The Atlantic has waded into perilous waters by publishing what turns out to be quite a good article about transgender women competing in athletics against biological women. The fact that this liberal and prestigious magazine even writes about the issue is, to me, a good sign: a sign that the issue needs discussing. And I’m glad to see that the author, staff writer Helen Lewis, concludes with a solution that is virtually identical to mine.
To read her piece, click below, or find it archived here.
Lewis begins by citing recent controversies involving transgender women competing—and winning—against biological women. They include the now well-known story of Lia Thomas, who will swim no more against women, as well as the San Jose State women’s volleyball team, which included what seemed to be a trans woman (they won’t publicly admit it, but most team members do). This story isn’t as well known:
In September, the San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser and the associate coach Melissa Batie-Smoose went public with their concerns about their own team’s trans player. “Safety is being taken away from women,” Batie-Smoose later told Fox News. “Fair play is taken away from women.” Both women told Quillette that they believed players and coaches were being pressured not to make a fuss. The next month, Liilii told me, she and her Nevada teammates voted, 16–1, to boycott their next match against San Jose State. The Nevada players were not alone: Teams from Boise State, the University of Wyoming, Southern Utah, and Utah State also forfeited games rather than face the trans player.
San Jose State kept competing despite all that—and despite a lawsuit aimed at barring the school from the Mountain West Conference postseason tournament in Las Vegas in November. (The lawsuit failed, and the team finished second in the finals.) The season ended in acrimony. “I will not sugarcoat our reality for the last two months,” San Jose State’s head coach, Todd Kress, said in a statement after the tournament. “Each forfeiture announcement unleashed appalling, hateful messages individuals chose to send directly to our student-athletes, our coaching staff, and many associated with our program.” Afterward, seven of the team’s athletes requested to enter the transfer portal. The disputed player, who is a senior, will not compete again.
The problem is, as the references below show, trans women who go through male puberty retain substantial athletic advantages over biological women, even if testosterone suppressors are used to try to equalize the categories. But the suppressors don’t do that, for somebody who goes through male puberty develops the musculature, bone density, grip strength, and other indices of athletic success that give them pronounced advantages over natal women (equestrian sports may be an exception). And this advantage appears to last for years—perhaps forever.
Well, why not allow trans women to compete who have transitioned before puberty? The problem is that there are almost none of these, for male puberty occurs some time between ages 9 and 14, and that is simply too young for adolescent males to decide to take hormones and/or have surgery to develop something closer to a woman’s body. If future research shows that transitioning at a very young age makes females athletically equal on average to natal females, then we can reassess. But existing data show that trans women, or some with disorders of sex determination, have an innate athletic advantage over women, and thus shouldn’t be competing in women’s sports.
Republicans have made hay of this, of course, and if you polled Democrats versus Republicans over whether trans women should compete against natal women in sports, Republicans would say “no” at a higher rate. But just because this view is more pervasive in the GOP doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In fact, Democrats themselves are starting to realize that such competition is unfair:
Greater awareness of Thomas and other trans athletes in women’s sports did not translate into greater approval. If anything, the opposite occurred: In 2021, 55 percent of Democrats supported transgender athletes competing in the team of their chosen gender, according to Gallup. Two years later, however, that number had fallen to 47 percent. Overall, nearly seven out of 10 Americans now think athletes should compete in the category of their birth sex.
Nevertheless, the Biden Administration’s early executive order prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity implied that this would also hold for sports participation. Now, as Lewis notes, Biden has backed off on this construal of the order, perhaps because the wokeness of Harris and Biden (the subject of GOP attack ads) may have played a role in their November defeat.
Regardless, as I’ve learned in the past week or so, those who say that “trans women are women” will accept no exceptions to that mantra: trans women are to have every perquisite of natal women, including sports participation. But, unlike gay rights, trans rights conflict with the rights of other groups far more often (I can’t think of any case in which gay rights conflict with other people’s rights, except for those cases of religious people asked to make cakes for gay weddings). The last sentence in Lewis’s paragraph below is telling (I’ve bolded it):
“People like to say that it’s a complicated issue, and I don’t actually think it is … It all boils down to: Do you actually think that trans women and intersex women are real women—and are really female or not?” the transgender cyclist Veronica Ivy told The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah in 2022. “It’s an extreme indignity to say, ‘I believe you’re a woman, except for sport.’” She added that the enforcement of traditional categories was about “protecting the fragile, weak cis white woman from the rest of us.” Noah’s studio audience in New York heartily applauded Ivy’s words. Sports was only one part of a seamless whole: If you believed, as good liberals did, that trans women were women, no carve-outs were justifiable.
Many women and men think otherwise, as do I. But the carve-outs, as I see them, are very few. Still, if you’re a extremist gender ideologue, they are impermissible.
