blinkedup

It is an effective safeguard for protecting female prisoners from male prisoners.

There are different safeguards within each prison to protect prisoners from others of the same sex. VPUs for example.

Please refrain from deliberately misreading my comments.

Sexual assault and rape is terrible, no matter who the perpetrator or victim is. On this, I assume we agree.

The issue here is policy changes that remove one of the most important safeguarding measures to prevent this in the prison system: segregation by sex, so that all male inmates have no physical access to any female inmates.

This ideological argument was attempted back then too, but it's rejected by most people, who see the reality of the situation: men being locked up in women's prisons.

It should be no surprise to anyone that such a policy is very unpopular. Prisons are separated by sex for good reason.

Trying to pretend that some of these male criminals are women just because they said they are is not a particularly convincing argument.

Although the pushback against trans activist policy has come mostly from the right in the US (with some notable exceptions - Kara Dansky of Women's Declaration International, for example), it's a different story in the UK.

Around the mid-2010s, two events occurred in close succession: the Conservative government of the time proposed a policy of gender self-identification, and trans-identifying male prisoner Karen White was charged with sexually assaulting female prisoners while he was incarcerated in a women's prison. He was later convicted and it was uncovered that he'd been sent to the women's prison due to his "female" identity, despite having previous convictions of sexually assaulting and raping women.

The reaction from women was immense, organised on Mumsnet and other forums, mostly by left-wing feminists. After a lot of protest and publicity, the Tories dropped this policy. It was only later on they changed tack with policy proposals that shifted the balance away from trans activism, mostly to draw a line between them and Labour.

> 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.

That interpretation was by the laboratory, described verbatim from the reports of the test results.

Abrahamson also reported that the XY chromosomes were depicted photographically. So we know it must have been a karyotype test because that's what those tests show.

Here's an example from Wikipedia: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NHGRI_human_male_k...

We can see in this how the sex chromosomes make an asymmetrically sized pair, indicating XY. It's clear from the description of the lab reports that the same was observed for Khelif and Lin.

I read your comment as prioritizing testosterone levels over sex. My apologies if I misinterpreted.

> 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.

No but the commenter I was replying to suggested removing both sex and identity as eligibility criteria for women's sport. Whereas I was arguing it should be sex first and foremost.

Additional criteria can be added to take care of the edge cases but sex is most important and impactful.

> Do you or do you not accept as fact that people are born who are neither unambiguously male nor unambiguously female?

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.

I agree that an XY karyotype isn't conclusive proof that an individual is male, but it's a good heuristic for male physical advantage. In the context of women's sports, and certainly at an elite level, there are very few XY DSDs that don't confer such advantage and would still permit an individual to be competitive.

Like for example, Swyer syndrome is an XY DSD where the individual has a female phenotype (including uterus, fallopian tubes, and vagina) but complete gonadal dysgenesis. No ovaries or testes. Because of oestrogen deficiency, such individuals end up with a very high risk of bone defects including osteopenia and osteoporosis - which is not compatible with competitive sport.

Even with CAIS, an XY DSD where the body cannot process testosterone at all so despite presence of testes the individual develops an otherwise female phenotype, has a curiously higher incidence in athletes competing at an elite level, compared to the average within the general population: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5643412

> although they are likely to be taller than the average 46,XX woman given some height-determining genes on the Y chromosome and perhaps some that increase lean body mass. Mutation of this gene is found in fewer than 1 in 20,000 in the general population but is relatively common in elite female athletes [noted as 1/421 and 1/423 at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games].

The case of mosaicism you linked is fascinating but also incredibly rare, even more so than other DSDs. Also it almost certainly doesn't apply to these two boxers because it would have been picked up on the karyotyping, as it was in that paper.

I feel that the BBC article was quite enlightening on the topic of DSDs in general, but not so much on the impact of and presence of specific male DSDs in women's sport at an elite level. Sport provides a selection filter so these skew towards the subset that confer performance advantage. Like, 5-ARD has dominated entire podiums: in the Women's 800m of the 2016 Olympics, every medal was taken by a male.

That said, I see this as a policy failure more than anything. The IOC's policy fails women by not attempting to exclude male physical advantage at all, instead just going by whatever an athlete's identity documents say. They prioritise inclusion of male athletes in the women's category more than fairness and safety for female athletes.

This is in contrast with how they police their other eligibility criteria, like weight classes where this is verified at the event by weigh-ins. It's strict, too: an athlete was disqualified in this Olympics for being 100 grams over.

I believe the IBA's process, even though they prioritised the safety of their female athletes and fairness in competition, was also flawed. They should have taken the XY karyotype results as the start of their investigation instead of the end. Though, neither Khelif nor Lin pursued a case against the the IBA's decision at the CAS. Which says a lot too.

Interestingly there were a couple of transgendered athletes competing in this year's Olympics: Hergie Bacyadan, a female boxer who identifies as a man, and Nikki Hiltz, a female runner who identifies as a non-binary. Both competed in their respective sports in the category congruent with their 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".

I disagree. One shouldn't just take all possibilities as equally probable. But instead consider what would need to be involved to make each outcome possible and adjust one's perception of probabilities based on that. If it involves a vast unevidenced conspiracy of several unrelated parties, then it's going to be much less likely.

Besides that, there's additional evidence in this case that indicates XY sex chromosomes and male physical advantage.

For Khelif, perhaps the most revealing evidence is this interview with Khelif's trainer: https://www.lepoint.fr/sport/exclusif-jo-2024-imane-khelif-a...

