No surprises here. You cannot be having babies and making sandwiches if you are doing sports.
As a stay at home Dad, I also find time to cook and play basketball in the local rec League. I personally think women should leave all that stuff to men and get back to work.
Put simply, it was never really about transgender women, they were just used to create a psuedoscientific smokescreen around the same thing that misogyny has always been about: policing women’s bodies. If the patriarchy doesn’t consider you a woman, you don’t get to be one.
I think the transphobic trend inherited a lot of its energy from the anti-gay currents I watched my entire life, and which largely had the breath kicked out of them when gay marriage became recognized around the country.
Not all of the anti-gay current was about policing women’s bodies. Thats in there. But it’s also about what they call deviance. They have strict roles for people and you can’t keep anyone focused on their strict roles when anyone has absolute freedom to flout them. I don’t even think they care what trans and gay people are doing in other places. They care about their own authority to command their children how to be, and they think this authority is undermined if anyone out there can live a happy life in defiance of it.
That includes policing women’s bodies but is not limited to it. Things like making sure your sons have short haircuts and work hard at practicing sports are in there too. It’s about policing people generally. Blows my mind how they think the Left are waging a culture war when all we are doing is busting out of the cages they try to keep everyone in.
I was listening on NPR about how women were checked for femininity and given a card after an official go to see their reproductive organs for Olympic sports. Fun times!
It would be interesting for statistical analysis of our evolution, and for fun, to measure every one’s penis and be given a male card:
Name: Robert Schmidt Soft penis size: 3" Soft curvature= downward Hard penis size: 5.75"… He keeps saying 7" Hard curvature= left up Right ball r1= 1.5" Right ball r1= 1" Left ball r1= 3" Left ball r1= 1.5" Semen color= 270, 265, 256 Semen quantity= 10ml Semen smell= standard musky 275 Semen motility= 50% above average Semen morphology= 10% at average Semen taste= pineapple and onion Penis elastic modulii data…
Imane Khelif, Lin Yu-ting or any woman’s testosterone levels give no more an advantage than Michael Phelps height, wingspan, hand/feet size and his body producing less lactic acid that shortened his recovery time. Yet nobody was screaming from their high horse about Phelps domination in the pool.
“The IOC insisted this week that no scientific or political consensus exists on gender and fairness issues. It gave updated guidance to sports governing bodies in 2021.” Source
Right wingnuts can go fuck themselves.
Also, the body that DQed her in 2023 apparently ONLY found out “she was trans” (which she isn’t) after she had fought 9 other matches under the same federation, with testing before each one - her defeating a Russian boxer and immediately being DQed after that match, while fighting under the auspices of a Russian boxing federation, is totally coincidence, I’m sure.
The more I think of it, it’s just an insoluble problem. Sex is not black and white. It is legitimately complicated, biologically. Yet if we don’t segregate sports, men will very broadly dominate women. All I can think is that every sport is going to need weight classes and possible hormone level classes within which people can compete. There’s a basic desire to measure skill, not just biological gifts. But that is obviously not going to work for swimming or whatever where skill is more of a prerequisite than a differentiator. I really couldn’t give a fuck about competitive sports and I’m glad because wow it’s going to be hard to keep doing.
We do not know what is between Imane Khelif’s legs. It is absolutely possible to be XY and be born with a vagina that looks and works like any vagina. They might even have rudimentary (but non-functional) female reproductive organs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
If that is true about Imane Khelif, she may not even have known about it most of her life.
Should all Olympians be genetically tested or just examined to see what’s between their legs? If the former, which event do the women with Swyer Syndrome perform in? How about people with both sets of genitalia? They exist. What about people who are XXY or XYY?
And if you think the latter- please do justify that sort of invasive examination for the purposes of athletic competition. Unpaid athletic competition at that.
Do we need a protected class? If yes, there must be standards and those standards must be either endocrine or genetic or both. Yes they should be tested. Anyone failing the protected class can compete in the open class. It’s really that simple.
What open class? There is no open class at the Olympics. So no it isn’t really that simple.
