Oh, gosh, I didn’t realize I could just look up the interpretation of an evolving social/cultural situation in sports rulebooks, which of course will remain unchanging as long as the Greek translation of Leviticus.
God, I’m so stupid. Sorry.
Seriously, you can only take dismissiveness so far as a defense. And your defense, IMHO, has been abridged too far.
Just perhaps, you think I am arguing against all these notions. I am not. I am pointing out that we’ve opened a door to an entirely new set of assumptions that kick a simple male/female dichotomy all to pieces, and we’re going to have to look further than last year’s IOC rulebook to sort them out.
But it’s not about self-identification. And that’s why you are struggling with this.
The current standard of care is that a transgender person has to have received extensive counseling with a licensed therapist before they can be administered cross-sex hormones. There are exceptions to this, such as if the person in question is currently illegally self-medicating, or at risk of imminent self-harm if hormones are withheld.
Then the person in question will have to undergo hormone therapy for some time, typically a year, before they are eligible for surgery. During this time, assuming they are a transwoman, the estradiol is going to cause significant changes to their body, while the anti-androgens start wearing away the benefits of testosterone. In some people this change is profound and quick. In others, or intersex persons like myself, the change is slower and less profound.
Then after that time period, after which the person in question normally has to have gone through a social and legal gender change, including living fully as the new gender, the person in question must undergo a gonadectomy. Contrary to popular belief this does not mandate full SRS; surgical castration will suffice, since despite what all you men think, the penis is really not a magical source of power and glory.
So now after three years of no testosterone and massive levels of estradiol going through their body, how “hulking, hairy, bemuscled” is our hypothetical problem child? Not very.
So not only is it pretty unlikely, when has it happened before via the “official” channels and women were shut out of medals? Never.
In short, this is a solution looking desperately for a problem. There is a much greater problem with doping than there has, or likely ever will be, with transgender athletes. Look at Lance Armstrong, awash in rumours and accusations of doping for years, yet he managed to slip by test after test. And in professional sports there is the continual problem of players who throw a game or assist in such in order to cash in via illegal betting.
Consider even still the fact transsexual women who will undergo full hormone treatment and surgery are still on the order of 1 in 10,000 in the population (note I qualified it with surgery - transsexual women on hormone therapy are about 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000). So now out of a very small population to begin with, we have to find the percentage who happen to competitive athletes, and who are of the right age to still compete, and who intend to keep competing full-bore after transition. How many are we left with? 1 in a million from the general population?
I know it’s entirely anecdotal, but in my circle of a few thousand transsexual women who I’ve met and/or worked with, I know of only a single competitive athlete - and she competes only in local 10k and half-marathons. Sure, there are golfers, mountain bikers, fencers, basketball players, MMA fighters, tennis players, softball players, etc. and I have vignettes of several on my website. An extremely small number.
And we can recall similar arguments were used at one time by folks trying to keep black athletes out of certain sports - they supposedly had a “natural genetic advantage”. Remember Jimmy the Greek’s pontifications upon the subject? Some grumbling was heard at the last summer Olympics about the incredibly tiny (and almost certainly underage, in some cases) Chinese gymnasts.
Athletic competition does not begin at the Olympic level. Currently, some states have policies permitting transgender K-12 students to compete as female (often female students are permitted to compete on otherwise-male teams regardless of gender), some states have policies that insist that students compete as whatever their birth certificate says, and some states have no policy at all.
Requiring hormone therapy or medical intervention for students would not be appropriate in my opinion. Whether medical intervention is in order should be between the child, the child’s guardians, and the child’s doctors, not done to meet a requirement to compete.
When you add in the complications of the non-trivial number of people who are born of indeterminate sex, it seems strange that you don’t see this as an issue. Caster Semenya’s running career took quite a hit from the horrendously implemented investigation into whether she ought to be able to compete as the woman she had always believed herself to be. She has never beaten her times before the debacle and either she was robbed of her reasonably predicted career trajectory or should never have been competing in the female division in the first place, depending on whether one agrees with the determination that was finally made.
Lance Armstrong and doping has nothing to do with this. Yes, there are many problems in competitive sports. Are we not allowed to discuss one issue until we’ve solved all bigger problems?
Certainly a scientist can look at a skull and reconstruct a face. But that doesn’t place somebody in one of set of groups called race. As I said, race is a scientifically invalid concept. What is race? Where does it fit on Kingdom Phyla Class Order Family Genus Species? Race is clearly not equivalent to subspecies. How many races are there? What are the characteristics of each?
I understand what you are saying **DocCathode **but, respectfully, I would like to disagree with you on two points:
[ol]
[li]Your argument above could be used to declare that there is no scientifically valid definition of “sex”. Just substitute “sex” in your above statement for “race”. In other words, scientists can tell whether an ancient skull is male/female, but, in the way that you phrased your statements, “sex” does not fit into your Kingdom Phyla Class Order Family Genus Species example either. Yet scientists agree that “sex” is a thing.[/li][li]There actually have been a large number of scientific studies that combine genomic sequencing with self-identified “race” to determine geographic origins of different ancestry. They are not racist papers - they speak to migration and the intricate evolution of human groups.[/li][/ol]
Examples:
Here is a *Genetics *paper that discusses the genetic similarities and differences between different human populations. Some of the subpopulations resemble “racial” partitionings.
Here is a *Genetics *paper that matches up self-reported race/ethnicity/nationality to a large GWAS (genome-wide association study) cohort.
I’d argue that your dismissal of a scientific definition of race (as you stated it) was painting with too broad of a brush. Race (more specifically human evolutionary diversity) may not be at the forefront of all scientific disciplines, but it’s an active research area in genetics.
I’d also suggest (to everyone) that it’s entirely possible to celebrate the rich diversity in races in a scientific setting because it is a fascinating and relevant topic. And all of us can benefit in understanding our origins without any racist overtones, as exemplified in these *Genetics *papers.
[li]Your argument above could be used to declare that there is no scientifically valid definition of “sex”. [/li][/QUOTE]
No, it couldn’t. I’ll explain why in a bit
Sex isn’t meant to fit into KPCOFGS. It’s a completely separate axis. Knowing an organism’s sex does not tell me if it is an animal or plant, whether it has a spinal chord etc. Race, if it existed in a meaningful way, would have to fit into KPCOFGS. Adherents of race claim that it tells skin color, facial features, type of hair, and many other things.
