I believe the fallacy is that gender is binary at birth. It has always been a spectrum, and those who are in the middle are finally starting to come out of the closet. The 2007 book “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides is an excellent and eye opening read that points out how naive we are to think “male” and “female” are the only two possibilities, even straight out of the womb.
Hard to see how “women’s” sports (or colleges) survive the demise of gender, sad as that may be.
Since women appear to be getting their skulls broken it seems like a huge deal.
This came up in a recent competition in Australia.
This athlete transitioned at age 35 to female and switched to competing with men to now competing with women. No huge surprise that he is gaining all sorts of metals in the women’s category.
Piers Morgan responded to reports on Hubbard competing for the International Weightlifting Federation Australian Weightlifting. “This is insane. Women’s rights to basic fairness & equality are getting destroyed at the altar of political correctness. Trans women born with biological male bodies have a massive physical advantage against women born with female bodies in any sport where power & strength are significant factors. This shouldn’t be a contentious claim, it’s just a rather obvious fact.”
He was soundly criticized for saying this by some. If the critics win, I see the end of women’s sports. It is the rare woman who will be able to seriously compete against a person to grew to adulthood as a male before transitioning to female. In fact, what is even the point of trying - esp in a contact sport (like wrestling, boxing and MMA) where you can more easily have a career-ending injury in such a situation.
Here is one of many articles on this competition. https://www.goldcoastbulletin.com.au/laurel-hubbard-at-centre-of-transgender-battleground-after-piers-morgan-comments/news-story/a2e5d11573822fe0101ac1501334bb51
It seems that we need new competitive categories for trans athletes. I hope this can be done without stigma or judgement, but just to address basic scientific realities.
I never really thought about the “second party” idea, but you’re right. Sailing is a sport where women can (and regularly do) compete with men, but the boat is the second party. Target shooting?
One way to approach the problem for high school sports would be to have two categories, one for testosterone levels above X and one for testosterone below X. During transition, athletes would stay in their category until their levels changed. There are all kinds of issues with that system, but if workable, it would allow for more equality within the categories. It might not be necessary for sports where skill, experience and strategy matter more, but when it’s faster, higher, stronger, we know there’s an unbreachable biological gap. Another idea would be to allow the athlete to be on the team they identify with, but stipulate that their times aren’t official until their testosterone levels match. My understanding is that testosterone is the big factor (which is why a lot of athletes get in trouble for artificially raising their levels).
I thought this article about coed Quidditch was so interesting: https://www.newsweek.com/co-ed-college-quidditch-teams-tackling-gender-inequality-sports-1449083
There are issues, but Quidditch has a policy of ensuring acceptance for people who are trans.
Ultimate Frisbee is another coed sport, but apparently women in the professional league recently grew frustrated and started their own league:
NYT article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/sports/professional-ultimate-frisbee.html
According to this, .7% of Americans 18-24 years old identify as transgendered. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/how-many-adults-identify-as-transgender-in-the-united-states/
I see no reason to think the percentage of athletes would be lower.
In any event, it’s a small, but not negligible percentage.
Several other sports too - golf, tennis, baseball/softball. Even in team sports the size of the athlete can really make a difference like Gronk did in football.
Really, size does matter. A six foot tall athlete may only have to take 3 steps to another athlete’s 4. My daughter has short legs and even a shorter male can beat her down the field just because she has to take more steps.
The entry of flamethrower people and groups (e.g. Piers Morgan and ADF) making a lot of noise will make it harder to come up with a reasoned solution.
Ultimate frisbee has three divisions: open, women’s, and mixed (Coed). Open is open to any athlete regardless of sex or gender. Men have not complained about not having a separate division.
Title 9 exists because there are many educational benefits to participating in sports. It is expected that trans people would also want to participate and the goal should be allow participation while also protecting opportunities for cisgendered girls.
Sports already have many different divisions in addition to sex including geographic region, age, weight, size of school, and years of experience.
