I agree with this. I was expecting some brutal roundhouse. Normal opening round stuff.
Could be that she was merely following the money, until she realized the magnitude of the blowback?
I think some are piling in on Sherrerd as if he/she is representing the transphobes, but the comments seem reasonable to me.
Let’s say there are 10 aspects of human sexual dimorphism. Nature is not black and white, and many humans will have some of column A and some of column B. Sporting bodies have the unenviable task of trying to draw a line somewhere.
All @Sherrerd seems to be saying is that what gender you were assigned at birth – which is going to basically equate to which genitals you have – shouldn’t automatically trump all other factors. I agree with that. I think there is a danger to women’s sport if many of the top competitors tick many more boxes for male than female.
However, this is not me saying Khelif should not be allowed to compete; we don’t even know the test results.
And I have been even more disgusted than usual by people like JK Rowling and Trump.
The latter has even gone to the level of just claiming Khalif was a successful male boxer who “transitioned”. Blatant disinformation even by his standards.
I think people are reacting to the thesis that THIS is an opportunity to discuss exactly which mannish girls/women shouldn’t be allowed to compete.
One problem is that most of the sexual traits other than genitals aren’t easy to determine, and in fact the athlete themself might not know them. If someone grows up as a girl, and competes in girls’ sports all through the various levels of schooling and hobby leagues, at what point do you break out the chromosome or hormone tests? And do you do it for every single female athlete?
Yeah it’s complicated and we do have to be sensitive to the fact that we’re talking about people’s whole careers.
But what’s the alternative? If we just say anyone with female external genitalia then we may end up selecting people who are physiologically male apart from that one trait.
Of course, this is the point where some would argue that that has been the standard of judgement in the past, but this is irrelevant; we know more now. There’s no going back.
Here’s one link:
Going back from what? It was posted above that the IOC no longer sanctions or requires any form of “sex testing,” including parading naked before the judges or chromosome or hormone tests.
However, I wonder, as anti-doping these days includes screening for various forms of gene editing, whether they do not have samples of at least some of the athletes’ DNA.
There are many similarly arbitrary dividing lines in sports, such as age, weight, school size, etc. For instance, in the 12-year-old soccer division, they don’t test for testosterone levels, strength, size, speed, etc. Super talented 12-year-olds play against slow and uncoordinated 12-year-olds. Dividing sports by gender assigned at birth is the same kind of arbitrary division. Within group of people assigned a specific gender, there will be some that are super talented at athletics and some that aren’t. That’s just going to be the normal, statistical distribution that happens with any arbitrary sorting criteria (like age). There doesn’t need to be gender-based tests for cisgender female athletes which cause them to move to male sports. If there is a very talented cisgender female athlete, then she should be able to play in female sports and be at the top. Her super ability is just part of the normal, statistical distribution of ability for ciswomen.
And if you think about male sports, there’s no cutoff for how good someone can be. There’s no testing to say that someone has too much natural testosterone, is too fast, is too strong, etc. If a football player is 500#s of pure muscle, he plays alongside the players who are much smaller and weaker. It would be just part of the natural variation in ability of players on the field.
But what about her quarter-final fight video?
Sure, any line you pick is going to be arbitrary.
What I’m saying is, I’m not convinced that gender assigned at birth is the best compromise line to draw for the future of sports and fairness to the most competitors.
For one thing it implicitly rules out anyone that has transitioned including those that transitioned in infancy and/or due to misgendering by a doctor.
More to the point, I haven’t said exactly where the line should be. I’m just pushing back against the notion that some seem to have here, that gender assignment at birth is the obvious, fair measure. Nothing is obvious here, and any line is going to disadvantage someone.
People are arguing that GaaB should be the minimum bar and that anyone seeking a less inclusive bar than that is probably seeking to smuggle in anti-trans rhetoric under the guise of “fairness in women’s sport”.
So do you think Khelif should have been allowed to participate or not as a woman? What could she have done to satisfy your requirements?
Well, it’s what the transphobes argued for. Now that they’ve gotten their wish, they’re still complaining.
I think this take is potentially kinda misleading. IANA geneticist, unlike Johnny_LA’s anonymous “Farcebook” correspondent 
, but AIUI, there’s really no such thing as a natural-born body that is “physiologically male apart from that one trait” of female external genitalia.
That’s not how DSDs work. Y-chromosome individuals don’t get developmental anomalies that somehow affect only the external genitalia and leave all the other developmental pathways of male sex characteristics untouched.
Take the illustrative example of the mid-distance running champion Caster Semenya (and I’m taking all my talking points here from Semenya’s own recent autobiography The Race to Be Myself and officially published racing statistics).
