More women than expected are genetically men (2016)
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Between reasons like in this article, or being born intersex, etc, there are definitely people with female chromosomes who have competed in men's sports, or people with female sex organs and male chromosomes that have competed in female sports. I don't know what the "fairness" answer is, but these are real people.
All elite athletes have biological advantages not afforded to ordinary humans like us. People like Michael Phelps and Alex Honnold are specific examples of course, but even after years of training most people cannot perform anywhere near the level that elite athletes do.
Now, which biological advantages are fair and which are not is determined by society. We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair, even though people have exactly as much control over them as they do over the amount of lactic acid they produce or how their amygdala behaves.
What's the implication here, that because the distinction is totally arbitrary, that we should do away with it? What does that mean for women's sports?
I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority?
Would you be equally deferential to the organizer/rule-making body if it was some other controversial issue, like whether women could compete at all? As a sibling comment mentioned, women couldn't even compete in the olympics before 1900, so if it came up as a culture war topic would your reaction also be "I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision"?
I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.
You kinda do, otherwise your position just sounds like "why are you talking about trans athletes? You should just Trust the Experts, except when I disagree with them, then it's an Important Moral Issue that the public needs to weigh in on".
>I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.
This is a very perilous position to hold, because it basically means if there's enough TERF athletes to outnumber trans women athletes (which doesn't seem too implausible, based on purely demographic factors) then it's okay to exclude them.
It is okay to exclude men from women's sports because women have the right to sex-specific spaces.
the clergy, such at least as can be fully confided in, may admissibly and
meritoriously make themselves acquainted with the arguments of opponents, in
order to answer them, and may, therefore, read heretical books; the laity,
not unless by special permission, hard to be obtained. This discipline
recognises a knowledge of the enemy's case as beneficial to the teachers,
but finds means, consistent with this, of denying it to the rest of the
world: thus giving to the élite more mental culture, though not more mental
freedom, than it allows to the mass [0].
I think a regime where intersex cis women, as well as trans women who have been on testosterone suppression for a long period, would probably be most fair. I don't think categorical bans are fair in any respect, not is forcing intersex cis and trans women to compete with men (because they're likely to be much worse due to not having as much testosterone), nor is creating a third category (because it would have too few people to be truly competitive). But I'm not an expert and most likely neither are you, so I try to keep my opinions here relatively loosely held.
The muscular changes that happen during puberty are permanent. No amount of testosterone suppression will change that. In how many sports do any trans-women end up on the podium vs their numbers in that sport?
The boundaries are really not that fuzzy at all.
On the scale of human evolution, this is a very recent situation for society to figure out how to "decide".
So actually on the scale of human evolution, humans have been making different choices about matters like these since we've been humans.
You can, for example, find examples of trans individuals in Utah in the 1800s. [1] Eunuchs are a pretty well-known concept since about the start of recorded history.
Here's an example of a roman cult which practiced self-castration. [2]
Or gender norms have existed since gender was defined in the 70s-80s by feminist scholars. Before that was only sex, which biologists know to be not a binary but a bimodal distribution, itself.
I think a helpful reframing is to note that some sports do segregate by factors other than sex, generally bodyweight. If boxing, wrestling, judo, weightlifting etc all benefit from weight classes so that we can have more fair competitions among competitors in comparable weight bands, why not have height classes for various sports? Why not have cycling races with tiers of people at different points on the vO2 max scale?
I actually think it would be interesting to watch competitions for some sports that are based around who does "better than expected" by some model that predicts baselines. What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? Critically, you wouldn't just stop paying attention when the first cluster of people cross the finish-line -- the winner might arrive later. I would also love to see if different styles of play would emerge in, e.g. an under-6-foot basketball height class.
This is basically how golf works, right?
Pushing for allowing men into women's sports based on gender identity will result in the extinction of women's sports. If you want that, at least be honest about it.
To use one of your examples: Michael Phelps has at this point had his records beaten by a number of other male swimmers. But no female swimmer has come close. Not even Katie Ledecky.
For example, the fastest male swimmers in Iceland are still much faster than the fastest female swimmers in the world, and Iceland has 10 000 times less people than the world.
There aren't 10 000 times more men trying to become elite swimmers than women.
That somehow was mostly because people with certain chromosomal characteristics were heavily disadvantaged in sports, but increasingly wanted participation in them. Because those people (who we called "women") would largely be unable to be competitive and/or would face considerable increased risk of physical harm if they played in/against the same teams as everyone else, people with those chromosomal characteristics splintered off to compete in/against teams of themselves.