Really? They prohibit women from competing alongside men?? No thats not the case, women only sports is to prevent males with higher biological advantage from taking over the women’s competition.
there must be standards
Here’s a standard: if you live as a woman you’re a woman.
and those standards must be either endocrine or genetic or both
There is absolutely no reason to assert that this must be the case.
Do you really think it’s fair for a full blown man to fight women in the ring just because he identifies as a woman? Women will get very seriously hurt or possibly killed fighting someone assigned male sex at birth. I have no problem letting them do anything that doesn’t hurt others, but this is a case where I think we need to be more sensible.
Boxers and wrestlers have weight classes because weight confers a massive advantage and almost predetermines the outcome of the match. You might as well just award someone for weighing more, because skill can only overcome it to a point.
I would prefer if competitive classes were determined by things like weight which are universal and obvious and non-invasive to measure. However I don’t know if that works for everything. Hormones do in fact confer major advantages, as chemical doping does. Should we not test for doping either?
I do think it’s actually more invasive to try to measure if someone “lives as a woman” than it is to measure what’s in their blood. How do you even begin to define that, and aren’t you engaging in prescriptive sexism as soon as you start? I can tell that your suggestion comes from a place of wanting to support women and their autonomy but I don’t think you thought it through at all, at least not in the context of competitive sport. If you don’t care at all about fair sports competition, it’s all super easy. If you do want to enable fair sport competition, you have to actually deal with the complexities and not just fire off leftist slogans.
At least one X is required because it contains instructions to make very crucial stuff, while Y contains a bunch of switches turning things on and off.
The determination of who may compete in limited-class sports must be made by rules.
It’s not a matter of who you or I think is a woman who qualifies. Only the governing body of that sport makes that determination.
I think the debate is about what a reasonable class is. I don’t think that an appendage, or identity for that matter, is a reasonable proxy for capability class. In my mind you really have to go one of two ways.
You either make everything class-less (think UFC 1) where all weights, sizes, abilities, genetics compete for a singular title
Or
You make science-based classes, based around whatever the best proxy for capabilities are (testosterone, chromosomes, height, weight, body fat percentage, some combination of the former, etc)
If you use nothing as a proxy, there would be a lot of people unable to compete but it would at least be unequivocally “fair”. If you use science-based capability classes you would have a wider range of “fair-ish” competitions, but there might be some weird overlap where some men, some women, and those in-between bridge accepted norms.
If you use nothing as a proxy, there would be a lot of people unable to compete but it would at least be unequivocally “fair”.
The thing is there’s always going to be people unable to compete. I don’t have the ability to compete in the Olympics, and that’s OK. I’m not asking for them to make a class for people like me specifically.
I don’t know what the “right” solution is, but my opinion has always been that the premier class should be unrestricted and anyone can compete. Whether we have subdivisions is another question, and then what those subdivisions should be is another. Is gender/sex the correct subdivision, or should it be something else? There are many women who can kick my ass despite being a 6’ tall man. Gender/sex is not a definitive proxy for capability.
That really doesn’t answer my question, it just splits it up between different bodies.
So let’s say it’s just a specific governing body of a sport? I’ll reword it with a minor changes:
Should athletes be genetically tested by that body or just examined to see what’s between their legs? If the former, do the women with Swyer Syndrome perform in the male or female divisions? How about people with both sets of genitalia? They exist. What about people who are XXY or XYY?
And if you think the latter- please do justify that sort of invasive examination for the purposes of athletic competition.
I think you can give a general answer to that question which applies to all members of, at the very least, the boxing league Khelif is in.
That really doesn’t answer my question, it just splits it up between different bodies.
Sorry, that’s just reality.
I can’t give you a general answer that applies to all of women’s sport, and for a specific answer regarding a particular women’s sport, you’ll need to consult with the governing body of that sport, and recognize that body may pander to interests (commercial, or the preferences of its participants and other stakeholders, etc) that have nothing to do with how you prefer to define “woman”.
This isn’t about the external genitalia, not sure why you keep going there. This is about the levels of hormones over an amount of time that is known to impart a muscular advantage. The IOC needs a formula for this to decide who can be in the class. This would not be a determination of who is female.