Democrat Seth Moulton’s breaking ranks from the Biden-ish gender ideology may have been a telling moment, as it made it acceptable for Democrats to discuss the issue in public, though many, including the FFRF, appear to still think the issue shouldn’t be discussed, much less raised. Moulton still got savaged, of course, which reflects poorly on his fellow Democrats:
After the 2024 election, a handful of Democrats broke ranks. “I have two little girls,” Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The New York Times. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” His campaign manager subsequently resigned, protesters gathered outside one of his offices, and he was rebuked by the state’s Democratic governor. But many of Moulton’s fellow Democrats were notably silent. “Asked for comment on Mr. Moulton’s remarks, each of the 10 other members of the state’s congressional delegation, all Democrats, declined to comment or did not immediately respond,” the Times reported. Further evidence that a taboo had been broken came on the Friday before Christmas. The White House abandoned its proposed rule change forbidding blanket bans on trans athletes after 150,000 public responses, acknowledging that the incoming Trump administration will set its own rules.
Lewis is too good a writer not to give her own opinion after weighing the controversy. At the end, she suggests the “empathic compromise” given below, and I must say that I agree with almost every word of it:
In my view, the way forward lies in an empathetic compromise, one that broadly respects transgender Americans’ sense of their own identity—for example, in the use of chosen names and pronouns—while acknowledging that in some areas, biology really matters. Many sports organizations have established a protected female category, reserved for those who have not experienced the advantages conferred by male puberty, alongside an open one available to men, trans women, trans men taking testosterone supplements, and nonbinary athletes of either sex. Unlike Veronica Ivy, many voters who support laws protecting trans people from housing and employment discrimination don’t see trans rights as an all-or-nothing deal; in fact, a few limited carve-outs on the basis of biological sex might increase acceptance of gender-nonconforming people overall.
Not everything has to be an entrenched battle of red versus blue: As more and more Democrats realize that they shouldn’t have built their defense of trans people on the sand of sex denialism, Republicans should have the grace to take the win on sports and disown the inflammatory rhetoric of agitators such as Representative Nancy Mace, who responded to the election of the first trans member of Congress by deploying anti-trans slurs. As the second Trump administration begins, the lesson from the college-volleyball rebellion is that institutions cannot impose progressive values by fiat. Attempts at social change will not survive without the underlying work of persuasion.
My only beef with the above is that it may be dangerous to trans men or “nonbinary athletes of either sex” to compete against biological men, as the greater strength of the latter could be dangerous. This is probably why World Rugby, as well as the International Rugby League, have banned the participation of transgender women in international competitions, presumably because although they are biological men, suppressing testosterone could reduce their ability to withstand injury in this heavy-contact sport.
The athletic effects of testosterone suppression in males:
An opinion piece by Robyn Blumner in Skeptical Inquirer cites references I’ve mentioned before, showing that testosterone suppression isn’t a way to equalize the athletic performance of transgender women and natal women. As she writes:
If we eliminated sex categories for most sports, there would rarely be female winners. For natal women to be able to compete in a way that gives them a fair chance at victories, there have to be sex segregated sports.
The question then becomes whether that advantage can be mitigated through testosterone suppression. That is a matter of scientific inquiry, and the longitudinal biomedical findings to date suggest that “the effects of testosterone suppression in male adulthood have very little impact” on physiological outcomes such as muscle strength, muscle mass, or lean body mass, according to a paper titled “When Ideology Trumps Science” by six international leading researchers (Devine et al. 2022). They cite a cross-sectional study from 2022 that measured the performance of transgender women and found the “advantage may be maintained after 14 years of testosterone suppression.” (For a thorough vetting of the subject, read “Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage” by researchers Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg, published in the journal Sports Medicine [Hilton and Lundberg 2021].)
References:
Devine, Cathy, Emma Hilton, Leslie Howe, et al. 2022. When ideology trumps science: A response to the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport’s Review on Transwomen Athletes in the Female Category. idrottsforum.org (November 29).
Hilton, Emma N., and Tommy R. Lundberg. 2021. Transgender women in the female category of sport: Perspectives on testosterone suppression and performance advantage. Sports Medicine 51(2): 199–214.
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.”
Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex
(French: Le Deuxième Sexe)
1949
(Emphasis added)
There is strong evidence the biology is highly germane. Sex differences have been found in 1-day old infants. The fact that sex differences are actually greater (the gender paradox) is more liberated societies is yet another data point.
Ha Ha. I know you were making a more subtle (and true) point, but perfectly obvious sex differences are “found” in infants at the moment of birth. You don’t have to wait a day. I have a vision of cartoon scientists studying newborn babies and trying to discern subtle differences between the sexes, all the while overlooking the obvious one.
You are giving me far too much credit. My comments were anything but subtle. I was actually referring to Simon Baron-Cohen work. He has found that the ‘people vs. things” preference (M vs. F) exists in newborn infants. Yes, I am also aware of anatomic difference between male infants and female infants.
That’s the mobile experiment Baron-Cohen talks about I think.
