“No true Scotsman would think that.” “Don’t eat that, it’s poison!” “Decent people support this policy.” Is that person a real woman?
Humans love to think in absolute categories—it’s a trick that worked well on the savannah plains of Africa, where we did most of our evolving. There’s no time to explain to your savannah child that the fatality of those berries is dose-dependent. Just say, ‘It’s poison’ and instill fear. No need to explain that the success of your tribe is—with its hodge-podge of practical and magical beliefs—like all human groups, a mixture of good sense, opportunism, and the cynical crushing of enemies from time to time. Just say that we are the “favored people” and assume their allegiance.
Humans love categories and essences, but here’s the problem: Scientific progress is all about the fact that nature consists of processes, not essences. And when we apply our magical thinking about essences to practical problems, we can often go seriously awry.
Unless you have been living under a rock you must be aware that two Olympic boxers are attracting controversy. Are they women? Imane Khelif of Algeria, and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, are about to compete for the gold medals in their weight categories as women.
People have been struggling to make sense of this in terms of chromosomes, hormone levels, and physical appearance—but these are all processes that follow, typically, from one thing—the SRY gene. And processes can go awry.
The condition these boxers almost certainly have is called 5α reductase deficiency, and it causes those with male gametes to not respond to testosterone in quite the same way as most males do. But they still get a huge dose of testosterone at puberty, and their bodies develop things like bone density, muscle proportions, and lung capacity that no amount of testosterone suppression will remove. Evolution designed men to compete physically with one another. The fact that some women can compete with some men, just underscores how utterly remarkable those women are. It does not make it fair, any more than someone naturally taking on an athlete who has taken steroids (and still beating them) makes that situation fair.
These boxers have male gametes but suffer from conditions that make the outward expression of this (such as descended testicles, or penis development) not happen in the usual way. Since there is a huge amount of confusion (some of it deliberately spread) here is an illustration of the range of DSDs; this graphic unequivocally shows that sex is binary, not a ‘spectrum’. The old term ‘intersex’ (which I have used in the past) seems to have helped engender.
Summary of DSDs and karyotypes dividing into clear male and female disorders
Source: Copyright Daysgobygoby
Disorders of sexual development (or, if you prefer, differences in sexual development) are vanishingly rare. However, I had to devote nearly a chapter in my book to them, because confusion over the fact that women evolved under their own (separate) selection pressures (rather than being defective males) is one of the reasons that the study of female orgasm has been so difficult.
Incidentally, none of this has anything to do with ‘trans’. The question as to whether gender dysphoric people, who have had some degree of surgery and or hormones, should be able to identify in women’s sports is separate. People with DSDs have no gender dysphoria.
But back to sport, and why understanding sex categories matters.
Anyone who does not think that some sports folk—from coaches to competitors will use any unscrupulous angle to succeed is perhaps naïve. Examples abound, but my favorite is the one where the entire Spanish Basketball team pretended to have levels of mental impairment, to be able to win gold at the 2000 Paralympics. This meant no athletes with intellectual disabilities for the next two Olympics, ruining thousands of careers.
That some women may beat some men is utterly irrelevant. A disabled person may beat an able-bodied one. Richard Browne, a man with only one leg, can run 100 meters in 10.83 seconds. You can’t do that, and neither can I, but that doesn’t mean that losing a leg isn’t a disability.
Similar remarks pertain to all the many categories we have introduced into sports to make it possible for as many as possible to have fair, and meaningful, competitions. Age, experience level, weight in combat and lifting sports, and sex.
Most sporting bodies have realized this but, for a variety of reasons this has not happened here. But the tests have been done, and these boxers have XY chromosomes.
And trainers know this. Some of them scour the world looking for athletes who fit the profile because it is a known glitch in the system that can be exploited. So much so that in the 2016 Olympics, the entire podium of female winners was males with DSDs. The athletic sporting bodies in this sport realized these loopholes and removed them. For a variety of reasons boxing has lagged but the situation here is not just unfair, it is downright dangerous. Boxing has already had more than its fair share of dangers, without importing new ones.