One of the studies on the higher end found 3% of teens were trans.
The average US male is 4-5 inches taller than the average female. Having an extra 4-5 inches of height is obviously an advantage in a number of sports.
Society has spoken on this topic. Transgender females are females, and should be treated as such.
It is completely inconsistent with the wishes of society to place any sort of special restrictions or considerations for transgender athletes. We don’t ask women in the boardroom to prove their testosterone levels. We don’t ask women in the break room to prove their gender confirmation surgery. Are we really going to have different standards for a “woman” depending on the activity they are involved in?
Sport is about much more than the person at the top of the podium. Comradery, teamwork, preparation, bettering oneself, etc. Wouldn’t it be psychologically damaging to someone to prevent them from participating based on a testosterone level?
Say, hypothetically, transgender females become dominant in women’s track. If this causes some cis-females to quit, they’re probably in it for the wrong reasons, anyway. Make the sport accessible to people of all abilities by having divisions with different levels of competitiveness, and move on.
To achieve at the highest level in most sports, it is almost entirely dependent on privilege. The privilege of athletic ability is obvious. But look deeper, and privilege goes beyond physical ability.
For example, Dominican kids reach Major League Baseball at a highly disproportionate rate. They have the physical tools, but more so than others? No. They have good weather, lack of other activities to distract from playing baseball, poverty that prevents them from buying the most advanced bats (which stunt the development of hitting ability), etc. From a broad perspective, many would say impoverished Dominicans are not privileged. But from the narrow perspective of rising to baseball elite, they are highly privileged.
So, are we really going to ignore the unique privilege that benefits every elite athlete, and selectively discriminate against the possible privilege that being born male could possibly provide?
Interesting that women have been invoking Title IX for gender equality in sports for so long, but now some are fighting for inequality.
Total nonsense.
It’s also about college scholarships, money and prestige. It’s also about fairness.
Here’s a girl (born female) who beat all the boys in her North Carolina wrestling division: https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/26/us/first-female-wrestler-state-champ-trnd/index.html
She was competing against boys who were also in her weight class and because she goes to a smaller school she was in the lowest Division 1A. The big high schools compete at Division 4A.
We DO ask Olympic athletes to prove their testosterone levels. We DO ask college athletes to complete drug testing for all kinds of drugs like steroids and testosterone and amphetamines so that they aren’t getting an unfair advantage in strength. Steroids that have a legitimate medical purpose like treating asthma or birth control pills that contain testosterone are banned because they may give an advantage.
I don’t think all of society is as open as you, and many have not accepted sports equality for women (just look at the salary differences) and certainly not for transgender athletes.
I don’t want to have just one division for all sports.
This may not be the healthiest example. She’s wrestling in the sub 106 pound weight class. At that low of a weight class, a lot of the competitors, including the boys, are going to have eating disorders.
She is mistaken. There is a biological reason that all of the traits that she mentions are called “secondary sexual traits”, with an emphasis on the secondary. She is equating the chromosomes of a body with the actual body plan. Not even the genes, but simply the chromosomes.
To begin with, if a person undergoes hormonal treatment before or after puberty, that can change every single one of the physical traits which your friend mentions. All somebody needs to do is to look at the females athletes sent by East Germany to the Olympics to see how it was possible change those physical traits.
To equate the sexual karyotype with “biological sex”, while defining “biological sex” as the body plan that a person has, demonstrates an old and outdated notion of how genes work. Claiming that an identity of a biological entity is the same as its genes is the same as claiming that a building is nothing more than its blueprints. Claiming that a biological entity is determined by its chromosomes is like saying that a building is determined by the shape of the cases/cases which contain the blueprints.
It’s, in fact, more than that. A biological organism is not the result of an organ which transcribes a body directly from the genes. An organism is the result of constant interactions between the the DNA and other cell parts, between the different parts of the cell, between the ever changing set of cells and organs, etc. Much of the interactions which produce the organism are the result of direct interactions between sets of organs without direct influence or mediation of genes.