Fascinating. AND how they convinced new parents to let them track the eyes of their newborn infant!
D.A.
NYC
I don’t disagree with de Beauvoir as long as she is writing about culture and conditioning. This is one of my beefs with trans women, that they don’t have the experience of being a woman and often seek to emulate our silliest characteristics. Also, I grew up on a ranch, stallions & mares, boars and sows, bulls and cows, etc.
The force at work now is the dialectical transformation of de Beauvoir which feminism never asked for known as Queer Gnosticism.
It’s operational principle is the negation of limiting principles.
Agreed, Reese; my question is how in blazes do these blokes know what it is like to be a women when I hear one of them prattling on about their feelings on the subject?
Re “…our silliest characteristics.” I recall JK Rowling commenting last summer about a trans women becoming a football referee: “I don’t see why I should celebrate those who wish to parody us.”
The project of this book was an investigation of the current and historic status of women as the Other. It was not written as a defense of transgender ideology and this sentence taken out of context to imply such misrepresents her ideas.
I read The Second Sex. As you noted, it was written in 1949. Her idea was that the characteristics that a culture uses to define woman- more accurately, feminity- are cultural and learned, not innate. Regardless of biological differences, the majority of roles and opportunities available to women have historically been imposed from without.
Yeah, there are lots of beautiful and interesting things that Simone de Beauvoir delivered. This wasn’t one of them.
And given other things she advocated for and seem to think, it would be very interesting to know what she would think about our current quagmire.
Kinda like the US Constitution – a right fascinating and often brilliant attempt at far-reaching projections. There are just some things they could never have foreseen.
Simone herself explained that she did acknowledge real biological differences between men and women, and that her words were twisted by many people. Here’s the video of her explanation, recorded on TV:
Thanks for posting this-
The insights invoked by de Beauvoir and her contemporary Michel Foucault and so on is the consciousness that of a spirit imprisoned carceral societal norms which fits a pattern of gnosticism.
The thought of de Beauvoir, Foucault, Friedan, and so on was used by the revolution and discarded. This is how the dialectic develops through History according to Gnostics. As Hegel had it in Philosophy of History:
“Great men… had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding, while prosecuting those aims of theirs… When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel.”
“And so the dialectic continues.”
-Delgado and Stefancic
Critical Race Theory – An Introduction, p.66
3rd Ed., 2017
Correction incl. commas in bold:
“.. is the consciousness, that of a spirit, imprisoned by carceral societal norms, ..”
I think it was Ted Cruz who, in the last few weeks, asked a good question of a trans sports advocate: Why have women’s sports at all? The implication being that, if there is no difference physically between women and men who pretend to be women, why should there even be women’s sports? Why not just have sports? The answer is, of course, that in saner times, people undeceived by ideology observed that there are, in fact, noticeably and dramatic differences in the strength of men and women, and that competing together made no sense. For people whose ideology dismisses inconvenient facts as being part of an oppressor/oppressed schema, that is unacceptable.
Exactly. The fastest female 100 metres time is 10:49 (and it was set during the heroic era of steroid doping, which is probably why it’s remained unbroken for nearly 40 years).
Not only is that not fast enough to win the men’s Olympic 100m final, it’s not even fast enough to qualify for the Olympics at all.
Humans are sexually dimorphous. That may be a bad thing in many ways (I suspect many fewer women would be murdered by men were there no strength gap), but it is the reality.
We have a protected category for women because if we didn’t 50% of the population would never be able to play at the elite level in most sports.
How fucking painful to have to nod at that grotesque buffoon. But that’s the hard part of striving to be intellectually honest — you have to acknowledge a good point wherever it gags comes from.
The only thing worse than someone you generally disagree with making a good point is someone who agrees with you making a bad argument in support of a good premise.
Boom. Truth.
Strictly from a sports perspective, if it is illegal to take performance enhancing drugs – why is it legal for trans-women athletes to take substances to suppress their natural biological performance? This has never made sense to me.
I suppose because those drugs are presumed to be performance suppressing.
Again, makes no sense…performance enhancing is inherently unfair and fraudulent. Why isn’t the same standard applied to suppression? It is aimed to alter an athlete’s natural performance, thus making it fraudulent. Enhancement and suppression are two sides of the same coin.
“Why isn’t the same standard applied to suppression?”
The competitive advantage of enhancement.
The immorality of using drugs in sports comes from the unfair advantage they confer on the taker, which leads to strong incentives to take them.
There is no incentive to take performance-suppressing drugs if a person wishes to be competitive in a sport, as they only work counter to one’s goals and do not even confer an advantage in a competitor being terrible. Winning is tough, and it’s very difficult to differentiate oneself from another contender, so a tiny advantage (possibly from drugs) has enormous potential to make that difference. However, being rubbish is easy. Even if you had the goal of being dreadful and coming last, another contender for being the worst cannot be at an advantage by taking performance-damaging drugs because anyone can choose to try less or play/compete more carelessly up to and including pretending to faint at the starting line.
