Fair and includey
As the first openly transgender female athlete to compete at the Olympics, Laurel Hubbard was making history and huge controversy in the Tokyo International Forum. It certainly looked like the weight of the world was on her shoulders.
If you believe that he really does have gender dysphoria. If you believe he’s just cheating, it looks a bit different.
Hubbard had met all the requirements set by the International Weightlifting Federation, though those rules — requiring athletes to demonstrate their total testosterone level in serum has been below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months before their first competition — are regarded as wholly inadequate by a battery of sports scientists. At the most basic level, they point out that the normal testosterone range for women is between 0.3 and 2.4 nmol/L.
The most basic level is the one that counts.
Fiddling nervously with a tracksuit top, she made a short speech of gratitude to journalists — an unusually large amount were present for women’s weightlifting — which did serve as a reminder that there is a human story here of an athlete seeking a place in the sporting world, and in the world in general.
Again, only if you believe that he believes all the nonsense, and isn’t just taking advantage. I don’t believe that, so I don’t think that’s the human story here at all. And for that matter even if you believe he believes, you damn well ought to keep in mind the woman he displaced. What about her human story? She not rich or white or male.
Hubbard thanked the IOC for reaffirming “their commitment to the principles of Olympism”, but the organisation could hardly hail this as a triumph as it grapples awkwardly with the science and talks of a shift away from a framework based on testosterone.
There is also the hard reality that it will never please everyone. Fairness and inclusion can never be fully reconciled in this debate.
But the Olympics are all about exclusion. That’s the whole entire point. They’re about the very best, and they exclude everyone else from competing. That’s how athletic competitions work.
Testosterone be damned. Only one question needs to be asked by the Olympic officialdom: does this ringer’s bell have a donger?
Well to be entirely literal though, it is the testosterone that makes the difference, not the donger.
Strange how Gavin’s OK at under 10, but if a real woman happened to get her test level up around 9, she would be banned for doping. But testosterone plays no part …
Maybe, just maybe an unusual number of journalists were present because journalism had mostly been institutionally captured? It’s a thought.
The presence of an actual penis is sufficient but not necessary to determine maleness. The presence of a faux penis is not an indication of maleness. Most TiMs do not have their genitals removed, but some do, and none of them should compete in women’s sports.
Testosterone levels post-puberty are less of an issue than often assumed, at least according to Cordelia Fine’s “Testosterone Rex”. (Carole Hooven has a new book out, “T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us”, that sounds quite good.) Testosterone tests can be used to detect doping, and can help in detecting that a supposedly female athlete is actually male, but males should not participate in female sports, regardless of their testosterone levels.
I don’t think belief really matters in this context. What matters is – what the facts are.
Say you’ve got a heavyweight boxer who identifies as a featherweight – the scale isn’t going to agree with them, and that’s that.
It is not fat-phobia, it is fact-philia.
People believe things that are wrong the whole time, why give credence to those beliefs when we have evidence to the contrary?
That these sports scientists say that the measures are inadequate, well, that should have a lot more weight to it, than what Hubbard believes personally.
Hubbard’s beliefs aren’t a veto on reality, and given that the sports sex divide is based on biology not sociology, the biology is what matters. The whole point to a competitive division, is that it is a division.
See, this was the first step on the road to getting where we are now, this notion that someone having “gender dysphoria” makes them “really trans”, as opposed to a faker. But in its own terms, “gender dysphoria” is a mental illness, a delusion, either very starkly akin to or actually the same as the body dysmorphia which afflicts anorexics or compulsive exercisers.
The proper treatment for the latter two expressions of body dysmorphia, you’ll note, is not to completely reform society to give the stick-thin girl the “validation” that she is “in the wrong (obese) body” and is a hero for making radical changes to show the “real authentic” waif she is “on the inside”, nor the muscle-bound boy the “validation” that he is “in the wrong (shrimpy) body” and is a hero for making radical changes to show the “real authentic” hulk he is “on the inside”.
It is highly unlikely that the proper treatment for the former is to reform society to the extent being done now in order to indulge their delusions. Of course, someone being delusional is not in itself a moral failing, and it *is* worth treatment, with compassion and respect and empathy. But compassion and respect and empathy are sorely lacking by the TRAs and their “allies”, even (or perhaps most especially) for and toward the very dysmorphic people whose mental illnesses were exploited to catapult us into where we are in the first place.
So, even if one does believe that Hubbard has gender dysphoria (or body dysmorphia expressed through secondary sex characteristics), the appropriate response is almost certainly not to humour him in his delusions for the rest of his life. And it’s certainly not to turn people who refuse to humour him into thought-criminals and pariahs simply because they cannot pretend to believe in the impossible.
There is indeed a load of difference between a delusional person who ought to be pitied (and not humored) and the loathsome purposely cheating arsewipe that Hubbard almost certainly is.
Seth – of course. I wasn’t saying otherwise, I was only making the distinction between consciously cheating and genuinely having the delusion. I don’t for a second think the delusion makes it ok to take a woman’s place.
Ophelia, yeah, that is quite clear; about half a second after I posted it I realised I should’ve made it clearer myself that I was jumping off of what you’d said to make an orthogonal point in the comments (which is why I didn’t even go into the fairness of this specific situation one way or the other, as you’d already covered that quite well).
I suppose my point is that we gave away the ballgame when we collectively allowed TRAs to recategorise gender dysphoria as indicative of something like a physical birth defect rather than a mental illness. That seems to me to have been the first step over the line, imperceptible as it was for most of us at the time, which has led us to this cultural moment. And most of us were more than willing to nod along with this at the time, in the hope of being good and supportive and decent people if for no other reason.
This is, I believe, the “root” of the trans issue, the floodgate-opener that precipitated the deluge which has swept away the skepticism and thoughtfulness of so many self-professed free-thought-loving skeptics. This is the “radix” which the original trans-exclusionary radical feminists excluded from their feminism, and which set them up as the assailable Other for all right-thinking progressives circa 2014 or so. It is a demand to believe the impossible, a leap of faith, a mental hurdle so high that every subsequent demand is all the easier for having already surmounted it. In hindsight, we should have listened more to the radical feminists, and less to the faith-based activists.
Seth: It was nonetheless an excellent orthogonal point which sums up very clearly many of the issues. (Snarking comments by myself on the Otherkin are not as kind)
I love “faith based activists” by the way. Which is a turn of phrase that pretty much explains my interest in the issue: The sheer irrationality, the puritanical policing of thought, the stoning of the witches, that we have arrived at today. I am male (not 100% gender stereotype conforming, but who is?) so it shouldn’t bother me. But the sheer irrationality and nastiness of much of the movement DOES bother me.
You can see how trans activism might find attaching itself to gay rights almost makes sense, given that homosexuality was considered a mental illness. But gay rights didn’t demand the redfinition of anything but the word “marriage.”
Yes, it is indeed an excellent orthogonal point.
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