Kinda funny to read scientists say testorone doesn't help in sports like these.
I reviewed an all comers track meet a few months ago. The overall woman 100m winner, in her 20s, would have barely beat the 70 year old guy--whose testosterone is probably close to double the woman.
All the younger men (e.g., 60s) with fewer miles and more testosterone left the woman in their dust
> Kinda funny to read scientists say testorone doesn't help in sports like these.
Which scientists say that???
The article features a scientist talking about a genetic mutation on the Y chromosome which affects the production of testosterone, and another scientist talking about another genetic mutation that prevents testosterone from being processed in the body. In both cases the individuals with these mutations have XY chromosome, yet female phenotypes. Individuals with the second mutation would have high testosterone without the performance enhancement. Those mutations are rare and would certainly not be picked up by comparing the racing time of men vs women.
No scientist in the article or any other that I've read makes the bold claim thar testosterone doesn't enhance performance in general.
Edit: in fact based on the estimate from the article of 1 in 300 people being affected by a DSD, you might expect that if a DSD enhances performance of women to the level of men (through increased testosterone for example) you might expect some women from your dataset to reach the middle of the pack of men performance. This is a hypothesis you can even test statistically, though that would be limited by the little we know of the many types of DSD.
Exogenous testosterone doesn't help in events like track and field. Maybe sprinting but there are better tools for the job.
But your comment does touch up on something else which is the fact that men and women very much have biological differences that are complimentary to our survival as a species and trying to ignore or say they don't exist smacks the face of reality hard.
But the linked article indeed touches upon a unique edge case and it's something that these games will need to address, the 3rd option. Unfortunately by genetics these "intersex" people are not men OR women, they are aberrations and unique which I would say should preclude them from competing entirely because they aren't technically men or women.
If their sex linked genetics gives them an advantage over women but not men, why should they be restricted from competing against men? That seems unnecessary and cruel.
How about people like Michael Phelps who were born with swimming advantages? Was reading an article years and years ago how his body is naturally made for swimming.
Suppose we took this line of thinking to its natural conclusion. If we wanted to be completely neutral, in theory we could have no male/female division at all, and just compete for the "best human" in each sport. But because of the vast biological differences between men and women, men would win every single time, hands down. This goes back to why do we have men and women divisions in the first place? Because we want a space for people without the vast advantages from male physiology to compete fairly with each other. Allowing for people who are technically "women" based on their reproductive anatomy, but have all the male physiological advantages otherwise, feels like it defeats the entire purpose from having separate women divisions.
What about a universal ranked system. For example, take tennis. There are already ranking systems so imagine a single one where all players regardless of gender/age/etc are all on a single list. Competitions will only allow you to play against someone within X rankings from you. So regardless of gender/age/etc, matches will always be reasonably fair and people move up and down based on what they win or lose.
So, now comes the part of whose the best DESC. Want to know the top female, just see the highest ranking one? Top person over 50? Under 20? Top person who isn't taking performance drugs? Top person who is? etc. You can get whatever top ranking you want. All matches are fair. Everyone can play.
This is actually the right answer though. Have one unrestricted category and then run the most popular retarded (I apologize, i can't find a better word, I have tried. It literally means poorer performance because of some specific identifiable physical trait in this case https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retard#h1) category next (which will often be women but could be men or something else in some instances) Relegate the rest to different events and promote/demote if popularity of some retardation (again, apologies) changes.
I think this is probably broadly true, but not always, maybe not even that commonly. Particularly in sports where raw power and endurance aren't the singular determining factor in the result. I'm optimistic that in some sports, if competition at a high-level started leaning into it, competitor performance from both would eventually converge in a way that makes the divide less clear. Some of those sports, by the nature of reduced exposure, just don't have remotely similar access or exposure among women, which is one of the factors that would change over time.
I'm thinking of climbing, skateboarding, where although speed, power, and endurance are factors, they're sort of relative factors compared to the person's bodyweight and how the routes/courses are set. Skateboard is much more divided for now than climbing as far as I can tell, but climbing is quite a lot closer, and the women's competition is generally more interesting to me to watch.
I feel like people aren't thinking enough about how much time each generation of new competitors has in terms of exposure to high-level athletes from the previous cohort, and how much of a compounding effect that can have. If you're clearly someone who'd be in the female category of sport, and you're divided into that category from the day you start, and the selection of people from the previous generation is 10% of the amount available among the other category, there's a very limited surface area for pushing harder.