Therefore, performance suppression can never put someone at an advantage, even when that person seeks an advantage in being disadvantaged.
But t-suppression is done to provide an advantage to an athlete who would not otherwise qualify to compete, so it is not a disadvantaging tool. It is done to allow a male with innate physical characteristics to compete in female categories. Therefore, in the case of male athletes wishing to compete in female sports, it is a way to preserve the majority of their physical advantage while reducing slightly their overall performance to meet some arbitrary guideline.
It’s fairly straight forward. Disadvantaging yourself is generally considered to be OK. Nobody cares if you make it harder for yourself to win the competition.
Isn’t it obvious?
Enhancing performance gives an advantage; hobbling performance doesn’t. The main issue here is fair competition, not adhering to nature.
But you’re right that there’s something very disturbing about an athlete deliberately sabotaging their capabilities in order to qualify into a sports category. It goes against the entire meaning of what it is to be an athlete: train the body to work at its optimum level in order to win. Women work and struggle and push themselves to be the best they can be – and here comes a self-designated “marginalized” competitor who’s trying to lower his abilities just enough to make it seem fair when he beats them.
A woman is not a weak man.
My central point is performance alteration. Enhancement and suppression are both alterations. To me, “hobbling” performance is akin to a boxer throwing a fight…or a football team starting and playing its second string for a purpose other than winning the game.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
Not sure if it counts as sabotaging their capabilities, but athletes in sports with weight categories aim to be at the maximum allowed weight for their category which sometimes leads to amusing stories of boxers shaving their heads to cut the extra grams or also disturbing stories of athletes starving and dehydrating to the point of fainting for the weigh-ins that take place some time before the actual competition and after successfully passing they start to eat and drink normally again.
Indeed! An Indian female wrestler was disqualified from her gold medal bout at the Paris Olympics after being 100g over the 50kg weight limit despite cutting off her hair: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/aug/07/india-despair-olympic-wrestler-fails–weight-gold-medal-final-paris-modi
Meanwhile, two men with suspected DSDs won Olympic gold in the women’s boxing competition, of course.
During the Late 70s, my brother swam in college. He, and his teammates, shaved all of the hair off of their bodies, including their eyebrows. He said it made them 2/100ths of a second faster. Whatever.
ON an unrelated note, the best swimmer on my brother’s team qualified to go to the Olympics in 1980. But we all know how that ended.
Reminds me of something I read about an American coach jokingly telling a Russian coach that Mark Spitz had a moustache because it made him slightly more streamlined in the water. Apparently all the Russians showed up at the next competition sporting moustaches!
I’d describe that behavior and trying to reduce their weight in any way possible to just come in under the upper limit for a weight class. That is: Trying to be as light as possible.
Your phrasing seems confusing to me.
Yeah, it all ends up being very Harrison Bergeron, doesn’t it?
+1
The reason must be that a perspective strictly from the competition / athleticism perspective is not capturing something. What might that be?
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
-Simone de Beauvoir
Sociological gnosticism.
I, for one, find this talk of “carve outs” misconstrued. First, shouldn’t we all agree that “gender-nonconforming people” (both men and women) should just be accepted? No-one should be forced to comply with gender stereotypes, should they?
But where there is quite proper segregation by biological sex, then trans-identifying men (aka “trans women”) should obviously not be included.
In situations where trans-identifying men can and should be included, then quite clearly that means there is no need for segregation by biological sex.
Hence, as I see it, there are no situations where both (1) there should be enforced segregation between men and women, and (2) trans-IDing males should be included in the “women” category.
Can anyone provide an example where both (1) and (2) should hold?
No.
The best I can come up with is something like a woman’s book club where trans-identified males might be invited to join if none of the women object. This is, of course, assuming that a woman in the group is free to object without being condemned.
I agree. And it kind of exposes that their requests fall apart as soon as the first demand–that we all agree and swear the oath “Trans women are women.”–doesn’t hold up.
Any carve-outs make the swearing of that oath impossible.
And, so far, the TRAs cannot allow that.
The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in the UK has been challenged to provide exactly such an example in response to their consultation on new guidelines for operating single-sex / separate sex services and facilities. (The draft document the consultation was about was horrendously badly written and legally flawed. Consultation closed on January 3rd and it will be interesting to see how the EHRC responds to the many criticisms.)
Sastra’s suggestions collapse if, under legal self-ID, an organization risks being brought before a human-rights commission for violating the human rights of a trans-identified person for excluding him. In Canada, these actions cost the complainant nothing but the respondent has to pay a lawyer to defend itself, and still lose where it will have to pay damages to the complainant in almost all cases. (One doesn’t become a Human Rights Commissioner unless one is ideologically disposed to support complainants against The Man,…which is now you, dear ladies.) In case I sound like Chicken Little, human rights legislation in most provinces applies only to employers and to firms providing service to the general public, not to private friendships. But if your book club was incorporated or public-facing, you’d be in trouble. (British Columbia on the Left Coast casts the net wider.) But the federal government has introduced legislation that would bring purely private behaviour into its ambit if an oppressed person felt he had suffered “harm” from it.
