Do You Have A Lab Where You Can Verify Your Sex Independently?
I’m just letting you know upfront, this conversation features one of my favourite replies ever.
In my article, The Endangered Art of Running Like a Girl, I made the earth-shattering observation that males have physiological advantages over females and that these advantages make it unfair for males to compete against females.
This fact, which even ten years ago would have been too obvious to justify a 1,000-word article (and which is backed up by the entire history of sport), is suddenly contentious enough that I’m arguing about it in the comments of the aforementioned article.
We begin this conversation with my reply to another reader about the physical advantages Caster Semenya has over other female athletes and whether they’re “fair”. Eve decided to join from there.
Steve QJ:
She was born with these kind of advantages to the point that people keep trying to insist she must be male
Actually Caster Semenaya may well be male. If we're going to have this conversation accurately, we need to stop treating "male" and "man" synonymously. Caster is a woman. She was raised as a woman, she identifies as a woman, I have no problem recognising her as a woman. But her biology doesn't care about any of that. And as we don't know exactly what her condition is, it's quite possible that she's male (in fact I've seen numerous sources say that she is).
Yes, fundamentally speaking the top 0.1% of athletes have advantages over everybody else. But it's not so simple to describe them as unfair. If the advantages Phelps or Bolt have are unfair, how do we describe an advantage that is fair? Is a strong mentality unfair? Is a mindset that allows you to push yourself harder than others with more natural talent unfair? Should the aim be to only have people who are exactly psychologically equivalent compete against each other in the hopes that all athletics competitions are eight way ties?
As I said in the article, sport will never be a level playing field. This is fine. But female sport exists so that females can compete, and the best females can be recognised for their hard work and dedication. "Fairness" in this context simply refers to females competing against other females with no external or artificial assistance. Lots of females will struggle to compete equally in this climate. But in a climate where males and females compete together, no females can compete equally.
What we're really arguing about here is whether female sport has a place. I think it does.
Eve:
Yes. Caster Semenya was stripped of her status as a woman, publicly, after decades of competing athletically.
Every single woman on Earth should recognize how easy it is to do that. To any of us.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/feb/10/caster-semenya-given-london-2012-gold-after-rival-is-stripped-title-mariya-savinova-farnosova
Steve QJ:
Every single woman on Earth should recognize how easy it is to do that. To any of us.
This is preposterous. At most, you're making the case that every single male with a DSD who has been mistaken for a female might, at some point, be discovered to be a male.
"Every single woman on Earth" is not in this position. In fact, vanishingly few people (less that 0.02%) are in this position. And even those who are will still be referred to as women by any reasonable person. I'd never dream of referring to Caster as a man.
Eve:
Do you have a lab where you can verify your own sex independently? I thought that was rather uncommon.
Steve QJ:
Do you have a lab where you can verify your own sex independently? I thought that was rather uncommon.
😅 I don’t have a lab where I can verify my genealogy independently. Yet I'm 99.98% sure that you, and everybody else who has ever laid eyes on me, would agree that I’m not white.
I don’t have a lab where I can verify the probability that a coin will land on its edge independently. But I still say “heads or tails,” when I flip one, because 99.98% of the time it will be one of those two options.
And no, I don’t have a lab where I can verify my, or anybody else’s sex independently. I don't need one. Because 99.98% of the time, it's possible to tell at a glance. Most people master this feat of observation by the time they’re around three months old.
If your entire argument hinges on pretending that you’re too dumb to understand all of this, consider the possibility that it's a not a good argument. It's possible to be kind and to simultaneously be honest.
I mean, I don’t have a lab where I can verify that you're being wilfully disingenuous. But I’m 99.98% sure that you are.
Eve:
I don’t have a lab where I can verify my genealogy independently. Yet I'm 99.98% sure that you, and everybody else who has ever laid eyes on me, would agree that I’m not white.
Hey, that’s a great analogy.
Would you support testing to identify people by race for the purpose of sports?
Or just by sex?
Honestly, I didn’t think I would hear back from Eve after my previous reply. It’s a pretty comprehensive refutation if I do say so myself. But, of course, she did what so many people do in this situation. She ignored almost all of it, and pulled out the “big guns” in the oppression Olympics; race.
I could barely contain my excitement.
Steve QJ:
Would you support testing to identify people by race for the purpose of sports?
Ahh! There it is! 😍 I just love it when trans people and their allies reveal their ignorance and racism because they think they're being clever and/or original.
Let me see if I can remember how this goes...
So black people aren't really human in the same sense that white people are. Is that right? We're only, hmm, what shall we say? Three-fifths of a human? Only good for working in the fields with our strong backs and our thick lips? Just one homogenous lump of "humanity" with no genetic diversity at all. I mean, if you think of it like that, of course it's not fair if we compete with "normal" people!
In fact, I'll let you in on a little secret; black people need to have surgery and take hormones for our entire lives just so that we can do a passable impression of human beings!! After all, we’re just white people who were “born in the wrong body.”
