caster Semenya, who was reportedly assigned female at birth, with a birth certificate to match, but for whom later tests showed XY chromosomes, this was a strong indication of Semenya actually being male. Then further investigation revealed that Semenya has 5-ARD, a male-only DSD condition in which the penis does not develop as normal due to a mutation in an enzyme responsible for transforming testosterone to DHT. The testes are present and caused Semenya to go through male puberty. There is no female reproductive system: no uterus, no cervix, no fallopian tubes, no ovaries. But there is a male reproductive system, albeit a broken one: testes and an underdeveloped penis. On this basis, Semenya is male, not female.
Knowledge of sex chromosomes was the starting point for confirming that Semenya is a male.
> Also note that some athletic associations, e.g. World Athletics, consider athletes with Y-chromosome DSDs to be eligible for competition in women's categories as long as they reduce their testosterone to [fe]male levels medically.
That's true but it's also controversial. The female category can only coherently exist if the eligibility criteria excludes the male physical advantage acquired by males during male sexual development. And there's no evidence that this advantage is wholly removed when these males suppress testosterone. Only evidence of some weakening. The male body remains.
> As an aside, note in the same article that World Athletics now completely bans transgendered women _who have gone through male puberty_ from competing in the women's category so even having one's sex determined as male as birth is not recognised as an absolute advantage in women's sports; the cutoff is having gone through a male puberty, which a genetic test alone cannot determine.
I think this is an important aside to mention. The male physical advantage is equivalent between the cohorts of males with a trans identity and males with an androgen-sensitive DSD (like 5-ARD). In terms of fair competition, it doesn't really make sense to permit eligibility via testosterone suppression for one group but not the other.
> Yes, but I'm claiming that someone whose sex was determined to be female at birth, and lived their whole life as a woman, and experienced everything that every other woman experiences, is not a male.
Does this apply to the athletes we're discussing though? Having testes and going through male puberty, as Caster Semenya did, is not a female experience.
Whether it’s fair or not is for the armchair philosophers.
What all the available evidence so far indicates is that Khelif is male, most likely with a difference of sex development (DSD).
Biologist Richard Dawkins agrees (though his argument is much better stated than mine): https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/07/biological-sex-bi...
Note that this doesn’t really “solve” all parts of the debate around gender and sports, but it’s a good starting point.
Dawkins knows better and knows that that humans are born that are not clearly male, not clearly female, and also very clearly neither male nor female.
That's actual empirical observed science. There are peer reviewed medical papers in respected journals that look at hundreds of thousands of birth records and break the numbers down on distributions of chromosonal variations at birth.
He understands genetics and these days, when talking to the likes of Piers Morgan et al. he plays a cagey game and talks about reproductive sex, what is required to make a baby outside of a lab the good old fashioned way, when a sperm fertilises an egg.
He's well aware there are more than two types of human birth, he glosses over what he knows to keep things simple to avoid contraversy or something.
If this is all news to you, rather than something you might have read, as I did, some 40+ years ago, then you might choose to start with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
IIRC it links to medical papers and meta papers.
There are several people here in Australia that were born neither male nor female. That's a fact. One took a valid complaint through the Australian courts that they would be lying on an official document if they checked either [F] or [M] on an Australian passport.
Doctors and genetics experts gave evidence, the Australian passport system was changed.
This wasn't some "cultural gender" thing based on someone's feelings about gender, it was stone cold genetic reality about "sex" at birth .. which in reality is a lot more complicated than many Fox cable hosts claim it to be on camera.
Do you have a reference for or link to the details of the court case? It would be very interesting to understand the details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex_rights_in_Australia sketches out a framework, the details can be extracted from the public records for the Department, the State of Victoria, and the decisions of the Family Court.
> Though I'm surprised he managed to convince them
Would you be equally suprised that Perry Mason won a case concerning a woman? Do you require that a fully limbed wheelchair bound lawyer be disqualified in a disability case about a blind amputee?
The key result here is that people of unambiguously indeterminate sex actually exist and government forms in Australia now recognise that.
A wider realisation that some may not reach is that various syndrome might not unambiguously define male or female for the people borm with such syndromes or be clear to the parents that raise them.
If you have specific examples to the contrary, I'd be interested to read about them.
There's a weird thing that occurs in Australia, civil servants tend to respect citizens right to privacy. Not always, of course, but by and large identities are preserved and hefty fines come into play when privacy is violated.
Hansards and Court transcripts, as you would have found, obfuscate identities in various contexts and reporters that attend are aware of guidelines to follow.
> Seems to me that this system of marking passports with an "X" is flawed by being overly broad, including people who are unambiguously male or female.
Do you or do you not accept as fact that people are born who are neither unambiguously male nor unambiguously female?
It's a very simple Yes or No.
Regardless of your personal belief here, expert testimony in multiple court cases adjudicated by various seperate judges, along with a federal department and a state tribunal all aligned together to agree that Yes was the case in the world in which we live.
Yes, some people are born who have differences of sex development, and this might require further investigation as to what abnormal event has actually happened in their development, and the root cause. This is for clinicians and developmental biologists to understand and elucidate for the rest of us.
However my point is this "X" marker tells us nothing much useful about this at all, as it's being applied to individuals who are unambiguously of one sex or the other even with DSDs, as with the Klinefelter syndrome cases.
The "X" is even being given to people whose sex is unambiguous, who don't have any DSD condition, but for some reason have come to believe that they are neither a woman or a man. A wholly psychological condition.
[3] is Selma Feldman Witchel (2018). "Disorders of Sex Development". Best Practice & Research. Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology. 48: 90–102. doi:10.1016/j.bpobgyn.2017.11.005. PMC 5866176. PMID 29503125. The estimated frequency of genital ambiguity is reported to be in the range of 1:2000–1:4500
Those referencess of the 218 references provided are the ones that mainly focus on various aspects of distribution frequency.
For example, XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) is a male condition, X0 (Turner syndrome) is a female condition, XYY (Jacobs syndrome) is male, and so on.
This is the spectrum of human physical and genetic birth presentations as described by peer reviewed medical papers (a number linked in the intersex wikipedia link).
Venn diagrams are not difficult to grasp and anyone taking issue with the categorisation in the field is more than welcome to submit their work and arguments to the relevant journals.
Though for competitive sports, and protecting the women's category in particular, it is only a smaller set of DSDs that eligibility policymakers need to be concerned with: those that confer male physical advantage.
This might be a good model for younger kids, but by the time kids reach high school the biological gap is too great. See https://boysvswomen.com/#/ This is a problem because high school is the time when college scholarships become a thing, performance in competitive high school sports matters. Also, you now need three leagues instead of two, which could get expensive depending on the sport.
Did you friend say why he advocated for these arbitrary tiers rather than separating by sex?
I guess your friend was aiming more towards not upsetting male athletes who identify as women and who desire to compete in the female category, by abolishing the category altogether, rather than these male athletes being told "no".