The International Olympic Committee, in its infinite (lack of) wisdom, has decided that it will test all athletes competing in female categories to be sure they are “real” women. They’re going to use the presence of the SRY gene as a determining factor, even though the scientist who discovered it in 1990 says it is in no way determinative.
The headlines all say this will ban trans women from competing as women. However, as a practical matter, there are very few trans women competing at the world class level. The women it will actually affect are those who have what is called “DSD” – differences of sexual development.
These women were assigned female at birth (AFAB) and raised as girls. It was only when they began competing as athletes on a high level and ran into testing procedures that they discovered they had some hormonal or other differences that are less common in women.
If you want to get an in-depth understanding of the actual science (which doesn’t support this policy) and politics underlying what happened, I strongly recommend the reporting by Reo Eveleth. They had a excellent article in Coyote on this news right when it came out and also did a newsletter report. A couple of years back, they did a superb podcast on the topic called Tested.
I’m not surprised by this decision, but I am furious about it. Spitting mad furious. I mean, I was already mad about so many things you wouldn’t think I could get any angrier, but this sent me right over the edge.
Now I’m a cis woman, as far as I know. I’ve never participated in anything that required me to prove it, so all I know is that I was AFAB and have never had any reason to question that or any problem with it.
I’ve also been a serious martial artist since I was 30, which makes me something of an athlete, though I’m in no way a world class one and the only competition I ever did was a few tournaments back in my karate days.
So why do I care? I’m not trans and I’m not a world-class athlete, so even if I turned out to have “DSD,” it wouldn’t matter.
Well, first of all, these people have the nerve to define who gets to be a woman, but they don’t apply the same kind of test to men. If you’re a world-class athlete and you say you’re male, you’re accepted as male. Trans men could compete.
Given the number of women who have passed as men to serve in the military – some of them likely trans men, others women who wanted to fight – I strongly suspect that some of the medalists in male events at Olympics gone by would, in fact, test out as female.
But no one’s going to look into that.
Biology is messy. And yes, I mean biology. We all know that gender is more complicated than just your hormones and your body shape and what the doctor said when you were born, but biology doesn’t break down into neat categories either, no matter how many people righteously proclaim that there are men and women and that’s it.
This policy is rooted not just on the assumption that there are no fuzzy lines in determining sex, but on the assumption that men are fundamentally superior to women. They really think all men are better at physical activity than any women, even world-class women.
By their reasoning, anyone with an SRY gene, no matter how fragmented, must be better than anyone who lacks it.
Also, as a friend of mine points out, they don’t want to take the chance of being beaten by a woman.
This policy is rooted in misogyny and is intended to keep women “in their place.” Women don’t just have to be world-class athletes to compete; they have to conform to fit some idiot’s idea of who qualifies as a woman.
This kind of discrimination will reverberate back on cis women, because any time someone asserts the authority to decide who qualifies as female they open the door to other regulation. They’re deciding that the possibility that some women have traces of SRY is a reasonable determining factor. They could decide that height or the ability to build muscle mass or a deep speaking voice was enough.
They’re not using good science to make these rules, so they could easily make more absurd ones.
I mean, I’m about the height of the average man and if I joined a choir these days I’d likely sing tenor. Or even baritone.
Given the various laws and policies being put in place in various parts of the United States right now, I wouldn’t be surprised by a policy that defines one’s sex by vocal range.
By the way, I’ll just note that most of the women currently affected by the DSD designation come from Africa and let you draw your own conclusions about why this is suddenly so important.