It’s an unfair advantage apparently. You know, like being born tall for basketball players. Curious how no other biological advantages are being policed.
> The International Olympic Committee has barred transgender athletes from competing in the women’s category of the Olympics and said that all participants in those events must undergo genetic testing.
Genetic testing doesn’t leave a lot of room for accidentally or intentionally targeting women for being “insufficiently feminine.”
https://www.olympics.com/en/news/semenya-niyonsaba-wambui-wh...
If it's just karyotype, are men with XX male syndrome (SRY gene without an Y chromosome) then allowed to participate in women's sports?
I recall a study looking at genetics in general and how much of professional sport abilities that can be attributed to it, and the number were fairly high for most sports, especially those involving strength and endurance. Genetic disorders like AIS could however also be a hindrance.
I do recall that in some endurance sports, certain genetic disorders involving oxygen delivery were much more common in top elites than in the average population, meaning that people without that disorder is at severe disadvantage compared to general population. It is an ongoing discussion if people with those kind of disorders should be allowed to compete in for example long distance skiing, as the disorder becomes natural doping and would be cheating if a person without the disorder was competing with that kind of blood in their system.
Genetic testing, outside of the culture war about what defines a man or a woman, really comes down to what is fair competition. Personally I can't really say. Does knowing that maybe half of the top skiers has a rare blood disorder make it less fun for people?
I'm just going to leave the headline of this article for you to consider while you answer:
"Report of Fertility in a Woman with a Predominantly 46,XY Karyotype in a Family with Multiple Disorders of Sexual Development"
Otherwise it might turn out you are proposing a standard that no system that bifurcates men and women can achieve, and on the basis of that, rejecting genetic testing.
Leave aside the fact that very few of us here have actually tested our 23rd chromosome. Historically, the Olympics have not been (and are not) strictly chromosomal. The 2023 testosterone suppression decision requirements has exclusively impacted cis women, for one example.
Humans are biologically dimorphic in the same way winters are usually cold and summers are usually hot.
I’d rather not have discussions in bad faith.
Coming back around to the olympics: I agree that humans are bipedal, but that has no bearing on the fact that the Olympic committee should take great care to create rules and categories for paralympic athletes. I think there's a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree without dismissing the complexity that comes from organizing across 8 billion people.
Ironically the sports divide is probably the single area where having some physical advantages isn’t a bonus. It’s also near and dear to the hearts of billions, and such a terrible hill to die on. Ideally the solution would be a league like the Paralympic competitions, but high level athletes are rare, trans people are relatively rare, and two overlapping are incredibly rare. To make such a league would be a farce that couldn’t hope to succeed.
When discussing trans people in sports, the most salient contexts aren't elite sports championships like the Olympics. "Sports" is also done recreationally and is often considered a normal part of ones childhood upbringing. On the topic of trans people, the question "can my child play this sport with their friends"?
Edit I’d add that T screening in sports exists primarily to find dopers, not people trying to pass.
To restate myself, sports during childhood are much more important than elite world championships. Almost everyone I know did a sport with peers during our formative years, myself included. Meanwhile, nobody I know was ever close to qualifying to be an Olympic athlete, and I feel certain the same is true for most of the people in this thread.
Generally speaking when people talk about "kids sports" they specifically mean pre-collegiate, not in the least because colloquialism aside, college students are adults.
As someone who played sports in college, for >99% of people it really was just about having fun: you're hanging out with your friends, getting some exercise, and doing something enjoyable. I exercised side-by-side with people who went on to represent my country on the international stage and their dedication was definitely the exception.
No silly scholarships involved here, though: I live in the EU, so education is reasonably affordable to everyone without it, and the colleges don't feel the need to pretend to be professional sports teams.
Within biology, we'd see a number of metrics (like height) which would usually appear bimodal (like two bell curves added together). We might identify at least two latent variables here: A real-number 'age' (which can be observed) and a binary 'sex' (not directly observed). But it's worth stressing that these implied underlying curves overlap, and any given metric is not strictly correlated with the others. (Commonly, one might be on the lower end of some distributions and the higher ends of others. Someone can be 5'3" tall, have red hair, and a high body-fat percentage while also having testicles, XY chromosomes, and dying at the age of 62.) (We should also note that the 23rd chromosome just another observed variable, starting after ~1900.)