In skateboarding, this pretty much meant anyone coming up 10 years ago had basically 2-5 notable figures who made anything of themselves skateboarding, and maybe half of them either stopped doing the sport or became reclusive. Ideally, you need to skate with the boys and compete with yourself and any other girl you can find. This period of time produced exactly what you'd expect; more women than in the previous generation got at least 50-75% better than the top competitors they would have looked up to. This compounds, and now those women are the inspiration for the current cohort, but they're only ever going to get as good or a bit better whichever rare individuals they have to compete with. Big fish, small pond.
In my opinion, we don't yet know how close those can get, and in some cases I'd like to see how that could change. In others, that possibility doesn't really come down to how driven or creative someone is, there's limited surface area for optimization and muscle growth, a clear dividing line where only mutant abnormalities would clear the gap at the highest level, since everyone on either side are already mutants.
The other men he competes with have similar physical advantages. And elite female swimmers do too.
But it would be completely unfair to have Phelps compete in the women's events, because he also has the male physical advantage, which female swimmers do not have.
Which we can see most starkly by comparing the record times of equivalent female and male events. The best of the best male swimmers are considerably faster than the best of the best female swimmers.
The difference being, that about half the population has zero chance against the other half in most sports. And for vast majority of the cases, it is very clear-cut as to which group someone belongs. Phelps, on the other hand, is a singular individual.
Sports is not the only problem. All public policy, as a consequence of some agreement between a large group of people, should be based on something objective rather than what a person thinks or feels. So how do we know when a person should be able to retire with benefits?
It seems like testosterone is at the base of the advantages. Wouldn't be possible to make a rule based on amount of testosterone exposure, instead of sex? Not sure if it's technically possible
Unless we embrace gender is - like many things - a spectrum, there will be debate.
I'll add, that equal is a high - perhaps unattainable - bar. It might make sense to first focus on fair / fairness, and that at times the many might have to take precedence over the few.
What always seems lost in this debate is how a trans men can’t generally be competitive in either men’s or women’s sports groupings. Either due to a physical disadvantage due to chromosome and hormonal differences or due to having to settle for an identity disadvantage (forced to identify as their biological sex instead of their gender to be in a competitive group).
Honestly it seems like the easiest solution is eliminate sports groupings by their references to sex or gender, and just divide up by those sciencey things which are generally known to provide the athletic advantages.
Group 1
Above a testosterone baseline and/or if you have XY chromosomes
Group 2
Below a testosterone baseline.
If you don't feel binary grouping is fair, set up multiple groups to accommodate.
Not parent commenter; I believe that any sport which looks at gender/sex is undeniably sexist, this includes the Olympic games which are by far the most blatant and prominent examples.
True equality can only be achieved by not considering if someone is a man, woman, or whatever they might want to classify as. Lump everyone together, equal opportunities given, and may the best man as in mankind win.
And no, don't give me "Women will almost always lose!". That is sexist bullshit. Equality is equality, we can't have our cake and eat it too. There is no line to be drawn.
Everyone has the right to ‘boil down’ anything to whatever. But science says otherwise.
XX or female is the default setting. If there is any deviation from the default, then there is a change or transformation. And the result is no longer female. It could be male. Or not. But it’s not ‘female’.
OP here. That's my point. In shooting for absolute equal, we're trying to take what is not binary - it's more of a biological spectrum (chromosomes, hormones, etc.) - and make it binary. Square peg, round hole, and so on.
Putting equal aside (because it's not realistic) leaves "What is fair? To all?" and that's a different question.
Not to make light or sound snarky (but to make a point), if we use equal as the goal, then what's to stop those who are height-challenged from demanding to play basketball?
I don't think a spectrum is the most helpful way to model the problem. What may be more useful is to consider normal males and normal females as the baseline, and then a set of discrete edge cases within each sex involving differences in sex development (DSDs) as the outliers.
The question when it comes to competitive sports is, which of these DSDs confer male physical advantage onto the individual?
As an example, though we can speculate with some now quite strong evidence on these two Olympic boxers, perhaps it's best to look at an athlete whose DSD is already known and confirmed: Caster Semenya, who won gold in the Women's 800m of the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
Because of a ruling published by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, we know that Semenya has 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), a male-specific (XY) DSD that, due to a recessive gene mutation, impairs the conversion of testosterone to DHT such that the penis is underdeveloped and the testes typically remain internal to the body.
Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation. This is what happened with Semenya.
However, the testes are still functional. Individuals with 5-ARD go through male puberty, produce testosterone in the normal male range, and in athletic competition, will therefore have male physical advantage.
In response to Semenya's case, the IAAF (now World Athletics) instituted a rule change so that 5-ARD individuals, and others with DSDs that are known to confer male performance advantage, are by default deemed ineligible to compete in women's events.
That is: on the basis that being male is not a talent, they chose policy that does not reward male physical advantage in competitions that should be about celebrating female athletic excellence.
So I think this isn't really about if sex or gender can be thought of as a spectrum, but what policy decisions, regarding DSDs, need to be made to ensure fairness in women's sport. And in the case of contact sports like boxing, safety as well.
I disagree and I think the reason there is disagreement and debate is exactly because of how hard it is to define male and female, man and woman (which may be either four or two categories) in a way that covers every individual case. The BBC article makes exactly that point: you can't just look at someone's Y chromosome and say whether they're male or not. Not for 100% of humanity.
And remember we can't see chromosomes. You say this with apparent certainty:
>> Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation.
Who is to say that a baby born with female external genitalia is "erroneously" observed to be female? If we observed them to be male, how would that not be erroneous? Again: we don't observe chromosomes directly. The line between the categories of "male" and "female" we understand was drawn long before anyone knew anything about chromosomes and there is no reason why knowing that a majority but not all individuals in the male or female category have the same "chromosomes" (the same karyotype, really) should eliminate the criterion we used before that, i.e. external genitalia at birth.
In the same vein, who is to say that someone who was assigned female at birth, who grew up as a girl, socialised as a girl, grew up to be accepted as a woman by their entire society - was "erroneously" so?
I think that would be a very lazy attitude to adopt (no offense to you) and that we should instead be prepared to accept that sex determination is hard in the fringes where people are not like most of us and we shouldn't make absolute proclamations like "XY is male".
And we should not forget that telling a person who grew up as a woman that she is now a man, or that she is stripped of some of the natural rights of a woman, like competing in women's sports, is cruel and a form of violation. It's like a forced sex change, a forced intervention to a person's identity that they developed spontaneously by living the only life they have in the only body they have. We should tread very carefully when dealing with people with DSD, especially when it's all in the name of "fairness". Scientists certainly do and not for reasons of fairness but for reasons of accuracy.
The spectrum means that for sports involving strength, at the highest levels of competition women that are most like men will dominate. That’s what we are observing.
Whether it’s fair or not is for the armchair philosophers.
If you're referencing the posted article, that is absolutely not what we're "observing" right now, that claim is political propaganda from the American right-wing. Khelif is not trans.
Biological sex is binary. Not all humans have two arms, but it would be wrong to say the number of arms we have is “a spectrum”. 99% of people start out with two arms. If you think that the number of arms humans have is some unknowable value because amputees exist, that doesn’t make sense to me, it favors a technically correct philosophical argument over reality.
Dawkins knows better and knows that that humans are born that are not clearly male, not clearly female, and also very clearly neither male nor female.
That's actual empirical observed science. There are peer reviewed medical papers in respected journals that look at hundreds of thousands of birth records and break the numbers down on distributions of chromosonal variations at birth.
As a follow up just because I’m still thinking about it. I had a long discussion with a friend about this one time and he advocated for a tiered approach. So instead of having a men’s league you would have an A, B, and C league and people are placed based on performance. If we go just based on pure athletic ability then the A league would be mostly men and the C league would be mostly women, but there would be upward mobility and likely a mixed league in the middle.
This might be a good model for younger kids, but by the time kids reach high school the biological gap is too great. See https://boysvswomen.com/#/ This is a problem because high school is the time when college scholarships become a thing, performance in competitive high school sports matters. Also, you now need three leagues instead of two, which could get expensive depending on the sport.
Despite no evidence, there's endless speculation and just askin' from the western media.
Contrast this to:
This statement, however, ignores that the history of women’s sport, from tennis to weightlifting to shot put, and yes to boxing, is peppered with athletes who did not conform to stereotypical, European standards of womanhood, including, ironically, European athletes.
Whereas we previously accepted that some women were indeed bigger, stronger or faster, than others, now it appears that many of us expect female athletes to be cookie-cutter images of each other and seek to punish those who do not conform. For all the growing awareness of non-binary gender, it seems we are growing less tolerant of any deviation from the stereotypical norm.