Where I think the Atlantic author falls down is in thinking that if only we compel bigots and transphobes to respect pronouns and tolerate flamboyant clothing at work as “gender expression” (on pain of what if they won’t comply?), then the TRAs will desist with their insistence not to be constrained by carve-outs that make so much sense to the rest of us good, tolerant, inclusive liberals like her. There is no evidence from their behaviour they will be bought off this easily. They want the whole shootin’ match. Sport is one of the highly visible domains where if trans-identified men get to compete as women, they will have won bigly. They’ll never concede this. It will have to be taken from them.
The other consequence of “tolerance” of trans people everywhere except where we say it matters is that it doesn’t tell us what to do about activists who want the schools to teach young children that you are something other than the sex you were “assigned” by your parents if your internal gender concept (coached by us activists) says different. This is harmful to children’s development and should not be accepted in the name of tolerance and inclusion of people who are different. If you believe this you will oppose the banning of puberty-blockers in children and adolescents: in order to respect diversity we have to allow children to find their own true selves and this means interrupting their normal puberty if they want to and then (in 98% of cases) putting them on wrong-sex hormones for life or until regret, whichever comes first. After all, every trans adult whom we must embrace as trans was once a trans kid whom we ought to have affirmed, right? Why make him wait until adulthood when it will cost so much more then to carve up his masculine face so he can “pass”. (In case anyone wonders, this really is the argument that gender-affirming pediatricians are making here.)
We are left with Anna’s formulation: Transwomen aren’t women, ever. No ifs ands or buts. If that excludes trans-identifying men from ever being considered equivalent to women, that’s what the science says. If I don’t accept you as being a woman in any context, too bad. That leaves us with a simpler question: to what extent may I discriminate against a man who presents himself as female when he’s not? How badly will the law allow him to hurt me if I won’t play along with his belief, whether sincere or manipulative but still wrong?
“They’ll never concede this. It will have to be taken from them.” I agree, and although I love Helen Lewis as a writer and thinker she’s wrong about this one. When Lewis suggests that “Attempts at social change will not survive without the underlying work of persuasion” she’s of course pointing in the progressive direction, but the logic works both ways and I think it doesn’t go far enough. Attempts to resist genderism will require both reasoned persuasion of those still on the fence and vigorous opposition of activists. I don’t think I could vote for Nancy Mace if I lived in her congressional district, but I live far away and from this distance I can grudgingly admire her showboating over bathrooms in the House. Representative Sarah McBride is a dude, and he started his adult political career as Tim.
I think it might be a good tactic to draw that particular line in the sand, and insist that Representative McBride should be using the mens’ room in the House, as part of a broader rejection of the TWAW claim and all that follows from its forced acceptance. Even if some folks like Helen Lewis find that tactic distasteful. And for what it’s worth, Representative Mace did not “[respond] to the election of the first trans member of Congress by deploying anti-trans slurs.” She was physically assaulted by activists (not Representative McBride) and responded by calling them “tranny protesters”. It’s weird for Lewis to imply that Representative Mace called Representative McBride a t-slur (as they say in polite circles).
And again rejecting the TWAW claim says nothing about whether “trans” people should have all of the civil rights and freedoms that everyone else has (they should and they do).
“They’ll never concede this. It will have to be taken from them.”
Correct. One only has to read the comments at The Friendly Atheist: completely unyielding. Even refusing to admit that men are bigger and strong than women.
They won’t yield an inch.
Part of me wants to go look, but I think it will make my head explode.
Actually, I can. Consider a CAIS person who also claimed a ‘trans’ ID. Such a person would belong in women’s sports (in my opinion) while also being ‘trans’. Does such a person exist? I don’t know of any.
The aspect which is often overlooked is that every cell in a trans woman i.e. male
has a Y chromosome. Thus every cell in their body (except red cells) is male.
Although I have seen reference to both ‘chromosomal sex’ (karyotype) and ‘cellular sex’ (presence or absence of Barr bodies), genes on the Y chromosome are not expressed in the vast majority of cell types. It’s the downstream effects of testes-therefore-testosterone that matter.
As I understand it, it’s the presence of an active SRY (sex-determining region on the Y chromosome) gene that leads to a foetus developing as male, rather than the presence of a Y chromosome per se.
There are (incredibly rare) instances of XY females who have a Y chromosome but no active SRY gene and of XX males where the SRY gene has been accidentally transposed onto the X chromosome from the father’s sperm.
Yes. The Y chromosome also houses a few dozen other genes, all of which (afaik) contribute to male-specific development or spermatogenesis.
