Divide and Be Conquered
Sex
No, not that kind … how the Olympics might help turn down the culture war on the trans issue
Admit it: if you saw this picture with no caption and didn’t know the backstory, you’d think that was the end of a men’s boxing match.
It wasn’t. Rather, a semifinal of the women’s competition.
The winner of the bout (Imane Khelif on the right in the picture) has been the subject of a major controversy at these games which I will only summarize briefly here below. Search the web if you want the details.
What caught my eye was the image of the athlete on the left, Janjaem Suwannapheng, hardly a soft girl. Hold this thought.
First, to dispense with the controversy of the hour filling the digisphere, the bottom line is that Khelif is considered a man by the international governing body for the sport of boxing (the IBA), but is considered a woman by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which has the final say at the games it organizes, and so for this and other reasons has stripped the IBA of its decision powers, as far as Paris 2024 is concerned.
How can this be, you might ask, that two separate international sports bodies can’t agree on something as straightforward as whether an athlete is a man or a woman, when it doesn’t involve the trans aspect.
The explanation, as simple as I can gather it, is that, according to the IOC, Khelif was born, raised and has lived her whole life female. It’s on her birth certificate and her passport, in a country, Algeria, whose laws are strictly binary. Good enough for them, the IOC.
According to the IBA, however, Khelif didn’t pass the required “gender” test. Unhelpfully¹, they haven’t disclosed the full details, but the whispers off the record are that it was a combination of elevated testosterone levels and a simple chromosome test, with Khelif being XY.
This leads to much speculation about whether this could be a case similar to Caster Semenya’s (or even to the tragedy of David Reimer), where there was some complication of biology or accident early in life that led to a lifelong gender/software and sex/hardware mismatch.
Given the history of PED abuse in sports, especially the Olympics (e.g. Ben Johnson, Marion Jones … not to mention the old Soviet Bloc swimmers and track & field athletes), a reasonable person might wonder whether something like the IOC’s own anti-doping tests could at least quiet this boxing controversy, if not settle it fully.
That is, until coming up to speed on the actual current framework. It’s a bit dated, but this si.com article below by Frankie De La Cretaz gives a comprehensive overview of the issue, from the peak Lia Thomas moment in March 2022, just after the IOC had rolled out its latest policy:
Even allowing for the author’s bias, it’s a good primer on the topic, repeatedly pointing out the complexity of the issue.
It’s also a prime example of the point of view to the left/woke/extremist side of the super-majority consensus in this country, which powers the backlash from the right, which pulls the center that way, which risks MAGA 2.0 come this November.
Insisting, stridently, that a 10 year old XY (called Jane in the article) should be able to compete against girls just because they feel like one, and accusing anyone who disagrees of transphobia and bigotry overdoes it.
Or that Lia Thomas, as so vividly described by UPenn teammates (once out from under the University’s censorship gag), let alone by Riley Gaines, wasn’t a bridge too far … call that the Lia Thomas Line of Absurdity (LTLOA).
Anyone who has parented and/or coached both boys and girls before, during and after puberty, as I have, understands De La Cretaz’s ambiguous claim to be the heart of the matter (apropos of state and local laws):
Many of the bills are based on a specious assumption that boys have an inherent biological advantage over girls when it comes to athletics.
That assumption is only specious before puberty (and De La Cretaz seems to be mostly concerned about non-elite high school and collegiate sports, well after), as clarified by this excellent article from bbc.com:
Certainly, according to a scientific concensus issued in 2023 by the American College of Sports Medicine, the differences in athletic performance between girls and boys are “minimal” before puberty then leads to an increasing gap between them. It is worth noting, however, that the data on pre-puberty performance is contradictory, with some studies suggesting young boys do have an athletic edge in track sports, for example.
If the conclusion then would be to have only mixed sports, with no segregation by sex through, say, age 10, that could move in the direction of reasonableness. (Or at least below the elite tier of competition that starts tracking even the youngest athletes toward the collegiate and professional levels … think what one will of that practice, it’s the reality in many sports, say, gymnastics or ice skating.)
It would be interesting to see the impact on girl participation, as both among boys and girls there is a spectrum of soft← →hard in terms of degree of competitiveness, cortisol/sensitivity and innate athleticism.