As many others have already pointed out, Khelif has been boxing in women’s competitions for many years, including at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics without these accusations arising. She has produced pictures of herself as a young girl, spoken of the challenges of boxing as a female in her Algerian culture, and has been defended by the IOC and Algerian officials.
Which leaves the Colin Wright's and others playing the maybe trans card with not much other than a vivid imagination and an apparent lack of exposure to female body types about the globe.
What analyses like this don't take into account is that if a male athlete of colour is deemed ineligible to compete in women's sports, a female athlete of colour can take his place.
Barring all males from women's sport opens up opportunities for female athletes from the same ethnic and/or cultural background who had been excluded from competition by the privileging of a male.
I guess this is fine as a hypothetical discussion, but considering that the 1) the IOC no longer recognizes the International Boxing Association, because it has had major issues, and 2) the claims put out by the IBA have been very inconsistent and may be politically motivated, I don't think it's good to even assume that the current allegations have any basis in any sort of physical condition.
Sports journalist Alan Abrahamson reports that he's personally seen the test results from the New Delhi lab where both boxers had their blood samples tested during the 2023 Women's World Boxing Championships: https://www.3wiresports.com/articles/2024/8/3/0d4ucn50bmvbnd...
> 3 Wire Sports has seen the letter and the tests.
> The documents shed new light on the controversy enveloping Khelif and, as well, Yu Ting Lin of Chinese Taipei that has erupted at these Paris 2024 Games.
> [...]
> In New Delhi, another test for each, "to reconfirm the findings of the initial test, which it did," according to the June 2023 letter the IBA sent to the IOC.
> The New Delhi lab reports for both Khelif and Lin say the same thing:
> Result Summary: "Abnormal"
> Interpretation: "Chromosomal analysis reveals Male karyotype."
> A karyotype means an individual's complete set of chromosomes. Females have XX chromosomes, males XY.
> The lab results for each athlete depict the XY chromosomes photographically.
As these were analysed in an independent laboratory, I think at the very least we can be confident that both athletes have a male (XY) sex chromosomes, even if the IBA itself may be of questionable trustworthiness.
> I think at the very least we can be confident that
Many things are possible when charged events spark contraversy, as evidenced by decades of history of reporting.
You may be "confident" in your leaps to a conclusion but you don't speak for a greater "we" and you should refrain from claiming to.
On balance it's just as probable that Abrahamson has seen documents that were presented to him as "test results from a New Delhi lab" but were fabricated, or genuine but flawed, or that Abrahamson is stretching the truth for the gain of his own website 3wiresports.
In the greater political picture, much of this contraversy stems from the IBA.
The IOC suspended the IBA in 2019 over governance, finance, refereeing and ethical issues and did not involve it in running the boxing events at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, before stripping it of recognition in 2023.
Any genuine lab results that exist will have been seen by the IOC, at the most recent press conference the IOC position on this was:
"Women have the right to participate in women’s [events], and we will not rely on — which test? I have been seeing a transcript of this very interesting press conference of this organization (IBA) where it was not even clear which tests have been performed, which results they have been produced.
~ IOC President Thomas Bach.
With respect to the greater picture here, he expanded:
When asked if the IOC would be willing to review its policies ahead of the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, Bach said the organization would be open to it.
"That’s what we have said from the very beginning. If somebody is presenting us a scientifically solid system – how to identify man and woman – we’re the first ones to do it. We do not like this uncertainty. We do not like it for the overall situation for nobody. So, we would be more than pleased to look into it. But what is not possible is that somebody saying that ‘this is not a woman’ just by looking at somebody or by falling prey to a defamation campaign by not a credible organization with highly political interests."
In such a situation it is wise to wary of any claims of definite lab test results being bandied about, there's pride, funding, revenge, etc. at play in this arena.
>> Interpretation: "Chromosomal analysis reveals Male karyotype."
>> A karyotype means an individual's complete set of chromosomes. Females have XX chromosomes, males XY.
The last line is an oversimplification that the author, as many others, uses to jump to conclusions. As the BBC article reports, quoting Alun Williams:
>> “It’s obviously a very good marker, as most people with a Y chromosome are male… but it’s not a perfect indicator.”
>> For some people with DSD, the Y chromosome is not a fully formed typical male Y chromosome. It may have some genetic material missing, damaged or swapped with the X chromosome, depending on the variation.