This was extremely successful and many women have been happily participating in sports, enjoying the ability to win games by virtue of their training and the non-sex defining aspects of their genetic make up, all without having to unnecessarily accept outsized risks of bodily harm and injury.
It's also worth mentioning that there hasn't been much effort to keep women from competing outside of their own divisions if they're willing to accept the lower odds of success and higher risks of harm to themselves that'd come from that. For the most part, they have been deciding for themselves that it isn't worth it.
It's not even as if chromosomal advantages are the only place we've done this. We have weight classes in certain sports. We have teams that only accept people within certain age ranges. We have divisions based on demonstrated ability. We even have things like the special Olympics. These really aren't a problem or a bad thing to have.
People can't choose their biology, but they can choose to play sports in a way that's more fair and safe for themselves and the others they play with and that's a perfectly acceptable practice that we should encourage. This is true even when it means that some people are excluded from specific teams or events because of things they cannot change about themselves. There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to.
This reads to me as "separate but equal" which I think is exactly what's wrong with sports divisions. Sports divisions play out the "separate is inherently unequal" at so many levels.
If a professional baseball player wanted to play in a little league tournament they'd do very very well, but it'd be unfair to a bunch of 7-12 year olds, so we don't allow that and the sport is "separate", but when a 9 year old kid wins the Little League World Series, while that's very exciting for the players, we still don't treat that win as being equal to winning the actual World Series.
Winning the actual World Series is a much bigger deal. Nobody treats them as being equal, but being inherently unequal doesn't mean that it's wrong. The Little League World Series can just be its own thing, because what actually matters is that the kids are having fun playing the sport they love and don't have to worry that some 30 year old with a batting average of .340 is going to ruin their good time.
There are times when "separate is inherently unequal" is actually the most fair.
I guess ask the WNBA if they feel that way about it...
Sure. Meanwhile there's no athletic record of anyone identified as a woman cracking the four minute mile.
Not long after Roger Bannister, teenage boys started doing it. It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets.
Elite capability does not erase or conceal sex-related gaps. We have male and female divisions at all levels of sport for a reason.
Most tracks aren't set up to properly measure the mile. It's easier to measure the 1,600 meters, still 9 meters short of a mile. It's not a standard track event but it does give a good estimate of the mile time.
The USA high school record for the female 1500 m event 4:04.62, set on May 17, 2013, by one Mary Cain of Bronxville, NY, in an event at Eagle Rock, CA.
It would take something like another 18 seconds to get to 1609 meters at that pace.
That's just the USA. Let's look at the World Under-18 records:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_under-18_bests_i...
3:54.52, by a Ling Zhang in China, in 1997. Not sub-4 pace. She was 16 + 188 days old.
Not sure where you got 3:34 from; maybe you are looking at a boys' table? A 17-year-old Australian named Cameron Myers hit 3:33.26 in 2023, in Poland.
We saw a new women's 1500 m record just this month. 31-year-old Kenyan Faith Kipyegon ran it 3:48.68 on July 5, in Eugene, OR.
Note that it it was still 15 seconds slower than the boy. It's about a 4:05 mile pace.
"It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets."
Most boys won't run the actual mile in a track meet, just because they don't run that event. I hadn't meant to address women at all.
Some sports actually do test for testosterone in order to determine eligibility (I believe volleyball?)
Also, interestingly enough, people that do estrogen injections end up with lower testosterone production. Estrogen also tends to (but not always!) block the effects of testosterone.
Hormones are weird and how individuals react to them is all over the board.
And example of that craziness is what the article refers to. People with Y chromosomes and uteruses. It's caused (AFAIK) because the fetus didn't respond to the hormones which cause the gonads to turn into male reproductive organs.
In theory.
The problem is that for example in women boxing these people are overrepresented. This indicates that testosterone is possibly not the only answer, and we don’t know the full picture AFAIK. But of course it’s also possible that simply Y chromosome causes changes in behavior and not physical performance, and it’s more likely that they like boxing more. We don’t know.
The current best proven differentiator AFAIK is testosterone level and whether their body can process that.
"Intersex" is a misleading term that's been phased out in favor of DSD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development). Every person is still male or female.
Women have a right to sex-specific sports, and anyone that doesn't qualify is free to compete in the men's leagues.
Since I'm rate limited, to respond to comment below:
That has been the definition for far longer than any current culture war. Right wingers might be latching onto it now, but broken clocks and all that.
To be slightly more specific, because you think you've found a gotcha, it's the gamete size one would or should produce. Biologists are well aware that there can be disorders of development.