Hmmm, how should we deal with the pesky problem of racial mixing though? Maybe some kind of rule? Like...I don't know...a "one-drop" rule? If a person has even one drop of tainted black blood, we should make them compete in a separate Negro league!!
You know? I think you're onto something here! It's a wonder that nobody else has ever thought of it!
Eve:
You brought up race. So I’m asking you why race is different from sex.
Steve QJ:
You brought up race.
Actually, I just mentioned the colour of my skin. Along with a bunch of other points that you ducked. What “race” do you think I am? But yeah, absolutely! There’s nothing wrong with comparing a male with a sexual developmental disorder to black people! It's a perfectly reasonable, not even slightly racist point!
Let's recap.
We were talking about whether Caster Semenaya (who is very likely a male), should compete against female athletes, and you thought that was a “great analogy” for the question of whether black people (who everybody knows aren’t really human in the same way white people are), should be allowed to compete with white people. Right?
I mean, If we don't allow males to compete alongside female athletes because they're male, how can we justify letting black people compete against white athletes even though they're...black? I mean, yuck! Amirite? Whew! You sure exposed the flaws in my thinking.
A favourite debate tactic of trans activists and their “allies” is using the struggles of other groups as shields. The hope seems to be that the person they’re arguing with will be too afraid to sound racist or sexist or ablest and will simply skulk away.
Intersex people are used to cast doubt on the fact that there are two sexes, even though intersex people are unambiguously male or female 99.98% of the time, and more importantly, intersex people have nothing to do with trans identities.
Segregation is used as an analogy for common-sense attempts to acknowledge the biological differences between males and females, even though the notion that black people are somehow “transhuman” is just breathtakingly racist.
As I said to Eve, the tragedy of trans discourse is that it creates this false dichotomy between being kind and being honest. Between acceptance and acknowledging reality. So when reality intrudes, they run headlong into some shockingly ugly places to avoid acknowledging it.
Trans people represent a shift in the way many of us think about sex and gender. This is honestly fine. I’m just not willing to abandon objective reality as well.
p.s. Apologies for missing Friday’s post last week. I had it scheduled to post automatically as I’ve been snowed-under this week, but set it for this week by mistake. I only noticed as I was setting this one up. Normal service should now resume.
Allow me to be the first to say it: "nonbinary" has nothing to do with "transgender."
Because gender is binary. People are male or female and while there are conditions like Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome the men who suffer from it are still men.
I have had it up to here with "nonbinary." Everything I have seen has convinced me that this is a fad to get attention; they are too strident, too angry, too fanatic. I think that just as transvestites piggybacked on gay political advances the "nonbinary" folk are piggybacking on transgender people, real ones.
And it annoys me how so many coddle this affectation. Medium will ban you without warning if you state a refusal to use that abhorrent singular they. Educators are called up on disciplinaries because a student complains about pronouns.
As if we don't have enough real problems.
Race on the other hand is a continuum. While we define three major races only some people fit squarely into one of them and then there is (sorry) interbreeding; there was a hysterical case a few years ago where a virulent white supremacist learned that he was genetically 13% black.
It seems insane that people fight against the reality of gender, as if concave versus convex genitalia are an artifact of societal uh rigidity.
Of course your position on this issue is obviously the rational one. And I think your point that we would not be even having this conversation 10 years ago is an insightful and important observation. It really does show just how far over the edge we have gone as a society. It is valid fodder for conservatives to use in dismissing any and all progressives on all topics. It is quite toxic.
Still I am not sure about this back and forth. I am not convinced it served to shift anyones thinking. (A high bar, I will admit in this case. Still this should be our aim.)
I feel the key observation is to notice that anytime there is a dramatic delta in expect performance we split groups up. Male / Female. 5 year old soccer from 15 year old soccer, from collegiate, from professional. Different weight classes in wrestling, etc.
Seems one should ignore all stuff about race (even if she brings it up), and just notice that we do this splitting, and it is good that we do.
If you did want to discuss race, it occurs to me that society WOULD have separated sports if the physiologies of different races were as incompatible as the physiologies. (but I would not bring the up, it would just get twisted.)
The other observation to make is that if one really are going to allow any person to join into either gender's sports, then one MUST simply abolish gendered sports all together. That is a logical position to take on this issue. It is just not a position that many who are pushing for self determination are taking.
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Part of me just wants to allow liberal rules to be applied at this highest most visible levels of sports. Increasingly it would be used by tier two athletes to become world champions to the collective outrage of the majority of the population. This policy would destroy itself, and would also help pull the left just a bit back from its ludicrous position. But I don't wish this, because it would also do large damage to the reputation of the left and many important issues that espouses. The question is how can we constructively demonstrate the defeating aspects of these ideas, without ourselves becoming destructive. (no ideas from the peanut gallery)