Also, something that's been a bit annoying throughout this affair: a "male karyotype" is not "XY", it's "46, XY" and a female karyotype is "46, XX". At least that's the normal male/ female karyotypes and some people with DSDs have variations thereof, like the 47, XXY karyotype of Kleineflter's Syndrome (a "trisomy").
In any eventuality, as the BBC article says, a male karyotype does not a male make, let alone a man. As a for instance, this is an article that reports natural birth in a woman with predominantly 46, XY karyotype:
Report of Fertility in a Woman with a Predominantly 46,XY Karyotype in a Family with Multiple Disorders of Sexual Development
This was a case of a woman with mosaicism, which means some of her cells had one set of chromosomes and other cells another. The karyotype of her ovaries was predominantly 46, XY, i.e. what the pundits keep calling "male" and less than 1% 46, XX, i.e. "female", by the pundits. And yet, not only did she menstruate regularly, she had two unassisted pregnancies and gave birth to a daughter. Imagine now if this woman was an athlete who had failed a gender test for having "XY chromosomes" as widely reported for the two Olympic boxers. A woman who has given birth is a male and should be competing in a men's category? How does that square with anything anyone knows or believes about gender or sex?
It is because of this kind of situation that is not unheard of and is not that rare in the grand scheme of things that the scientists in the BBC article, as well as the IOC, find it so difficult to say with certainty what is a man and what is a woman. Because despite what we all think we know, when we reach the limits of physical conditions, as is common in sports, the limits begin to become a blur.
If there is no genetic advantage here, what are the odds that this rare condition happens twice at the top of the sport? If gender is up for debate shouldn't it be assumed that you are a low performing man (relatively) as opposed to a high performing woman? The former is more common then the latter and thus more probable.
The BBC article doesn't seem to claim that there is no genetic advantage. I learned from it that there is some gray area in biological gender.
It may very well be that after this Olympics, the IOC will have to draw some arbitrary line (e.g., if you are a female with testosterone-sensitive Y chromosome, then you can't compete with females).
It is possible that the top athletes in many sports have a yet to be discovered rare genetic condition that allows their body to recover faster, gives them faster twitch muscles and supreme mental focus. That's certainly a genetic advantage.
>> The BBC article doesn't seem to claim that there is no genetic advantage. I learned from it that there is some gray area in biological gender.
I understand the BBC article to also make it clear that there is no test for "genetic advantage". If there were such a test then we could separate athletes to "advantage categories" so that all the athletes with the same kind of advantage compete with each other. Rather what we have is broad categories of weight and gender where different athletes have different strengths and weaknesses, where the majority of them have some kind of genetic advantage over the average non-athlete of their gender and weight, and where there are very often athletes who are clearly head and shoulders above the competition in every which way; and probably without doping.
Take the typical female (XX) and typical male (XY) one rep max on say a squat, bench press and deadlift (could/should also compare cardio, etc) vs someone with this condition. Who are these individuals closer to when untrained? That's who they should compete against.
The system selects for high performing women, but what if you blinded it to the women part? It might also select some low performing (relative to other men at this level) men by mistake.
Readit News
I reviewed an all comers track meet a few months ago. The overall woman 100m winner, in her 20s, would have barely beat the 70 year old guy--whose testosterone is probably close to double the woman.
All the younger men (e.g., 60s) with fewer miles and more testosterone left the woman in their dust
Which scientists say that???
The article features a scientist talking about a genetic mutation on the Y chromosome which affects the production of testosterone, and another scientist talking about another genetic mutation that prevents testosterone from being processed in the body. In both cases the individuals with these mutations have XY chromosome, yet female phenotypes. Individuals with the second mutation would have high testosterone without the performance enhancement. Those mutations are rare and would certainly not be picked up by comparing the racing time of men vs women.
No scientist in the article or any other that I've read makes the bold claim thar testosterone doesn't enhance performance in general.
Edit: in fact based on the estimate from the article of 1 in 300 people being affected by a DSD, you might expect that if a DSD enhances performance of women to the level of men (through increased testosterone for example) you might expect some women from your dataset to reach the middle of the pack of men performance. This is a hypothesis you can even test statistically, though that would be limited by the little we know of the many types of DSD.
But your comment does touch up on something else which is the fact that men and women very much have biological differences that are complimentary to our survival as a species and trying to ignore or say they don't exist smacks the face of reality hard.
But the linked article indeed touches upon a unique edge case and it's something that these games will need to address, the 3rd option. Unfortunately by genetics these "intersex" people are not men OR women, they are aberrations and unique which I would say should preclude them from competing entirely because they aren't technically men or women.
