Tox Report 60. The rules do not apply
Confused about sex and sport? You're supposed to be
I wrote for UnHerd last week about the controversy over the Olympics’ failure to screen for sex eligibility in boxing, but it turned out I had more to say. If you’re interested in the science and policy issues, the Real Science of Sport podcast has been covering this in excellent detail.
The trans activist, or gender identitarian, or sex denialist, or whatever you want to call it, project is fundamentally a linguistic one: it’s about the replacement of material reality with an ideological framework imposed through the application — and, just as importantly, the denial or hollowing out — of certain verbal formulations. Here’s a typical example from the International Olympic Committee’s Portrayal Guidelines: Gender-Equal, Fair and Inclusive Representation Guidelines, in a section on “problematic language”:
TERMS TO AVOID: “born male”, “born female”, “biologically male”, “biologically female”, “genetically male”, “genetically female”, “male-to-female (MtF)”, “female-to-male” (FtM)
Use of phrases like those above can be dehumanising and inaccurate when used to describe transgender sportspeople and athletes with sex variations. A person’s sex category is not assigned based on genetics alone and aspects of a person’s biology can be altered when they pursue gender-affirming medical care.
Which makes it notable that, when IOC president Thomas Bach made a statement on the two boxers competing as women after failing sex tests at the World Championships last year, he used these dehumanising words:
We are talking about women’s boxing. We have two boxers who are born as a woman, who were raised as women, who have passports as woman, who have competed for many years as women. This is the clear definition of a woman.
Bach also said, erroneously, that this was “not a DSD case”. After the press conference, a correction was issued: Bach misspoke, and should have said this was “not a trans case”. This is both true and irrelevant, because for people like me with an interest in the integrity of women’s sport, it has never mattered whether male athletes were trans or not: regardless of identity, they have no place in women’s sport. This, by the way, is why the inclusion of trans man Hergie Bacyadan in the women’s boxing is unproblematic: because Bacyadan is, if the IOC will forgive the offensive phrasing, born female and has not undergone testosterone therapy.
Maybe Bach would argue that there’s a significant difference between “born female” and “born as a woman”, though I don’t see how this is possible to maintain, especially given the number of times trans activists have smugly announced that no one is “born” a woman, because women are by definition adults and anyway didn’t Simone de Beauvoir say “one is not born but rather becomes a woman” so why does it matter what you’re born as? (I guarantee that no one who quotes de Beauvoir in this context has ever actually read her.)
What’s particularly infuriating (beyond the fact that Bach has apparently not read his own organisation’s briefing) is that the language deemed “problematic” has only been established in reaction to a more fundamental taboo — on using the words “male” and “female”. There’s a certain self-satisfied tone to some of the commentary: well, isn’t categories for people “assigned female at birth” what the terfs wanted? But the language of “assigned female” was originally applied by trans activists, in a maneuver that co-opted DSDs (intersex conditions) in order to obfuscate the fact of biological sex by implying that every identification is liable to be a mistake.
Now, when the athletes in question appear to have DSDs and the language of “assigned at birth” may be genuinely appropriate, the phrase is used as though there could never be any ambiguity or error. The assignation is treated as absolute in the very case where it should not be. First the sex denialists rewrote the terminology to be dislocated from reality, and then they treated that terminology as the ultimate arbiter of reality.
If you are one of the people who has tried very hard to learn the correct forms of language in order to #bekind, you would be justified in wondering why you bothered. Essentially, you’re in the position of the good Soviet citizen or the Medieval monk for whom truth is always provisional and subject to revision by the authorities: more fool you if you took it seriously. The linguistic project of the sex denialist position has always been opportunistic rather than principled. The point has never been to introduce a vocabulary that precisely reflects the subjective experience of gender; rather, it has been to generate a set of shifting norms that rendered the description of women as a group impossible.
Clearly, people in general are still very confused about sex, athleticism and DSDs. There is a persistent suggestion — as made by the writer Kat Brown in the Independent — that the athletes in question are accused of being female with elevated testosterone, rather than (as the IBA has said) XY male. (Brown also tweeted that the safety issues of males in women’s sport should be ignored because “it’s Olympic boxing not tiddly winks”, which implies that she either could not care less about women’s safety, or that she plays an unspeakably violent game of tiddlywinks.)
On social media, the tweely euphemistic claim that the boxers have “girl parts” became widespread, despite there being no external verification of the athlete’s physiology (and despite the fact that this would be a weird and unpleasant thing for the IOC to confirm). The insistence that they were “born women” has been interpreted to mean that they are female, when more likely, they are male with external genitals that developed in utero to appear feminised. After more than a decade of insisting that DSDs show sex is too complex to be legislated on, sex denialists have responded to an apparent case of DSDs by insisting there is no complexity here at all.
As Janice Turner observed in the Times this weekend, the Olympics has always been grudging about the inclusion of women’s sport. When outright bans are no longer acceptable, undermining the category of “female” is a way to serve the same misogynist logic. Bach can break the “rules” of his own organisation, because he is doing so in service of the deeper rule: that femaleness should be made unspeakable.
Gimme, gimme more…
My personality at the moment is almost entirely based on watching the Olympics, but there’s still been time to appreciate the splendour that is “Guess” feat. Billie.
I did the podcast review column for the Sunday Times. In case it’s not obvious, I am obsessed with Extreme: Muscle Men, which tells the story of how some enterprising meat heads built the biggest steroid ring in the US.
I couldn’t put the
in the column because I’m on it, but this pod continues to be the home of the best conversations you can eavesdrop on (or in my case, participate in). I talked to Gia and Tim about “cultural poisoning”, or how the internet made everyone lose their minds.The Jesse Singal x Helen Lewis Blocked and Exported show was a great night out, even if it is chastening to realise that “my people” are the people who spontaneously boo mentions of Michael Hobbes.
I wanted to find the video of Team GB skeet shooting silver medalist Amber Rutter swapping her shotgun for her baby, because it’s about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. What a badass. Who’s coming clay shooting with me?
This was excellent -- so many astute observations re: use (and abuse) of language and the erasure of women as a coherent class.
Last 3000 years: "Women have the wrong bodies for sports"
Last 30 seconds: "Female bodies don't exist"