It’s completely fair to argue that this spectrum is fundamentally socially constructed, or at least shaped … that Spartan and Viking cultures produced harder/stronger females (or that the Kurdish one does today). And as a society we should strive to move away from having a “weaker sex”.
I can imagine butch tomboys who resent societal pressures to be soft girly girls would be in favor of more competitive sports for females right from the very start of socialization.
As a male, though, I’m going to recuse myself from that one and leave it to the moms, grandmoms, aunts and big sisters to opine on just how much the state … from the local school board up to the US Supreme Court … should meddle in such gender role decisions.
Yes, requiring Phys Ed in schools is a good thing. Mens sana in corpore sano … and all that. Maybe not extending into requiring combat sports like boxing, to say nothing of forcing girls to compete with boys, regardless of how the latter identify, software-wise.
As far as I can tell there are only three sports in the current Olympiad where there is little to no appreciable performance gap between males and females: equestrian (where the horse is the athlete … and there’s been no male on the Individual Dressage podium since 1996), sailing (which is more an intellectual competition than a physical one) and shooting.
All the others have an elite level performance gap, roughly 10% (per the study quoted in that BBC article above).
I know, difference is the bane of wokeness when it comes to all things sex. It’s real, though, whether you like it or not. Denying that reality just invites closing the discussion and calling the vote.
It’s a mistake to give the Alito-Thomas SCOTUS an excuse to continue rolling the Law of the Land back to the 1920s.
I’ll close with my thoughts on a handful of first principles:
- The feelings to protect should always be those of the more vulnerable parties on a Safety First concept, especially for kids — note the inconsistency in De La Cretaz’s position between these two quotes:
They center the feelings of the cisgender competitors who may feel threatened by competing against a trans person rather than the feelings of the trans people
[…]
Transmasculine athletes taking low doses of T may not feel safe on a field with cisgender men.
- The classification of athlete sex as male or female begins with their chromosomes, XX or XY, which can be determined by privacy and dignity respecting tests, and covers somewhere between 98% and 99.99% of the population
- XX wanting to compete with XY is always permitted
- XY wanting to compete with XX puts the onus on the party to demonstrate they do not have an unfair biological advantage, in accordance with the rationale used by the sport to segregate into male and female
Putting that last one into practice, for example, a sport like basketball, volleyball or high jumping where height confers an inherent advantage, and post-puberty XY are on average 6 inches taller than XX, could simply prohibit XY from competing as an XX based on that fundamental difference between the sexes.
On the flip side, for an event like the balance beam in women’s gymnastics, it’s entirely unclear to me, as a non-expert, if there are any advantages to the typical adult XY body, given how much balance, flexibility and repetition/practice are key to success in the event. That sport’s governing body could weigh the pros and cons. I’d be surprised if little ball of fast twitch muscle double gold-medalist Carlos Yulo (pictured above) would have made the podium on beam this year, for example, as brilliant a gymnast as he is on the shared events of floor exercise and vault².
All of which winds us back to Thai boxer Janjaem Suwannapheng (pictured). As there has not been any controversy, I’m just going to assume she is XX and has not been disqualified for anti-doping reasons previously. She may just be max hard butch. More power to her, assuming that’s her thing in life and she hasn’t been pushed into it by an overbearing parent or coach … and isn’t juiced, of course.
Notes:
[1] Doubly unhelpful is the IBA’s use of the label ‘gender’ when referring to sex in this context. No one’s talking about software here, say, how the athletes are referred to by pronouns. This is purely a matter of which hardware competition you’re eligible for, not how you think of yourself, or your fashion preferences or your Yin or Yang tendencies or other socially constructed aspects of gender.
[2] Not sure how much weight to put on this AI answer, but, fwiw, Microsoft Copilot says Simone Biles’s hardest vault, the Yurchenko Double Pike has a higher difficulty score, 6.4, than Yulo’s hardest, the Piked Dragulescu, 6.0. On floor, Simone’s highest difficulty tumbling pass is the Biles II, 6.8 and Carlos’s is the triple-twisting double layout, 6.6.