So, now comes the part of whose the best DESC. Want to know the top female, just see the highest ranking one? Top person over 50? Under 20? Top person who isn't taking performance drugs? Top person who is? etc. You can get whatever top ranking you want. All matches are fair. Everyone can play.
Key word: “feels”
That’s on the person/people doing the feeling
I think this is probably broadly true, but not always, maybe not even that commonly. Particularly in sports where raw power and endurance aren't the singular determining factor in the result. I'm optimistic that in some sports, if competition at a high-level started leaning into it, competitor performance from both would eventually converge in a way that makes the divide less clear. Some of those sports, by the nature of reduced exposure, just don't have remotely similar access or exposure among women, which is one of the factors that would change over time.
I'm thinking of climbing, skateboarding, where although speed, power, and endurance are factors, they're sort of relative factors compared to the person's bodyweight and how the routes/courses are set. Skateboard is much more divided for now than climbing as far as I can tell, but climbing is quite a lot closer, and the women's competition is generally more interesting to me to watch.
I feel like people aren't thinking enough about how much time each generation of new competitors has in terms of exposure to high-level athletes from the previous cohort, and how much of a compounding effect that can have. If you're clearly someone who'd be in the female category of sport, and you're divided into that category from the day you start, and the selection of people from the previous generation is 10% of the amount available among the other category, there's a very limited surface area for pushing harder.
In skateboarding, this pretty much meant anyone coming up 10 years ago had basically 2-5 notable figures who made anything of themselves skateboarding, and maybe half of them either stopped doing the sport or became reclusive. Ideally, you need to skate with the boys and compete with yourself and any other girl you can find. This period of time produced exactly what you'd expect; more women than in the previous generation got at least 50-75% better than the top competitors they would have looked up to. This compounds, and now those women are the inspiration for the current cohort, but they're only ever going to get as good or a bit better whichever rare individuals they have to compete with. Big fish, small pond.
In my opinion, we don't yet know how close those can get, and in some cases I'd like to see how that could change. In others, that possibility doesn't really come down to how driven or creative someone is, there's limited surface area for optimization and muscle growth, a clear dividing line where only mutant abnormalities would clear the gap at the highest level, since everyone on either side are already mutants.
But it would be completely unfair to have Phelps compete in the women's events, because he also has the male physical advantage, which female swimmers do not have.
Which we can see most starkly by comparing the record times of equivalent female and male events. The best of the best male swimmers are considerably faster than the best of the best female swimmers.
Sports is not the only problem. All public policy, as a consequence of some agreement between a large group of people, should be based on something objective rather than what a person thinks or feels. So how do we know when a person should be able to retire with benefits?
- biological gender is not binary
- there's more to it than XX and XY
Unless we embrace gender is - like many things - a spectrum, there will be debate.
I'll add, that equal is a high - perhaps unattainable - bar. It might make sense to first focus on fair / fairness, and that at times the many might have to take precedence over the few.
C'est la vie.
Honestly it seems like the easiest solution is eliminate sports groupings by their references to sex or gender, and just divide up by those sciencey things which are generally known to provide the athletic advantages.
Group 1 Above a testosterone baseline and/or if you have XY chromosomes
Group 2 Below a testosterone baseline.
If you don't feel binary grouping is fair, set up multiple groups to accommodate.
There is a female athlete who identifies as a man currently competing in the Olympics: Hergie Bacyadan, in women's boxing.
This doesn't seem to have caused any actual disadvantage. In fact, Bacyadan is reported as saying:
> I'm very thankful that I got to the Olympics. It's a big deal to me.
True equality can only be achieved by not considering if someone is a man, woman, or whatever they might want to classify as. Lump everyone together, equal opportunities given, and may the best man as in mankind win.
And no, don't give me "Women will almost always lose!". That is sexist bullshit. Equality is equality, we can't have our cake and eat it too. There is no line to be drawn.
XX or female is the default setting. If there is any deviation from the default, then there is a change or transformation. And the result is no longer female. It could be male. Or not. But it’s not ‘female’.
Putting equal aside (because it's not realistic) leaves "What is fair? To all?" and that's a different question.
Not to make light or sound snarky (but to make a point), if we use equal as the goal, then what's to stop those who are height-challenged from demanding to play basketball?
The question when it comes to competitive sports is, which of these DSDs confer male physical advantage onto the individual?
