Comment by blinkedup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blinkedup | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think a spectrum is the most helpful way to model the problem. What may be more useful is to consider normal males and normal females as the baseline, and then a set of discrete edge cases within each sex involving differences in sex development (DSDs) as the outliers.

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.

I disagree and I think the reason there is disagreement and debate is exactly because of how hard it is to define male and female, man and woman (which may be either four or two categories) in a way that covers every individual case. The BBC article makes exactly that point: you can't just look at someone's Y chromosome and say whether they're male or not. Not for 100% of humanity.

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.

> 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.

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.

>> With this knowledge, what reason is there to classify these individuals as female?

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.

> 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?

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.

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