For example, we don’t have five fingers because there is a gene for five fingers. We have five fingers because one gene starts the process of fingers being initiated, and stops after a certain amount of time. The reason that polydatyctyly exists isn’t because of mutation that causes 6, another one that causes 7. Moreover, the reason that the number of appendages on each limb often doesn’t match isn’t because there is a specific gene for the number of digits in each limb. It’s because something disrupts the amount of time or the amount of cell divisions in the process of digit development. Moreover, often that disruption does not have to be at the level of a genetic mutation - it can be caused by mechanical or chemical disruption.
The secondary sex traits are the result of the effects of specific hormones which are secreted at specific times and in specific amounts. The hormones themselves are coded from DNA on autosomal chromosomes, as are the structures which produce and secrete the hormones, and as are the sex organs themselves. The DNA which codes for a male sexual organ is not on the Y chromosome. The body plan of an individual can be changed if you change the genes coding for any of those organs or hormones. The Y chromosome has a small number of genes which affect the regulation of hormone secretion. That’s it.
Ever single person has the genes for producing both male and female organs. The existence of hermaphrodite individuals proves this. These are individuals who have fully functional organs for production of sperm and eggs.
There are a long list of different conditions in which the chromosomal designation of sex does not match the development of the secondary sexual traits, or in which even the chromosomal sex is ambiguous, i.e., a Y chromosome on which the genes for regulation work differently, or an X chromosome which has genes which regulate hormonal secretion in a manner which result in the development of male secondary sexual traits.
So what has, in fact, been long established is that “biological sex” is an inaccurate term which is based on outdated and inaccurate scientific thought.
^What does this long post have to do with the OP?
It’s not the chromosomes who compete, nor is it the secondary sexual characteristics who compete, or a gender identity who competes. It’s physical bodies who compete.
The GDR athletes are actually examples how a xx female that has been changed by testosterone (in essence, these girls were put through male puberty) can not be changed back physically. To this day, these athletes have deep voices and male body types (not to mention major health problems). At least one has actually decided to transition.
Caster Semenya still insists that she should be allowed to compete as a woman because she has the secondary sexual characteristics of a woman (she has been quoted as “I pee like a woman”, which apparently is the way gender for competitions is determined in rural Africa, where intersexuality isn’t that rare. Wish I could remember the article, maybe the Atlantic?). But it’s not a pissing contest! The body she runs with has a xy karytype and undescended testes who produce male hormones, and it shows.
There are xy women with androgen insensitivity, which produces female bodies. A very famous case was kicked off Olympic competition when her karyotype was discovered, after which the guidelines for determining gender were reworked extensively - these women compete with their female bodies, not their chromosomes.
On the other end of the spectrum there are women with xx karyotypes but hyperandrogenism, ie their bodies produce more testosterone, which makes them develop male physical characteristics. A number of them have dominated international competitions, together with Semenya. They don’t compete with their chromosomes or their identities, they compete with their bodies, and they have advantages other females could attain only if they raised their hormone levels artificially, which THEY are not allowed.
As long as there is so much prestige, money, educational and professional opportunities riding on these originally recreational activities, determinations will have to be made. Just to say “gender is arbitrary anyway” and “let’s abolish all gender determination” is about as useful as saying “let’s abolish all organized sport”.
Organized sport is about rules. Otherwise, just have a boxer or martial artist knock out all competitors and amble to victory in what ever sport you choose.
I expect that there will have to be an intersex/trans category at some point, and it will have the same prestige as other minority pursuits, such as the paralympics, ie very little for most.
Perhaps in local rec leagues, the stakes are low enough that they do not want to bother with extensive rules defining gender, so they allow self identification on the honor system.
One can argue that high school sports are similar (and college athletic recruiting will consider times etc. not just placement), but it probably seems like a much bigger deal to high school athletes for whom the high school sports is a big thing from their perspective.