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Intersex has nothing to do with trans. Intersex people are not a third, fourth, or fifth sex. They are male or female; intersex conditions are sex-specific.
One more time: there are two sexes in humans. Sex is determined by the activity of the SRY gene, which either is or is not activated. That's it. That's your lot. There is nothing simplistic about this.
More importantly for this debate, having an intersex condition is a fact about material, observable reality. It is not something that one identifies into.
I thihnk that cases like Semenya's are very difficult, not least because she competed in good faith as a woman, rather than deciding that that was what she was. Still, cases like hers tell us nothing about trans athletes, because she is not trans.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 29 Jun 2021, 10:01,
Reply)
Of course intersex is different from trans. I am not conflating two different things.
Castor Semenya is a woman, and competes in the female category, which is entirely proper. However, it seems unarguable that because of her specific biological makeup she has a significant athletic advantage over many other athletes in the female category. That would be fine if she was simply allowed to compete as she is, but the athletic authorities have ruled that she must take hormone treatment to limit her athletic ability in order to compete in her existing category, which seems fundamentally wrong.
Instead of hobbling someone to fit a category that is clearly not fit for purpose, I'm arguing that we should consider reorganising sport to group athletes in more granular ranges of similar physical potential which are based on material, observable reality, and are independent of historic categories of male/female or self identification. This would also address the issue of trans classification; you compete in the category that matches your base physiological characteristics, regardless of sex, gene activity or identity.
(, Tue 29 Jun 2021, 10:20, Reply)
It wouldn't touch the (non-)issue of trans classification
since the whole basis of the trans claim to compete in female categories is that biology is unimportant in this regard, or at least less important than one's inner "sense of self". So there'd still be plenty of scope for athletes to insist that they should compete in this or that category, irrespective of their sex.
Your proposal is to take something other than sex as the guideline for classificatory boundaries. But what would that be? How granular do you want it? Eventually, you end up saying that there's as many categories as there are people, and in that case competition is meaningless. Or if you try to come up with meaningful categories based on combinations of size, muscle-density, metabolism, and the thousand-and-one other athletically-relevant factors... well, you end up back at sex.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 29 Jun 2021, 10:31,
Reply)
If you remove the existing male and female categories you do address the (non-)issue of trans classification. You can't insist that you should compete in a category that no longer exists.
(, Tue 29 Jun 2021, 10:42, Reply)
All you'd succeed in doing there is ensuring that all elite sport is male.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 29 Jun 2021, 10:55,
Reply)
No, you would have multiple elite categories. Some of those categories would be dominated by athletes currently categorised as "male", some would be dominated by athletes currently categorised as "female" and in between there would be categories where the winners could be athletes from either of the existing categories.
(, Tue 29 Jun 2021, 15:57, Reply)
how do we gauge "material, observable reality"?
In something like the 800m, presumably they'd all need to race against each other to find out who was closest together in ability. Then all the ability classes would race to find out who was top of each class. So you'd have a fastest class (all men probably) that would get all the media attention, then a load of slower classes containing women and the slower men that everyone would ignore. That's a bit shit isn't it?
(, Tue 29 Jun 2021, 10:35, Reply)
I don't think simply getting people to race against each other would work as an alternative method of categorisation. I'm not pretending there is an easy answer to how you would define that alternative classification, and I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think the existing classifications of male and female are working very well for many trans and non-trans athletes.
(, Tue 29 Jun 2021, 10:47, Reply)
you dont know what the answer is because broadly there is no better system than the one we have now
That is not to say that every effort shouldn't be given to accommodate minority groups wherever possible. But in this case it is not possible without excluding half the population from meaningful competitive sport.
(, Tue 29 Jun 2021, 11:21, Reply)
No, I don't know the answer because it is a very complex question, and society has only started seriously discussing it relatively recently.
"broadly there is no better system than the one we have now"
The current system accommodates the majority of athletes in the majority of competitions, but is causing some high profile issues in the relatively small number of cases where it doesn't work. I don't think we can say there is no better system, because I don't think anyone has seriously looked at alternatives yet.
(, Tue 29 Jun 2021, 15:50, Reply)
You are fundamentally misunderstanding what sport *is*
The categories we have allow us to measure and reward excellence, and so there are barriers to entry/recognition/high level competing based on skill.
What you are discussing isn’t “people that the current system doesn’t support” - there is, after all, a category in which Laurel Hubbard can compete fairly against peers - but you are in fact talking of a shift *away* from useful categories because you are coming from a perspective where your aim is “trans inclusion, with the right to choose their category” rather than “sporting fairness”
(, Wed 30 Jun 2021, 9:17, Reply)
A lot of people discussing this who aren’t really
Sporting experts, and I think their lay position, or assumption is that you have the men’s 100m and the women’s 100m, and that while the men are a bit faster, it’s almost as if the fastest men are the worlds fastest 1-8 with the women being 9-16, because that’s what a casual glance at the olympics might suggest if you’re not paying attention.
They seem not to realise that there’d be zero female Olympians under Happy Toast’s batshit proposals
(, Tue 29 Jun 2021, 10:48, Reply)