An XX, SRY+ person will have a male-looking body including normal puberty but will be infertile because several other genes acting in cis on an intact Y chromosome are necessary for spermatogenesis. The testes have Leydig cells but no Sertoli cells. There are a few XX males who have no detectable SRY gene, so far as I know. No one ever said this was easy.
(I made this reply mostly because I was thrilled to have an opportunity to use “cis” in one of its correct senses.)
(I made this reply mostly because I was thrilled to have an opportunity to use “cis” in one of its correct senses.)
Ha! Excellent to see how it’s supposed to be used!
To me, ‘cis’ is actually about Organic Chemistry. For example, 1,2-Dichloroethylene has two Chlorine atoms on the same side. Trans 1,2-Dichloroethylene has its two Chlorine atoms on opposite sides.
I noticed that Leslie – made me laugh out loud.
The new “cis” is such a slur: I’m not a sissy nor a cyst. I’m straight – a line all the many (older) gay guys in my building like. Gender nonsense is very much a younger person’s thing.
D.A.
NYC
(Chelsea, Manhattan: the gayest part of the known universe)
“If future research shows that transitioning at a very young age makes females athletically equal on average to natal females…”
Should this sentence read “young age makes trans women athletically equal on average to natal females” (or, even more clearly, to my mind, “makes trans-identified males athletically equal on average to females”)?
Yes, I fixed it, thanks.
Correction by the host noted.
My plea is that this shouldn’t ever be done, to males or to females. I hope sincerely that there will never again be a large group of people transitioned at Tanner-2 puberty who could be the subjects of such research. Remember that the subjects would have to be people who were transitioned as children and then went on to athletic careers at a level of competitiveness that they would be valid subjects for comparison. I’m not aware that this has ever happened, even anecdotally. You would have to trans a lot of children just to accrete a few who became cross-sex athletes. Mostly what you would find is that they become fat, sedentary, and screen-addicted as they struggled through their transition and yes they would indeed lose whatever athletic advantage they might have been otherwise destined to achieve over their female peers had they not transitioned in the first place. How much out-of-study pubertal transition would you have to allow (encourage?) in order to generate enough cross-sex athletes to put in the study?
Absolutely! In any case, Tanner stage 2 occurs before the poor kids can give informed consent to the puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.
Lewis’s article is a good one.
Regarding trans-male or non-binary athletes competing in an “open” category… . It’s quite true that they may risk injury by competing against natal males, but their participation is voluntary. That’s not the case for women competing against trans-men in the women’s category. There, they either have to accept the risk or quit. Or, the entire team can refuse to compete—as has happened.
I think this quote also applies to a reversal of what was societal acceptance of gender fluidity in recent decades. “in fact, a few limited carve-outs on the basis of biological sex might increase acceptance of gender-nonconforming people overall.” That is, we had (largely) achieved some acceptance of gender-nonconformity (I’m in Canada), but then the addition of “transwomen are women” in all respects, including biology, led to a reversal of that acceptance, undoubtedly aided by a core of people who never did accept gender-nonconformity, including in sexual orientation.
I don’t understand how “transgender” and “gender non-conforming” are in the same category. They’re opposites.
Gender-Nonconforming Man in dress: “I’m a man who likes to wear pretty dresses.”
Transwoman in dress: “I’m a woman. Isn’t my dress pretty?”
I largely agree Sastra, but the reality is that many forms of deviation from strict sex/gender roles are being lumped together without consideration of contradictions. Here’s a recent acronym from one organization: 2SLGBTQQAI+ and below the meaning of each. The + is for later additions! A very heterogeneous collection. My thinking is that gender-nonconforming might be an alternative to all the letters, but probably varies from writer to writer.
L – Lesbian
G – Gay
B – Bisexual
T – Transgender
Q – Queer
Q – Questioning
I – Intersex
P – Pansexual
2S – Two-Spirit
A – Asexual
A – Allies
Sastra, your reply tangentially raises another question: when was the last time you ever heard anyone identify as, or be referred to as, a transvestite? It’s a term that simply isn’t used any more. I think that’s very telling. Nowadays, behaviour that forty years ago would simply have been identified as transvestite now seems perfectly sufficient to many people to identify as a “woman”. No hormones, no surgery, just dressing up is enough.
When true transsexuals who had gone through the years-long process of hormone therapy and irreversible surgery were rare, I suspect they enjoyed more social acceptance than they do today, because of the general recognition of the level of commitment required to go through with it. The loss of social acceptance over the last few years surely has a lot to do with the fact that the rights of a woman are now being claimed by people who have gone through none of those procedures and made none of that commitment.
I think much of that social acceptance was based on the public’s comfortable conviction that transexuals were very rare — the stuff of headlines and films. Trans rights advocates now try to make the case that the trans-identified are but a tiny little minority even as the percentages travel up and our language, concepts, law, and education are twisted around to accommodate them. They know it’s a winning argument.
