Yes but which policy?
Lots of words, no clear meaning.
Sebastian Coe has taken a thinly veiled swipe at the hugely controversial Olympic gender policy in boxing, saying that all sports governing bodies must tackle the issue head-on with a clearly defined stance.
Well yes but it also needs to be the right stance. A clearly defined stance that men can invade women’s competitions would not be an improvement. The problem with the “hugely controversial” policy that lets men punch women is not that it’s not clearly defined.
Coe is the president of World Athletics, which introduced a new gender policy last year that means any athlete with differences in sexual development (DSD) must reduce their testosterone to 2.5 nanomoles per litre to compete in any event. Transgender women also cannot compete in the female category in athletics.
The DSD policy should be just no.
Coe is seen as a leading candidate to succeed Thomas Bach as the president of the IOC and, asked on Monday what his advice would be on the boxing issue, he said: “It’s unvarnished; have a policy. Be clear and have a policy.
“You’re never going to make everybody happy but you have to plant the flagpole down somewhere and that’s why it was so important for us. If you don’t, then you get into this sort of territory.
“I did five years on the British Boxing Board of Control as an administrative steward, and I have daughters. How do you think I feel about this?”
Notice anything about those three paragraphs?
They don’t tell us anything. The issue isn’t not having a policy, the issue is having the right policy. The issue is not making everyone or anyone happy, the issue is fairness. As for how he feels about this, I have no idea! If he means he thinks the Olympics needs to stop letting men invade women’s competitions he should say so.
This is the problematic point for everything CSJ. Yes, there’s historical and ongoing racism/sexism/whatever, and yes, we absolutely ought to do something about that. That, however, requires actually being able to tell what is and isn’t racism or sexism or whatever. If we can’t, then we can’t tell when we’ve succeeded and should stop or when we’re actually working against our own goals. The inability of the left to see that Genderism is both misogynistic and homophobic is the perfect illustration of the problem. We don’t just need to have a clear stance on sexism and racism and every other prejudice, we need to have the right stance.
Hm… I’m not sure I totally agree with that. Note: I do think that men with DSD (like both boxers are suspected to be) should be excluded, absolutely. However, it’s possible that women with DSDs, who may otherwise gain some advantage because of additional testosterone, might reasonably be allowed to compete if their hormone levels can be managed safely.
Of course, this entails first getting the various regulatory bodies to stop using the term ‘intersex’ to cover both groups at once as if there was some magical blending of maleness and femaleness going on, rather than extreme variants of each of the two basic sexes.
Fairness, yes, that applies to all women’s sports, but overriding that is safety. When Caster Semenya and the rest of the podium beat the women, that was unfair, but no one would have been killed. Contact sports and combat sports especially have to put safety first.
As I understand it there are a few XY male DSDs (Swyers, CAIS) in which the male fetus fails to respond to androgen and therefore develops a female body type, complete with uterus and vagina. At puberty they don’t produce testosterone, they produce estrogen and feminize even further. This can give them problems like brittle bone density — but they have no male advantage. Even some prominent GC biologists have argued that, because their developmental pathway was formed for supporting large gametes and their testes are either absent or misformed and worthless, they should count as “female.”
As far as I know athletes with Swyers Syndrome or Complete Androgen Insensitivity aren’t involved in the Olympics, but I wouldn’t rule out Coe trying to include the possibility. It seems like everyone defending the indefensible is pulling out these rare and inapplicable conditions and throwing them around like it’s relevant.
If we really commit to a definition of sex based on which reproductive role (i.e., gamete type) someone’s body is further along, then the presence of testes and lack of ovaries means male. This follows even in cases where the testes are invalid, else we’d be calling sterile men female and barren women male. Better, I think, to acknowledge that they’re the sex they are and carve out exceptions for their exceptional biology rather than try to incorporate the exception into the rule. That just leads to contradictions.
@#5
isn’t this veering towards treating various DSDs as categories in the paralympics? Not a big fan of that name but that’s not my call:)
bascule
@#6
not really, as male and female categories would do, with the occasional exception carved out: it’s well established which DSDs mean the person has male advantage so pretty simple to draw the line. The runner who got bronze behind Semenya in 2016, Margaret Wambui (who demonstrated more integrity, acknowledging the unfair advantage and retiring rather trying a different distance) suggested a category for athletes with the relevant DSD conditions – it’s doubtful there’s any motivation for it from the point of view of fairness/safety as there’s no evidence to suggest they are at a disadvantage against other males [there was an extract from a Carole Hooven paper on this blog the other day that reported on an experiment showing this], but if they wanted to create a new category, I guess there’s no harm in going for it
(continuing #7)
I don’t know if there are the numbers to make this new category viable even now (though para categories can operate with tiny numbers), and suspect we could see the numbers plummet if a total ban from the female category is brought in
@8:
Yeah, the percentage of people who are DSD is very low; the number who are athletes is even lower. Trying to carve out a category for them is probably nonviable. If an XY chromosome bearer develops no male characteristics at puberty, but instead has only female characteristics, that might be an argument for placing them on the women’s team. Other than that, it seems that defining the way biologists do…by biology…DNA and gamete size…are probably the best criteria. The fact that someone (Semenya, for instance) was raised as a girl, and believes he is a girl, is not the relevant argument. The relevant argument goes like this: He is not female, therefore he needs to be in the men’s category.