As an example, though we can speculate with some now quite strong evidence on these two Olympic boxers, perhaps it's best to look at an athlete whose DSD is already known and confirmed: Caster Semenya, who won gold in the Women's 800m of the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
Because of a ruling published by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, we know that Semenya has 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), a male-specific (XY) DSD that, due to a recessive gene mutation, impairs the conversion of testosterone to DHT such that the penis is underdeveloped and the testes typically remain internal to the body.
Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation. This is what happened with Semenya.
However, the testes are still functional. Individuals with 5-ARD go through male puberty, produce testosterone in the normal male range, and in athletic competition, will therefore have male physical advantage.
In response to Semenya's case, the IAAF (now World Athletics) instituted a rule change so that 5-ARD individuals, and others with DSDs that are known to confer male performance advantage, are by default deemed ineligible to compete in women's events.
That is: on the basis that being male is not a talent, they chose policy that does not reward male physical advantage in competitions that should be about celebrating female athletic excellence.
So I think this isn't really about if sex or gender can be thought of as a spectrum, but what policy decisions, regarding DSDs, need to be made to ensure fairness in women's sport. And in the case of contact sports like boxing, safety as well.
And remember we can't see chromosomes. You say this with apparent certainty:
>> Newborns with 5-ARD may, in the absence of sex testing, be erroneously observed to be female, and have this written on their birth documentation.
Who is to say that a baby born with female external genitalia is "erroneously" observed to be female? If we observed them to be male, how would that not be erroneous? Again: we don't observe chromosomes directly. The line between the categories of "male" and "female" we understand was drawn long before anyone knew anything about chromosomes and there is no reason why knowing that a majority but not all individuals in the male or female category have the same "chromosomes" (the same karyotype, really) should eliminate the criterion we used before that, i.e. external genitalia at birth.
In the same vein, who is to say that someone who was assigned female at birth, who grew up as a girl, socialised as a girl, grew up to be accepted as a woman by their entire society - was "erroneously" so?
I think that would be a very lazy attitude to adopt (no offense to you) and that we should instead be prepared to accept that sex determination is hard in the fringes where people are not like most of us and we shouldn't make absolute proclamations like "XY is male".
And we should not forget that telling a person who grew up as a woman that she is now a man, or that she is stripped of some of the natural rights of a woman, like competing in women's sports, is cruel and a form of violation. It's like a forced sex change, a forced intervention to a person's identity that they developed spontaneously by living the only life they have in the only body they have. We should tread very carefully when dealing with people with DSD, especially when it's all in the name of "fairness". Scientists certainly do and not for reasons of fairness but for reasons of accuracy.
Whether it’s fair or not is for the armchair philosophers.
Biologist Richard Dawkins agrees (though his argument is much better stated than mine): https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/07/biological-sex-bi...
Note that this doesn’t really “solve” all parts of the debate around gender and sports, but it’s a good starting point.
Dawkins knows better and knows that that humans are born that are not clearly male, not clearly female, and also very clearly neither male nor female.
That's actual empirical observed science. There are peer reviewed medical papers in respected journals that look at hundreds of thousands of birth records and break the numbers down on distributions of chromosonal variations at birth.
This might be a good model for younger kids, but by the time kids reach high school the biological gap is too great. See https://boysvswomen.com/#/ This is a problem because high school is the time when college scholarships become a thing, performance in competitive high school sports matters. Also, you now need three leagues instead of two, which could get expensive depending on the sport.
Contrast this to:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/8/7/imane-khelif-and...Which leaves the Colin Wright's and others playing the maybe trans card with not much other than a vivid imagination and an apparent lack of exposure to female body types about the globe.
Barring all males from women's sport opens up opportunities for female athletes from the same ethnic and/or cultural background who had been excluded from competition by the privileging of a male.
> 3 Wire Sports has seen the letter and the tests.
> The documents shed new light on the controversy enveloping Khelif and, as well, Yu Ting Lin of Chinese Taipei that has erupted at these Paris 2024 Games.
> [...]
> In New Delhi, another test for each, "to reconfirm the findings of the initial test, which it did," according to the June 2023 letter the IBA sent to the IOC.
> The New Delhi lab reports for both Khelif and Lin say the same thing:
> Result Summary: "Abnormal"
> Interpretation: "Chromosomal analysis reveals Male karyotype."
> A karyotype means an individual's complete set of chromosomes. Females have XX chromosomes, males XY.