“No true Scotsman would think that.” “Don’t eat that, it’s poison!” “Decent people support this policy.” Is that person a real woman?
Humans love to think in absolute categories—it’s a trick that worked well on the savannah plains of Africa, where we did most of our evolving. There’s no time to explain to your savannah child that the fatality of those berries is dose-dependent. Just say, ‘It’s poison’ and instill fear. No need to explain that the success of your tribe is—with its hodge-podge of practical and magical beliefs—like all human groups, a mixture of good sense, opportunism, and the cynical crushing of enemies from time to time. Just say that we are the “favored people” and assume their allegiance.
Humans love categories and essences, but here’s the problem: Scientific progress is all about the fact that nature consists of processes, not essences. And when we apply our magical thinking about essences to practical problems, we can often go seriously awry.
Unless you have been living under a rock you must be aware that two Olympic boxers are attracting controversy. Are they women? Imane Khelif of Algeria, and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, are about to compete for the gold medals in their weight categories as women.
People have been struggling to make sense of this in terms of chromosomes, hormone levels, and physical appearance—but these are all processes that follow, typically, from one thing—the SRY gene. And processes can go awry.
The condition these boxers almost certainly have is called 5α reductase deficiency, and it causes those with male gametes to not respond to testosterone in quite the same way as most males do. But they still get a huge dose of testosterone at puberty, and their bodies develop things like bone density, muscle proportions, and lung capacity that no amount of testosterone suppression will remove. Evolution designed men to compete physically with one another. The fact that some women can compete with some men, just underscores how utterly remarkable those women are. It does not make it fair, any more than someone naturally taking on an athlete who has taken steroids (and still beating them) makes that situation fair.
These boxers have male gametes but suffer from conditions that make the outward expression of this (such as descended testicles, or penis development) not happen in the usual way. Since there is a huge amount of confusion (some of it deliberately spread) here is an illustration of the range of DSDs; this graphic unequivocally shows that sex is binary, not a ‘spectrum’. The old term ‘intersex’ (which I have used in the past) seems to have helped engender.
Summary of DSDs and karyotypes dividing into clear male and female disorders
Source: Copyright Daysgobygoby
Disorders of sexual development (or, if you prefer, differences in sexual development) are vanishingly rare. However, I had to devote nearly a chapter in my book to them, because confusion over the fact that women evolved under their own (separate) selection pressures (rather than being defective males) is one of the reasons that the study of female orgasm has been so difficult.
Incidentally, none of this has anything to do with ‘trans’. The question as to whether gender dysphoric people, who have had some degree of surgery and or hormones, should be able to identify in women’s sports is separate. People with DSDs have no gender dysphoria.
But back to sport, and why understanding sex categories matters.
Anyone who does not think that some sports folk—from coaches to competitors will use any unscrupulous angle to succeed is perhaps naïve. Examples abound, but my favorite is the one where the entire Spanish Basketball team pretended to have levels of mental impairment, to be able to win gold at the 2000 Paralympics. This meant no athletes with intellectual disabilities for the next two Olympics, ruining thousands of careers.
That some women may beat some men is utterly irrelevant. A disabled person may beat an able-bodied one. Richard Browne, a man with only one leg, can run 100 meters in 10.83 seconds. You can’t do that, and neither can I, but that doesn’t mean that losing a leg isn’t a disability.
Similar remarks pertain to all the many categories we have introduced into sports to make it possible for as many as possible to have fair, and meaningful, competitions. Age, experience level, weight in combat and lifting sports, and sex.
Most sporting bodies have realized this but, for a variety of reasons this has not happened here. But the tests have been done, and these boxers have XY chromosomes.
And trainers know this. Some of them scour the world looking for athletes who fit the profile because it is a known glitch in the system that can be exploited. So much so that in the 2016 Olympics, the entire podium of female winners was males with DSDs. The athletic sporting bodies in this sport realized these loopholes and removed them. For a variety of reasons boxing has lagged but the situation here is not just unfair, it is downright dangerous. Boxing has already had more than its fair share of dangers, without importing new ones.