By this logic, individuals like those mentioned in the article above don't have any sex at all because their bodies are unable to produce gametes of any kind.
Sounds like a normal process of searching for a definition for a controversial subject.
Look, I get what you're saying. Such cases aren't "normal". The claim that "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers." And yet, people with six fingers exist, as do uncommon sex variations. It's fine. It happens.
The only reason to insist so stridently that there's an absolute and inevitable binary is if you're trying to enforce a social or religious norm, and are insisting that it's an immutable fact about the world instead of something culturally mediated.
> "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers."
No. There are no intermediates. Nobody produces "spergs" or "speggs". Someone may produce no gametes because they're not yet mature or because of a developmental disorder, but that just means that they will later on in life, or won't produce the gametes their body is set up to produce.
> The only reason
Bullshit. I bring this up because it's a fundamental fact of biology and HN should know better than to push pseudoscience. Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.
You're just using more normative words, implying that you can tell what someone "really" is aside from literally any definition you can articulate, since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases.
> Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.
Unless you are a biologist who specializes in this, caring so much about this means you are actually very much invested in the culture war.
Look, you're trying to argue with the field of biology as a whole. Good luck.
> since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases.
We've established no such thing. Find this mystical person first and then we can talk about something specific, instead of just waving your hands about hypotheticals.
> caring so much about this means
This is the worst sort of argument. Spout pseudoscience, get called on your bullshit, and then pull out "why do you care so much??? :(". Don't spout off in the first place and you won't get called out on it.
Yes, classification is normative. This stupid debate would immediately end if people could internalize what that means.
That's one of many ways sex is defined and it's definitely useful for some purposes, but I have no idea why some people think that is appropriate for making social distinctions.
> Women have a right to sex-specific sports
Gender (social, including legal, categories based on sex traits are gender, not sex) categories in sports were almost without exception created to prevent men from having to compete with and potentially lose to women. There is certainly an existing practice of gender segregated competition in some some sports and other competitive domains, but I’m not sure where the idea that this practice of segregation is a matter of rights comes from, no matter what basis of assigning gender is used. (Gender segregation has been frequently used as a means of preserving unequal treatment while meeting the US legal obligation for numerically equal opportunities in school sports insuring, but that’s obviously not the same thing as gender segregation being a right.)
Source? I've seen this claptrap mentioned a few times but never with a source.
> created to prevent men from having to compete with and potentially lose to women
You deeply misunderstand the origin of women's sports leagues. They were created by women for women as a result of patriarchal efforts to exclude women from sports. Men shoving their way into women's sports by way of gender identity is just one more example of males not accepting "no", and is exactly the reason why women have a right to their own spaces.
Players should not be allowed to play in competitions below their rating. Include some measures to make it hard for people to purposefully lose in minor competitions to lower their rating so that they can then enter a major competition in a rating group well below their true strength.
Playing in competitions above their rating should generally be allowed, although this might need to vary from sport to sport. For example in a top level knock out tournament that had a few low level players enter their opponents in the first round would have a much easier chance of making it to the second round than the other high level participants.
There still might need to be some gender restricted competitions for social reasons. In a sport where there is a large gender imbalance among players, especially at the scholastic levels, people of the minority gender might be discouraged from playing because they don't want to stick out.
Competitions restricted to the minority gender give those players a chance to develop to the point that they can be comfortable playing the events that are open to all genders.
Should all just play esports instead.
does not exist for sex or gender.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/gender-has-a-history-and-...
https://x.com/Fausto_Sterling/status/1229878759261712385
She is deeply unserious, and should be ignored if you value truth.
There is no rule that says women can't play in the NFL for example. A combination of biological realities, a lack of interested women, and cultural expectations have just naturally resulted in a segregated system. Any woman who is qualified for and interested in playing in the NFL can and should.
It's fine for people to decide who they want to play with/against too even if that means by definition that some people will have to play somewhere else. If someone wants to start a league of dart players all named Bill so what? May the best Bill win! The thing about sports divisions that segregate themselves (by name, region, age, gender, etc) is that they also limit their success. The best dart player named Bill can't claim to be the best dart player in the state without playing against people with other names.
If people are happy with their accomplishments within whatever division they're comfortable playing in, we can be happy for them too.
Using the word “gender” to refer to the concepts of both “reproductive sex” (chromosomes, gametes, genitals) and also “gender” (socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and expectations associated with femininity and masculinity) certainly makes it very complex to reason about and discuss, particularly if it feels socially distasteful to separate the two.