> Après les championnats du monde 2023, où elle a été disqualifiée, j'ai pris les devants en contactant un endocrinologue de renom du CHU parisien, Kremlin-Bicêtre, qui l'a examinée. Celui-ci a confirmé qu'Imane est bien une femme, malgré son caryotype et son taux de testostérone. Il a dit : « Il y a un problème avec ses hormones, avec ses chromosomes, mais c'est une femme. » C'est tout ce qui nous importait. Nous avons ensuite travaillé avec une médecin basée en Algérie pour contrôler et réguler le taux de testostérone d'Imane, qui est actuellement dans la norme féminine. Des tests montrent très bien que toutes ses qualités musculaires et autres s'amoindrissent depuis. Actuellement, elle peut être comparée au niveau musculaire et au niveau biologique à une femme-femme-femme.

Here, he states that Khelif was medically assessed after the disqualification from the 2023 World Championships, and that this investigation revealed "a problem with chromosomes and hormones", and that as a consequence Khelif received medical interventions to artificially lower testosterone levels.

Also, the coach of the Spanish national team, Rafael Lozano, revealed that when the Algerian team visited to train with them, Khelif had to spar against a male boxer (José Quiles), as Khelif's strength was too great to safely spar against any of the female boxers: https://x.com/AlbertOrtegaES1/status/1819317673576030501

We can consider the results of both of these boxers in the Olympics as well. Both won gold in their weight class, and both won each round 5-0, which none of their competitors did. Isn't it an interesting coincidence that the two XY boxers happened to be the two that achieved such remarkable success in the women's tournament?

All of Michael Phelps' records have been broken by other men. None by women.

I think this illustrates the opposite point: that being of the female sex is the most important eligibility criterion for ensuring fairness and maximising safety in women's sports, and identity is irrelevant to this.

All the examples I can find include people with conditions that are either male DSDs or female DSDs. 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.

If you have specific examples to the contrary, I'd be interested to read about them.

> On balance it's just as probable that Abrahamson has seen documents that were presented to him as "test results from a New Delhi lab" but were fabricated, or genuine but flawed, or that Abrahamson is stretching the truth for the gain of his own website 3wiresports.

Not really, no. It would require a conspiracy of far too many people and organisations, including the two labs independent of the IBA who analysed both boxers' blood samples.

Plus if these lab results were incorrect, Khelif and Lin could pursue a case in the Court of Arbitration for Sport and present medical evidence to the contrary. Or even just have an independent body do sex tests and make these results public. Nether of them chose to do so.

What analyses like this don't take into account is that if a male athlete of colour is deemed ineligible to compete in women's sports, a female athlete of colour can take his place.

Barring all males from women's sport opens up opportunities for female athletes from the same ethnic and/or cultural background who had been excluded from competition by the privileging of a male.

Thanks for the link. Looks like Alex MacFarlane was the test case for this. Though I'm surprised he managed to convince them that he needed a passport with an "X" in it, because according to the articles on his case linked from the Wikipedia page, he has Klinefelter syndrome - which is an unambiguously male condition.

Thanks for replying. That doesn't directly answer my question but it sounds like you meant to refer to differences of sex development (DSDs) more broadly rather than just those caused by chromosomal variations.

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.

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.

No-one who's been making any serious commentary on this topic has claimed that Khelif is trans. That's not the issue at all.

What all the available evidence so far indicates is that Khelif is male, most likely with a difference of sex development (DSD).

> due to having to settle for an identity disadvantage

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.

But then males could pharmaceutically suppress testosterone, compete in the low testosterone class, and still make use of the male physical advantage they have from going through male puberty and having had testosterone shape their body for many years. You can't unbuild a male, even by adjusting testosterone.

By chromosomal variations, do you mean sex chromosome aneuploidies? If so, individuals with this particular class of conditions aren't ambiguous with regards to their sex. The Y chromosome still determines if someone is male.

For example, XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) is a male condition, X0 (Turner syndrome) is a female condition, XYY (Jacobs syndrome) is male, and so on.

> 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.

Do you have a reference for or link to the details of the court case? It would be very interesting to understand the details.

It's fascinating the convoluted ideas people will come up with just to avoid the most obvious one: separate male and female categories.

Did you friend say why he advocated for these arbitrary tiers rather than separating by sex?

Sports journalist Alan Abrahamson reports that he's personally seen the test results from the New Delhi lab where both boxers had their blood samples tested during the 2023 Women's World Boxing Championships: https://www.3wiresports.com/articles/2024/8/3/0d4ucn50bmvbnd...

> 3 Wire Sports has seen the letter and the tests.

> The documents shed new light on the controversy enveloping Khelif and, as well, Yu Ting Lin of Chinese Taipei that has erupted at these Paris 2024 Games.

> [...]

> In New Delhi, another test for each, "to reconfirm the findings of the initial test, which it did," according to the June 2023 letter the IBA sent to the IOC.

> The New Delhi lab reports for both Khelif and Lin say the same thing:

> Result Summary: "Abnormal"

> Interpretation: "Chromosomal analysis reveals Male karyotype."

> A karyotype means an individual's complete set of chromosomes. Females have XX chromosomes, males XY.

> The lab results for each athlete depict the XY chromosomes photographically.

As these were analysed in an independent laboratory, I think at the very least we can be confident that both athletes have a male (XY) sex chromosomes, even if the IBA itself may be of questionable trustworthiness.

The other men he competes with have similar physical advantages. And elite female swimmers do too.

But it would be completely unfair to have Phelps compete in the women's events, because he also has the male physical advantage, which female swimmers do not have.

Which we can see most starkly by comparing the record times of equivalent female and male events. The best of the best male swimmers are considerably faster than the best of the best female swimmers.

Your characterization of the author is way off the mark.

Victoria Smith isn't an "anti-trans activist", she's a feminist, who focuses mostly on issues of motherhood and ageism - and has a well-received book published on the latter. She writes for numerous publications across the political spectrum, including the New Statesman and The Independent.