Culture War Watch
Transgender Rights
What would Montesquieu say?
Can we stop with all the noise and name-calling around important but controversial issues? Our enemies are doing their best to trigger schism … listen to all the Kremlin chortling about a looming second Civil War if you’re not tuned into this topic yet. Let’s not cooperate.
Rather, let’s foil them and show that we can engage in civil peaceful discourse instead, and try to work through some of these wedge issues.
The piece above by Eric Sentell is a case in point. The title did its job in terms of generating a click and a read. It’s an immoderate polemic, sadly, that doesn’t help either (a) working toward something like consensus on the issue, or (b) de-polarizing the body politic.
It begins with a series of questions that it (and most Americans, according to Pew Research, see below) calls reasonable. So far so good. But then it goes on to assert that anyone who asks these is really hiding bad faith. That’s a bit of a smear on those of us who aren’t “conservative transphobes” but who see biology as where to draw the line.
Sentell’s point about bans being self-defeating comes down to this flawed logic:
If student-athletes must compete based on what their birth certificates say, then you will have trans boys, who look like any other teen boy, competing with cisgender girls.
When I first read that sentence I was a little confused for a second by the meaning of “trans boys”. Teen boys (in the biological sense … what I will call “XY”, just to get away from the confusing vocab), who are trans, will look more like typical (cis) teen girls (“XX”). Then it dawned on me he meant “trans boys” (gender dysphoric trans teen XX).
Exactly how similar trans boys (in that last sense) look to “any other [cis] teen boy” is debatable, but for the sake of argument, let’s accept it and move on.
The Mack Beggs case as precedent for not banning XY athletes from XX sports? That, no, does not cohere, for the reasons that follow.
No one among the supermajority of Americans (including roughly half of Republicans … and me) who favor laws or policies that protect transgender people from discrimination thinks there’s any significant problem with XX competitors in XY sports, in compliance with the existing PED rules.
It’s not symmetrical. The problems come in with the unfair advantages of steroids (especially testosterone), whether natural from XY puberty or artificial from transitioning therapies for XX athletes (as in the case of Mack Beggs).
Nobody objects to a trans XY who has taken puberty blockers to lower testosterone competing in men’s sports, no more so than to cis XX who want to try the competition on the more demanding XY side. More power to them … Sarah Fuller, take a bow.
Closed-minded zealots from both heels of the horseshoe get too much air and pixel time, especially on this extremely thorny issue, so personal to those affected, be it the young people, or their families.
To the MAGA bigots: whether you like it or not, while DNA is indeed binary (in the sense of being a double helix, not a triple or quadruple, and h. sapiens’s sexual reproduction being oogamous), sexuality and gender identification aren’t. There are not “only two genders”. Homosexuality is not “against nature”. Attraction and circumstances are rather more fluid, per the famous Kinsey Reports (flaws and all) and Winston Churchill’s (apocryphal) quote apropos of the British Navy’s tradition:
…when Winston was at the Admiralty, the Board objected to some suggestion of his on the grounds that it would not be in accord with naval tradition. ‘Naval tradition? Naval tradition?’ said Winston. ‘Monstrous. Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers and the lash.’
(‘Prayers’ is often omitted from this quote.)
To the Wokerati Stasi: whether you like it or not, h. sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species, based on the chromosomes in every single cell of the body¹. This leads to the asymmetry, and thus the basis for segregation by sex into different sports competitions for XX and XY. That segregation is in the name of fairness for the smaller and weaker (on average) XX athletes.
And it’s all about averages. The same way there are weight classes in sports like wrestling. There are plenty of smaller, lighter athletes who can and do compete successfully at higher weights, but for the most part, mass (esp. muscle) confers advantages that the sport concludes require segregation into classes.
This is a no-brainer for any parent or coach. We’ve all seen it. Prior to puberty, there’s much less difference, and with girls (… can we please stop with the vocab policing) typically getting their growth spurts earlier than boys, it’s common to have tweener girls around age 10 plus or minus a couple of years who can compete against boys.
There’s nothing new here, is there? The Renée Richards case, as well as the Soviet Bloc athletes’ PED abuses stretch back at least fifty years².
Which brings us back to Mack Beggs. The issue is not that Mack (as an XX) was banned from competing against XYs. (For the record, the Texas body governing interscholastic sports claims they never received a request for such permission.) The issue is that Mack had an unfair advantage in the XX matches, in the form of banned anabolic steroid usage for several years as part of his transition process.
It was the PEDs, not the gender identity.