Without getting the soapbox out, it seems to me that there’s an infinite number of possible “genders” as each unique individual can construct whatever permutation of supposedly feminine and masculine coded things that suits them. But broadly speaking, there are two sexes - the one that went down the developmental pathway to produce and ejaculate semen, and the one that went down the pathway to be able to ovulate, incubate fertilised eggs, give birth and nurse with milk.
So in considering sport, given the physiological consequences of reproductive role causes female performance to be on average significantly lower than for males, does it make sense for sporting categories to be gendered (how people look or act) or sexed (how people are constructed)?
There’s a inclusivity argument for “yes” from the point of view of the interests of one group (transgender people), but it seems to come at the cost of preventing female athletes from doing anything other than merely participating in many competitions, rather than being able to win them.
XX division
Unlimited division for everyone else
The headline implies that this singular study from the Danish Cytogenetic Central Registry voids previous studies and takes their place as the new, singular source of truth. That's not how epidemiology works, though, so this study should be considered another data point with associated sampling bias, not a refutation of previous statistics.
These cases are the result of genetic variants, so sampling within a single region (as is the case with this study) can't be extrapolated to the entire population.
People with disorders of sex development such as Morris or Swyer syndrome have XY chromosomes, but they have female external genitalia, because the sexual development that would normally be triggered by XY chromosomes is somehow suppressed.
That is a high enough number that, were they to gather somewhere, you'd notice them, but a low enough number that trying to create laws to give them special treatment is political suicide.
I wonder what research into prevalence has done now, close to 10 years later and with way more political focus.
Its actually rather astounding how much binary pairs play a role from the very core of physics.
On the other hand, the XX vs XY karotype (chromosome set) is just very strongly correlated with sex.
The master switch for sex determination in humans (and most mammals) is the SRY gene, usually found on the Y chromosome. Its presence or absence determines whether a developing embryo takes the path towards producing sperm or producing eggs.
SRY can migrate to the X chromosome (resulting in males with an XX karotype) or can be broken by mutation (resulting in females with a XY karotype, usually infertile because other stages of development of the reproductive system depend on having two X chromosomes).
Sexual dimorphism in gonochoric species is a different type of thing to this.
I find this statement odd. Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender? What more is there to cope with beyond a simple genetic abnormality. It's not like discovering this means they suddenly have to register as the opposite gender or use a different bathroom. It's like taking a 13andme test and finding it hard to cope that you're 10% asian.
The only race we can truly define is homo sapiens sapiens.
This is a pretty controversial statement. Even studied anthropologists disagree with this.
I'll concede that much in the way of "race" is a social construct, but to claim there's no biology involved is categorically false.
that's what I'm trying to point out with this example: https://www.npr.org/2009/02/02/100057939/your-family-may-onc...
Race is the word we use to do exactly that. It's not perfect, but it's what we have.
A much more useful concept is ethnicity
If color defines a race, surely white korean people are the same race as Irish and German people and most malaysians are blacks right?
What about people born from parents with way different skin tones or any other characteristic you can think of?
And why aren't blond haired people not considered a different race than white people with brown hair? Why are ginger haired people.often discriminated? There are a lot of other characteristics than skin color we inherit from our parents, some are considered diseases, or syndromes, other not. The only difference with skin color is that we don't necessarily prejudice based on them, mostly because theses differences are less visible. Races is mostly a societal construct to discriminate people.
These kinds of properties/classifications are, I claim, more "natural", as far as biology. These groupings into classes are more natural (based on biological properties) than groupings into "races".
Distinctions between categories are often somewhat fuzzy, but in some cases there are processes independent of peoples’ opinions that behave largely like there are distinct buckets. Such as “has a left arm”.
With “race”, while there are certainly correlations between various genes and where one was born (and where one’s grandparents were born), and correlations between genes and other genes (which is partially explained by the correlations with location), any lines one may draw to split humanity into “races” will be fairly arbitrary, and at least substantially more arbitrary than splitting by whether someone is male or female (even though there are edge cases there as well; like I said, categories are often a little bit fuzzy).
Now, there may be other concepts that are even less real than race, but I don’t know if any of them are cared about enough to - oh, astrological signs! A person’s astrological signs are probably even less real than race, and people care enough about them to give them names.
I’m willing to talk about the radius of a helium atom even though there is no sharp cut-off in distance beyond which the amplitude for an electron being found there becomes zero.
But not every k-means clustering on a dataset reflects a real separation into types. Just because people draw lines in their model of the world, and just because these lines are sometimes useful, doesn’t mean those lines cleave reality at the joints.