Semenya, as I noted in post #17, apparently has 5α-reductase type 2 deficiency, which seems to be one of the least “feminizing” XY DSDs. She was born with female genitalia but no uterus and incomplete (internal) testes. Her natural testosterone levels are much higher than the typical female range, and she gains muscle mass more rapidly than is typical for women. Her voice deepened at puberty (although she did not develop male-pattern hair growth like facial or chest hair), and if you hear her speak it’s easy to mistake her voice for a man’s.
And yet Semenya is not even close to performing at the level of elite male athletes, not even when she’s been allowed to compete without chemically induced testosterone suppression. Some facts:
- Semenya has been beaten in various competitions by other female athletes, including several indubitably XX female athletes.
- While Semenya may be the overall GOAT in winning women’s 800m races in particular, she doesn’t even hold the world’s record for that race. Three other female athletes have posted better times in that race than Semenya’s PB, and AFAIK there is no indication of any of them being XY women. (In fact, AIUI, Olizarenko and Jelimo have both borne children, which as noted above is not positive proof of XX status, but definitely rules out the hypothetical status of “totally physiologically male except with a vagina”.
- Although there are only three female runners who have bested Semenya’s time in the 800 meters, there are about three thousand male runners who have done so. The men’s world record time for that race is 1:40, as compared to the 1:53:28 record time for the women’s race and Semenya’s own 1:54:25. Even the highest-achieving female athletes have about a 10-12% performance differential with respect to elite male athletes of the same age group, and Semenya is no exception to that rule. (National-class male runners—not even qualifying for “elite” ranking—on average easily beat the women’s record time by several seconds.)
- Even when Semenya competed with officially mandated testosterone suppression (which she found physically and psychologically painful), she was a world-level champion and won several races. Even when Semenya competed at her top natural potential without the drag of artificial hormone loading, she sometimes lost races, including to XX women, and as noted, never came close to even non-elite male runners’ times.
So if even Caster Semenya—who is literally the XY DSD poster child for gender police pearl-clutching about “Eeek oh noes a horrid brutal MAN messing up our delicate ladies’ athletics events!!”—cannot plausibly be described as anything close to totally “physiologically male” except for her vagina, then I think we need to be very careful about assuming that this hypothetical status of “totally physiologically male except for the vagina” is actually a thing.
Once again, the complexity of real-life human sex and gender biology resists the natural human inclination to classify it according to a few simple separable criteria.
Nah. There’s a fairly limited number of contexts in which it’s useful or appropriate to launch into, “Trans women in sports is a problem!” debates. A boxing match between two cis women is not one of those contexts. A boxing match between two cis women that’s been publically hijacked into an attack on trans people is double-plus not one of those contexts.
@Sherrerd can go fuck themselves with their bullshit concern trolling.
I’m thinking about my previous post, and realizing that one could argue that hey, what’s the evidence that Semenya isn’t “totally physiologically male except for the vagina”, irrespective of her sports performance? Like, maybe she’s just a rare vagina-having total male who happens to be not very good at running, compared to the best other male athletes?
Well, okay, more deets. Besides the no-male-pattern-hair thing, Semenya has mentioned she has (small) breasts. (And she also doesn’t have prominent laryngeal cartilage, i.e. “Adam’s apple”.) She’s officially 5’10" and 161lbs, which AFAICT would not be out of line for a male middle-distance runner.
But most importantly, if this is her body and her performance, then where’s the alleged unfair competitive advantage? If she’s birth-assigned female and lives and competes as a woman, and she performs at about the same level with either male-typical or female-typical testosterone levels, then what’s unfair about calling her an elite female athlete rather than a sub-elite male athlete?
Another layer of all this exasperating transphobic hypocrisy is the claim to be acting out of concern for female athletes and women’s sports, when what you’re doing is scrutinizing and denouncing female athletes for not “looking feminine” enough.
What impact do they think this is having on even cisgender girl athletes who aren’t stereotypically pretty or feminine-looking? Do they imagine that the prospect of being raked over the coals in the media for their short hair, or their muscular appearance, or their heavy jaw, or whatever, makes the prospect of sports competition more appealing to those girls?
These vicious gender police are themselves doing more damage to women’s sports than thousands of high-achieving transgender and/or XY DSD female athletes would ever do.
As always in gender and trans debates, you are the voice of reason, facts and understanding, @Kimstu, and I thank your for it. I’m disgusted by this recent discussion, it’s all so vile by most people, and I’m wondering what all this very public speculation and bullshitting about her innermost private matters will do to Imane Khelif. I wish her the very best and that she’ll get out of this mess as unharmed as possible.
Thank you very much EH! But I need to point out that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants here. Starting years ago, various transgender Dopers first cleared up some of my naive misconceptions about the classification of sex and gender, and they and many other non-transgender Dopers have continued to teach me a lot. I’ve learned a lot from reading some publications in biological and historical/sociological research too, and from various contemporary podcasters etc., but fundamentally I feel damn lucky to have this place to fight my ignorance.