And I agree with Nullius that we shouldn’t write the exception into the rule; that is the sort of thing that leads to the problems we have now.
I disagree. DSDs – disorders of sex development are not necessarily intersex conditions. The two terms are related, and have overlap, but DSD properly applied refers to anything that affects the development of any sex trait. This can include simple malformation of physical structures, including genitals, and hence does not necessarily involve any mixing of male and female traits in an individual.
That mixing of traits is more properly termed intersex, but even that term covers a wide range of oddities, many of which do not have any athletic advantage. People with Swyer syndrome for instance have the male karyotype (XY), female genitals, no pubertal development of any sex traits, a uterus which may be underdeveloped, and gonads that are non-functional and are neither testes nor ovaries.
The lack of puberty means no male athletics advantage.
I think instead, intersex conditions are better taken on a case by case basis.
I was taught at school that ‘sex’ relates to biology, and ‘gender’ to stuff like French verbs. But thus the times do alter.
I take it that males can have testosterone levels that are through the roof as long as they only compete in mens’ events.
The trouble has its source in the fact that some male athletes have no hope of winning in male competitions, but have a good chance if presenting as ‘females’ of whatever persuasion and/or confusion. Yet biologists have clearly defined the male and female categories based: the XY karyotype vs the XX. The ‘transgender’ males should be encouraged IMHO to take up sports where sex doesn’t matter: like say, tiddleywinks, or maybe horse racing..
Or as the immortal Italian poet Dante Alighieri put it: while watching two teams of genuine XX women playing hockey, soccer or somesuch: “Iffa you gotta da donger, you donta belonga.”
(I’m pretty sure it was Dante who said that.)
Meanwhile, everybody just ignores the only transgender person competing in boxing at the Olympics.
Hergie Bacyadan, an XX individual who identifies as a man, was eliminated in the round of sixteen.
I support the inclusion of trans athletes in the Olympics, in the correct sex category. I hope Hergie returns in 2028.
Omar:
You, June 18:
Dialect humor isn’t all that funny in the first place, and repeated dialect humor is…that much less so.
As a Heinlein character said.
Some jokes are funny once.
Use it once you’re a wit, use it twice you’re a half-wit.
And some jokes were not funny in the first place.
Holms @ 10, “case by case”
I suppose it’s possible that a 25-year-old man, small and weak, the stature of a child, might successfully seek admittance to the under-12 team in some sport, examined on a “case by case” basis. But mostly I don’t think that the people who organize and play sports would care to bend the rules that say under-12 teams are for people who actually are under 12, not for those who hold no performance advantage against people under 12. At the very least, in a competitive league where kids have to make the team, some actual kid is being denied a spot because this adult with “no performance advantage” has taken it.
The same is true for the Olympics, and for sex categories. What female boxer did not get to compete for Algeria because Khelif took the spot?
I’d rather they not look at performance advantage when determining eligibility. Performance may be a key reason for the classifications, but it isn’t the classification itself.
Sackbut@16: That’s exactly why I’ve been saying that the whole question of competitive advantage is worse than a red herring. By entertaining the question, we implicitly suggest that if it were athletically fair, then it would be appropriate. But that simply isn’t the case at all. Washed up NBA players, no matter how out of shape and past their prime, have no business playing in the WNBA. Able-bodied people, no matter how uncoordinated, have no business participating in the Special Olympics. Adults, no matter how short, do not belong in the under-12 league. Like so much of this, it’s so basic it feels odd to say.
Omar, another problem is the obsessive focus on testosterone. Even if testosterone levels are reduced, they still have male physiology, and don’t lose all that extra musculature or height or arm length…that’s theirs.
Plus, they don’t belong in women’s locker rooms. Women deserve to feel safe.
iknklast, I could not agree more.
Maybe we will finish up with the usual two Olympic categories, plus two extras: 3. Men who wish they had been born as women, and who dress accordingly, and 4. Vice-versa.
Could be interesting: for some.
@ #13, #14: Whatever floats your boat.
No, not whatever floats my boat. Telling the same crappy dialect joke over and over is tedious and also crappy. Dialect jokes are crappy because they’re jeers at immigrants for speaking a second language. Do you speak a second language? Fluently? With a perfect accent? To spell it out for you, please don’t tell your stupid “donga” joke again.