Yes – scale matters always.
40 years ago, say, a “trannie” was an odd duck, not harming anybody. And usually pretty interesting people to meet.
It wasn’t an entire sociological movement a “human rights issue” demanding all sorts of obnoxious things.
Scale matters.
D.A.
NYC
Jerry Coyne’s post on August 2 2024 discusses the related case of athletes with sexual development disorder 5-ARD. People with this disorder may be taken at birth to be girls, and they may be brought up as girls and take themselves to be girls, but they are males, and at puberty their development will be that of males, and the issues with respect to participation in sports are similar to the issues with trans women. This came up in connection with women’s boxing at the Olympics.
Indeed. It’s complicated. My understanding is that at least one of those Olympic boxers has 5-ARD but was brought up as a woman and considered herself as such. But she still shouldn’t have been allowed to compete because she has male strength.
Why would an interviewer allow a guest to state ““It’s an extreme indignity to say, ‘I believe you’re a woman, except for sport.” That sort of response, is about as penetrating as the standard “What you are saying offends me”.
The interviewer should say “Sorry you feel that way, but please answer the question.”
Because Trevor Noah wasn’t interviewing; he was simply providing a platform.
The Economist wrote about this years ago, including data showing that T suppression is not enough to remove male advantage. They published an op-ed advocating for “Open” and “Female” categories, ie exactly what The Atlantic is now suggesting many years later.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/10/17/a-ban-by-world-rugby-could-prove-influential-for-transgender-sports
And
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/03/19/sports-should-have-two-categories-open-and-female
I am very glad I found this site where thoughtful and intelligent discussion takes place about important and, yes, sometimes controversial subjects. We may disagree; but we listen and actually think about the other person’s point. Kudos to you all.
Same. It’s like a brain spa.
This site is a rare island of sanity.
Welcome to the sane living room! 🙂
One justification I sometimes read for allowing trans women into the female sports divisions is the trans woman doesn’t always beat every female competitor.
People don’t understand the mathematical concept of averages.
You could use the same justification for allowing adults into children’s sports: “Here’s a 20-year old who got outrun by a 12-year old so that means there’s no inherent different in adult/child ability.”
Excellent comparison.
Thanks, would’ve been better if I’d said “inherent difference” rather than “inherent different.” 🙂
Actually, it’s not about averages, it’s about one extreme end of the distribution. At least it is when we are talking about elite sports. The difference in average performance can be really quite small and yet there could still be hundreds or thousands of males who are better than the very best female.
“(I can’t think of any case in which gay rights conflict with other people’s rights, except for those cases of religious people asked to make cakes for gay weddings)”
This is a really important point, and one that Helen Lewis touched on in the article –
“Many progressives have viewed trans rights as an uncomplicated sequel to the successful campaigns for voting rights for Black Americans and marriage equality for same-sex couples.”
And it’s easy to sympathize with progressives who started out with this error in thinking (of which I was one)–right up until the error is shown and the errant thinkers double-and-triple-and-infinity down on it.
All legal sexual orientations (caveated because some people claim sexual orientations that cannot be consented to) require nothing of society at large except a refrain from discrimination.
The whiplash claims that gender identity (whatever that actually is) is entirely separate from sexual orientation or conversely inextricably braided into sextual orientation (depending on what compliance is being sought) require changes in protections of women’s privacy, safety, and dignity, along with everyone else’s behavior and language — including in legal, medical, and journalistic communication.
So under scrutiny and in practical application, special “trans rights” are nothing like non-discrimination against sexual orientation and race.
No “future research” is needed to confirm that pre-pubescent boys, on average, already have physical advantages over girls. I have graphs showing this but this format doesn’t allow adding them, so I am including one url from one study:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22561975/#:~:text=This%20was%20a%20cross%2Dsectional,in%20which%20girls%20scored%20better.
In Arizona, where I live, in 2023 Junior Olympics, if boys and girls in 8 and unxer years of age actually competed against each other, no girl would have won gold! This is for 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m 1500m shot put, javelin, and long jump. While the boys would have won a total of 21 medals, girls would have won two 3rd place medals and one 2nd place medal!
Similarly, for 9 and 10 year olds, boys would have won 20 medals and girls would have won 4.
This was an interesting article to be published in The Atlantic. Perhaps the Democratic election losses have opened the door to discussing the topic beyond the two allowable positions of “transwomen are women” or “you are a bigoted TERF.” I would like to see liberals taking leadership in reframing the discussion, because otherwise the anti-trans bigots will do so. Some Republicans will try to eliminate trans civil rights as much as they can.
I will never believe that anyone can change their sex, yet I believe transpeople should have civil rights. That is considered a bigoted view by the trans-supporting community, because I do not perceive transpeople the same way they perceive themselves.
We must march forward to fair compromises on this issue (sports, prisons, rape and domestic violence centers) in spite of the fact that one currently empowered position defines all disagreement as hate and bigotry. It takes guts to speak out about it. Prof. Coyne has put his neck and reputation out there, which I appreciate.