(Yes, yes as of 2015, the state of Texas had stopped enforcing the ban … that’s neither here nor there for the issue of fairness.)
It’s further worth noting that Mack went on to try the men’s side of the sport in college, and was listed on the roster of Life University’s wrestling team for three seasons, but there is no record of actually competing. The internet says Mack has gone on to a career in MMA, but, again, there is no record of stepping into the octagon.
I feel for Mack, I really do. As a wrestling fan and a coach of girls youth soccer teams, who saw the struggles many of the tomboy-ish ones went through, even in the very accepting time and place of 2000s Bay Area, I have nothing but sympathy for young people trying to pass through the transition from childhood (pre-sexual) to adulthood (these days, over-sexualized). It’s never been easy. Then and now, a gauntlet run across a land-mined obstacle course.
To the subtitle of this essay, I think Montesquieu would say the American public, as surveyed by Pew linked above, has it about right. The non-extremist reds have it on sports and bathrooms, things segregated on the basis of biology/sex. The red extremists have it wrong on thinking discrimination is okay. The blue extremists have it wrong on language and confusing hardware/sex and software/gender. The blues overall have it more right than the reds on gender and sex being different things.
If those last would just stop there rather than sliding into absurdities (to normal people, at least, if not to Berkeley academics) like “sex is socially constructed” and “sex is assigned at birth”.
No, you can come up with a new word for the corner cases of biology that don’t fit the simple binary (e.g. chimerism and mosaicism). Just don’t muddle the word ‘sex’ for those rare mutation cases, as it has a precise scientific meaning describing the two gamete types. Which type a baby can produce was (mostly) determined by which type of sperm wins the contest to fertilize the egg. Nothing is “assigned” at birth.
(Unless by ‘assigned’ the proponents of that jargon mean literally only what’s written on a birth certificate. The word ‘male’ or ‘female’, not the biological condition female or male. Really? … That’s one of the reasons wokeism/blue extremism makes everyone else roll their eyes.)
Most crucially for 2024, the blue side extremists have it self-defeatingly wrong on the cancel politics. By demonizing as transphobic (or worse … like Sentell’s “d*****bag” ad hominem) anyone who doesn’t agree 100% with their agenda, they alienate that moderate supermajority³, and thereby run the risk of exasperated purples returning MAGA to power.
Not a new centrist argument about #HowTheWorldWorks, I concede.
Suspend your disbelief, if you must, and imagine a near future with all these illiberals/theocratic authoritarians running both chambers of Congress, plus the White House, with the Opus Dei SCOTUS having the last word. In this time of heightened focus on the history of the Jews/Israel/Zionism/pogroms/genocide/etc… the remembrance of the era of the yellow stars, don’t forget the pink triangles.
If you think the state of Missouri is repressive, just wait for the laws coming for the whole country in February 2025, when Senate Majority Leader Rick Scott does away with the filibuster and he and House Speaker Mike “Family Research Council” Johnson pass the “Genesis 5:2 Act Defending God’s Nature” and unrestrained, senile, raging, out-for-payback Unitary Executive POTUS “Fingerbang” Don signs it, with enforcement contracted out to Constellis.
For sane blues, a word of advice from your purple friends: this is not the hill to die on.
Coda
A prepublication reviewer pointed out Sentell’s “trans girls trapped in boys locker rooms” concern. That’s a fair point, but at the limit, if the rule were “everyone gets access to a locker room shared only by their own type”, that means we’d need all eight combinations of { Male or Female sex } x { cis or trans } x { opposite or same sex attraction }. It’s also not clear that Sentell’s concern above is categorically different than a gay cis boy feeling so trapped, if that feeling comes from a fear of sexual assault or harassment.
But I get the concern. Not sure there’s a sensible solution, especially in light of everything that’s come out about the UPenn swim team. Lia Thomas might have felt trapped in the men’s locker room, but at least one of her teammates felt trapped by her presence in the women’s.
Notes:
[1] Let’s not rat-hole on the prevalence of genetic or hormonal etiology intersex cases. Yes, these are real biology/hardware conditions. As far as I can tell, they’re considered different from gender dysphoria by transgender activists.
[2] Two of the most astonishing individual records in track and field being Marita KOCH’s 1985 400m and Jarmila KRATOCHVÍLOVÁ’s 1983 800m, both considered tainted by the steroid era. Do we need to even start in on the East German swim team?
[3] Note the Pew finding of the trend in what the trans activists would consider the wrong direction on the question of the semantics of ‘man’ and ‘woman’.