Some causes of variation that we know about are fraternal birth order, or endocrine-disrupting chemicals like PFAS, conditions like PCOS, etc.
Case in point are all the cis women who are impacted by the ever-stricter testosterone guidelines in the Olympics. Further is the effect of fraternal birth order, or the endocrine-disrupting chemicals like PFAS, or the intentional introduction of hormones and hormone blockers. (If certain industries are to be believed, soy milk has a similar effect.) These are all variations and things which impact what we understand as "biological sex".
Folk gender theorists tend to consider sexuality, identity, biology, and expression as orthogonal axes. But these are clearly also correlated among people. (Stretching the definition of "correlated" to include qualitative metrics like 'expression' using the usual methods.)
An information-theoretic framework would inform well an "optimal" way to talk about this, using a one-bit string for most people and increasingly more bits when more information is needed. This is roughly how people already talk.
But that is not being said here, just as in every other time the discussion of sex segregation in sports comes up; and just as in every other time, people simply pretend in bad faith that such things are being asserted.
> I agree that humans are bipedal, but that has no bearing on the fact that the Olympic committee should take great care to create rules and categories for paralympic athletes.
Sure. Which is why they do, and nobody has a problem with it.
Go take a survey of the people opposed to transgender women competing in women's Olympic sports, and see what they think of having a separate category for transgender athletes. Or even separate categories for transgender men and transgender women. I'd wager the large majority have no problem with that. (They might at most be concerned about disproportionate airtime being given to sport events that relatively few people qualify for and relatively few people are especially interested in.)
Humans have a wide variety of biological variation in metrics we think of as linked to "biological sex" and those metrics are accessibly mutable. Even within the Olympics, the natural variation of these metrics within cis women is a famous topic of debate (Imane Khelif, Caster Semenya, etc.)
Bipedalism is something which varies very rarely and is especially not accessibly mutable.
This would apply to sex chromosomes as well
We are talking about sexual dimorphism and secondary sex characteristics.
Humans were understood to be sexually dimorphic before we discovered sex chromosomes in 1905, and we usually label our babies with a biological sex without the aid of consumer genetic testing.
What is the total prevalence of all conditions medically recognized as intersex?
> and those metrics are accessibly mutable.
What is that even supposed to mean?
Not all biological variation is classified as intersex.
> What is that even supposed to mean?
You can change a lot of your 'secondary sex characteristics' intentionally. This is much easier than removing a limb, and even easier than adding a limb.
Okay, but other biological variation is clearly not relevant to the discussion.
There are men under 5'4", women taller than 5'9", women with high testosterone, men with low testosterone, men with breast tissue, etc.
They have XY chromosomes, internal testes, a male testosterone level, and male muscle development. They have the SRY gene that the IOC is testing for, and are not one of the exceptions. Regardless of the fact that their DSD (5-ARD) results in no penis.
To be clear, I'm not saying they should start living life as men. But describing their situation as the natural variation of cis women is simplistic and not accurate.
Further, they are women, and therefore their testosterone levels and muscle development are female.
This just gets to a ludicrous place. These are women who are simply identifiable as so. Anyone throughout history would have identified them as so. Their biological metrics are within the variation of cis women, because they are cis women.
Either way, my point still stands. These women are women, would have been recognized as such by anyone throughout history, and it's simply the case that some women are born with XY chromosomes and testes.
It absolutely does appear to be the case, but Imane is very vague about it in interviews.
> These women are women, would have been recognized as such by anyone throughout history
I disagree. They are males with a genital deformity (no penis). Whether that translates to "woman" is not universal across cultures.
I agree we should refer to them as women, because that's how they were raised their entire lives.
> it's simply the case that some women are born with XY chromosomes and testes.
Yes, women with CAIS. But individuals with 5-ARD are not always going to have the "woman" label applied to them. And it is not fair they they compete against women in sporting events.
When people do submit to such testing, how commonly are the results other than they expected?
Perhaps not, given the selection effect.
> You can easily go your entire life without knowing.
Sure, since we already established that the tests are usually not done at all.
An overwhelming majority of people (at least among those who have a basic understanding of the underlying science) could, however, guess correctly about themselves.
The combined prevalence of all intersex conditions is simply not that high.