> The lab results for each athlete depict the XY chromosomes photographically.
As these were analysed in an independent laboratory, I think at the very least we can be confident that both athletes have a male (XY) sex chromosomes, even if the IBA itself may be of questionable trustworthiness.
Many things are possible when charged events spark contraversy, as evidenced by decades of history of reporting.
You may be "confident" in your leaps to a conclusion but you don't speak for a greater "we" and you should refrain from claiming to.
On balance it's just as probable that Abrahamson has seen documents that were presented to him as "test results from a New Delhi lab" but were fabricated, or genuine but flawed, or that Abrahamson is stretching the truth for the gain of his own website 3wiresports.
In the greater political picture, much of this contraversy stems from the IBA.
The IOC suspended the IBA in 2019 over governance, finance, refereeing and ethical issues and did not involve it in running the boxing events at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, before stripping it of recognition in 2023.
Any genuine lab results that exist will have been seen by the IOC, at the most recent press conference the IOC position on this was:
~ IOC President Thomas Bach.With respect to the greater picture here, he expanded:
In such a situation it is wise to wary of any claims of definite lab test results being bandied about, there's pride, funding, revenge, etc. at play in this arena.>> Interpretation: "Chromosomal analysis reveals Male karyotype."
>> A karyotype means an individual's complete set of chromosomes. Females have XX chromosomes, males XY.
The last line is an oversimplification that the author, as many others, uses to jump to conclusions. As the BBC article reports, quoting Alun Williams:
>> “It’s obviously a very good marker, as most people with a Y chromosome are male… but it’s not a perfect indicator.”
>> For some people with DSD, the Y chromosome is not a fully formed typical male Y chromosome. It may have some genetic material missing, damaged or swapped with the X chromosome, depending on the variation.
Also, something that's been a bit annoying throughout this affair: a "male karyotype" is not "XY", it's "46, XY" and a female karyotype is "46, XX". At least that's the normal male/ female karyotypes and some people with DSDs have variations thereof, like the 47, XXY karyotype of Kleineflter's Syndrome (a "trisomy").
In any eventuality, as the BBC article says, a male karyotype does not a male make, let alone a man. As a for instance, this is an article that reports natural birth in a woman with predominantly 46, XY karyotype:
Report of Fertility in a Woman with a Predominantly 46,XY Karyotype in a Family with Multiple Disorders of Sexual Development
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190741/
This was a case of a woman with mosaicism, which means some of her cells had one set of chromosomes and other cells another. The karyotype of her ovaries was predominantly 46, XY, i.e. what the pundits keep calling "male" and less than 1% 46, XX, i.e. "female", by the pundits. And yet, not only did she menstruate regularly, she had two unassisted pregnancies and gave birth to a daughter. Imagine now if this woman was an athlete who had failed a gender test for having "XY chromosomes" as widely reported for the two Olympic boxers. A woman who has given birth is a male and should be competing in a men's category? How does that square with anything anyone knows or believes about gender or sex?
It is because of this kind of situation that is not unheard of and is not that rare in the grand scheme of things that the scientists in the BBC article, as well as the IOC, find it so difficult to say with certainty what is a man and what is a woman. Because despite what we all think we know, when we reach the limits of physical conditions, as is common in sports, the limits begin to become a blur.
It may very well be that after this Olympics, the IOC will have to draw some arbitrary line (e.g., if you are a female with testosterone-sensitive Y chromosome, then you can't compete with females).
It is possible that the top athletes in many sports have a yet to be discovered rare genetic condition that allows their body to recover faster, gives them faster twitch muscles and supreme mental focus. That's certainly a genetic advantage.
I understand the BBC article to also make it clear that there is no test for "genetic advantage". If there were such a test then we could separate athletes to "advantage categories" so that all the athletes with the same kind of advantage compete with each other. Rather what we have is broad categories of weight and gender where different athletes have different strengths and weaknesses, where the majority of them have some kind of genetic advantage over the average non-athlete of their gender and weight, and where there are very often athletes who are clearly head and shoulders above the competition in every which way; and probably without doping.
Take the typical female (XX) and typical male (XY) one rep max on say a squat, bench press and deadlift (could/should also compare cardio, etc) vs someone with this condition. Who are these individuals closer to when untrained? That's who they should compete against.
Flawed logic when applied in a domain that is selecting for high performing women.
This isn't a "all things being equal" draw of marbles from a bag.
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