And yet sometimes they are useful. Prople whose lineage originates in different places (race, if you will) do have medically significant differences (see the literature).
So, if by “race” one means “melanin content and geographic location of ancestors”, then that is a real thing. But the way these vary do not come in any particular natural grouping into categories; “race”, in the sense of a categorical variable (not just the concept of ancestry more generally), isn’t real, or, at least, it is less real than the distinction between male and female.
If one has a random real-valued variable which has a continuous distribution, it may be useful to chunk it up into discrete buckets even if the way of chunking ends up being fairly arbitrary. Having a way of chunking it up into intervals being useful doesn’t imply that the arbitrary chunking is actually a natural categorical variable.
Yes, it is good to remind people that we continue to be ourselves whatever we discover about ourselves. But, we should also be upfront about the fact that some of us are going to end up with real identity issues at some point.
But it's not a real problem, that's my point. The infertility is obviously, but that's not the identity issue here. Most people with infertility issues don't have a sex or gender identity problem, but a medical one.
Insofar as your genes matter in regards to your sex, they can only matter in what they express, and that's already done. It's like someone telling you they switched the blueprints for your house up, and you were supposed to have your neighbors house. But whatever you've been living in for 30 years, it's still the same place. Everything that's wrong with it is still wrong and everything that's good about it is still good.
Your body can matter to your identity because it's what you experience, but your genes can't unless you start to in a sense fetishize your genetic markup.
I dunno. People end up with aspects of their identity that they have trouble contending with, in any case. I neither want to downplay that nor make it seem like a bigger deal than it ought to be. If the researcher is reporting that people are having trouble coming to terms with it (the genetic information specifically and in isolation), then it is a real problem, but I think I agree that it shouldn’t be. And also, it is a short quote by the researcher and not super detailed, so maybe it is actually the case that people are taking a while to come to terms with the medical meaning anyway.
No, fake kindness isn't empathy. This wasn't about me. Everybody is actually exactly the same in that we all should care about our bodies, nobody should care about the biochemical details of their genes. That doesn't change your body or your personality.
Affirming someone's mistaken identity crisis because you want to show the world how nice you are is actually the opposite. What would help them is understanding exactly what I said, that they are still exactly who they were.
I can certainly understand the confusion of someone being faced with a diagnosis like this, that's empathy, but to pretend this means I need to affirm their insecurities even if grounded in nothing is not just not empathy, it's callous behavior to the detriment of the person involved.
If someone were to learn after 50 years of life, they've been adopted, and they voice something like "my life's a lie, are my parents even my parents?", you can voice empathy for their disorientation, but the actual answer as to the question is obviously, yes they're still your parents. It would in fact be sociopathic to advice anything else just out of "kindness".
Seriously, it's not about you. It's about them.
This statement is extremely controversial. The gender attribution wars are still burning like the Springfield tire fire.
we're also nearing the point where the earth being a spheroid is controversial so I'm not sure controversy really has anything to do with how factual something is.
This doesn't convince people who see their cultural norms as objective reality tho. hence the controversy.
No we haven't. And in fact, the cases cited in the article still have gender determined by chromosomes, just not the basic XY, XX configurations.
I would think so but I think there's a ton of cultural pain points around this. These are people who identify as women but are being told that they may have ambiguity, e.g. they may not be able to bear children/have difficulty getting pregnant or have internal genitals that they would consider manly. I can definitely see that knowledge being painful to experience and trigger some kind of gender dysphoria.
Being told you're genetically abnormal and that this may affect your capacity to bear children, something people have been socialized/instinctively incentivized to desire, will always be shocking imo.
No expert but I thought there was a few to several cases along these lines.
To my understanding chromosomes are never responsible for anything, they are a container for genes, and some genes are likely to live on particular chromosomes, so talking about chromosomes being responsible is never 100% correct, so a bad level of abstraction when talking about corner cases.
Take a swig from your drink, then spit it back into the container. Keep drinking from same container. Offer a sip to your friend.
At a restaurant meal, mix all the food you are served together into one pile. Explain how it all gets mixed up in your stomach.
Imagine when a pet dog throws up, then eats its own vomit. Include neighbors dogs joining the feast.
Place a photo of a king rat on your refrigerator or over your dining table. Hang another in view from the toilet.
When reading these scenarios, at a certain point you may have become disturbed or offended, yet empirically there's nothing dangerous or even wrong with any of them.
Explain the dimensions of your distress and how you cope.
This is not universally accepted.