I think the spell has been broken more generally. I’ve seen Australian women on X and Mumsnet posting about articles appearing in the news media “down under” covering the sex/ gender debate in ways that had been avoided until now.
Australia, Victoria particularly, is the most “progressive” jurisdiction regarding trans-crazy. They’re deadly serious about criminalizing non “affirming” teachers and parents.
Vic – I’m ashamed to say as a former Melbournian – is the apex of madness.
D.A.
NYC
Indeed, although the Moira Deeming saga reached a happy conclusion last week with her being readmitted to the Victorian Liberal party room and John Pesutto being ousted from the leadership. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/dec/27/john-pesutto-victorian-liberal-leadership-meeting-ntwnfb
Pesutto now needs to pay her AU$315,000 for defamation plus costs that I’ve seen estimated to be in the millions.
And it looks like the nonsense isn’t going unchallenged in Queensland: https://t.co/lavmwl9Br7
Why do we need to compromise? If you are sure about your values, you only compromise when you can’t win against a superior force and can’t walk away to fight another day. The trans activists don’t have truth or time on their side. Enlightened legislatures are legislating against them. (Progressive legislatures won’t even keep male rapists out of female prison cells. They’re a lost cause. We can’t even compromise with them. Yet.) But we can win all the marbles if the trans activists are irretrievably weakened by the contradictions inherent in their position and sensible people start to get fed up with their bullying. Majorities of people tell pollsters they don’t agree with any of the central tenets of trans activism, including the notion that transwomen are in any way women or that children should be given puberty blockers. They are losing. Harry them in retreat.
So what if Republicans are emboldened to eliminate “trans civil rights”? How can it be a civil rights obligation of an employer to allow a man to wear flamboyant drag attire (or huge rubber breasts) on the job instead of the flame-retardant overalls or office business attire that all the other employees have to wear? Do any Republicans propose that trans people should lose the civil rights protections against discrimination by race, sex, or creed just because they’re trans? Or their civil liberties under the Bill of Rights? You can pay your black employees less than your white employees as long as they are trans? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Conservatives just don’t want gender identity or expression (aka fashion sense as Jordan Peterson calls it) to be a prohibited ground in itself, an addition to the list of currently prohibited grounds. If a women’s spa or a lesbian bar says, “No Men”, they mean No Trans-identifying Men, either. That’s not stripping them of their civil rights.
My hypothetical colleague Bob has changed his name to Barb. As names are rather arbitrary, I readily use this new name. After all, we all heard of the boy named Sue. But now Bob asks me to refer to him as a woman. He also requests that I use standard female pronouns when talking about him. I want to be kind—or, I don’t want to be thought an asshole—so I agree. It’s quite easy for me to persuade myself that I am doing this for him. Am I? Or is it for me and a way to avoid discomfort? I don’t believe that Barb is a woman, let alone that Barb can ever become a female. Perhaps I am advancing a general notion of societal politeness and doing my part to contribute. At what cost?
I believe it important to separate out the varying types of “trans” that exist. While not pretending to be comprehensive, I readily see three groups: 1) gender dysphoria. I use “gender” hesitantly because of its definitional plasticity, but I am speaking of any psychological disturbance or ailment that causes significant clinical distress; 2) those with autogynephilia or any other form of fantasy or sexual kink; 3) the young who appear swept into a form of social contagion. Is a one-size-fits-all language solution appropriate for these disparate groups?
If a man is mentally ill and consequently believes he can change his sex, what is the evidence that your use of his desired female pronouns is helping him rather than doing him harm? Are you participating in his delusion and hindering his recovery? Are you helping to put him on a path to irreversible surgery and a lifetime of medical complications? After all, you and all his professional friends through your language signal that you agree: he really is a woman.
If a man is publicly indulging a kink, by what right does he demand that the rest of us participate?
If a teen girl is overcome by social contagion and now sees “transition” as the cure for her discomfort with her body (and a possible antidote to leering or abusive men), do you participate? Imagine she is your neighbor in an upper middle-class neighborhood of professionals. Each of you want to be kind. You join with her teachers, her classmates, nearly all in her social circle to call her by male pronouns. Only her parents disagree. She now hates them as they are the only people in her social orbit who do not agree that she is a boy. What help have you given? What harm have you done?
Decisions to alter centuries of language use to placate individuals or to make oneself feel comfortable carry societal costs. Have we fully considered them? Many people have pointed out—correctly, in my view—that a chief reason we are in this gender mess is because far too many people uncritically embraced the language demands of “progressive” activists. Those who insisted on language mirroring physical reality were increasingly shunned, ostracized, censored, even fired from their jobs. But set aside the free speech issue. Are there other unconsidered harms from “desired pronoun” usage—other than the harm done to reality itself?
Very interesting post!
I also had the same instincts about hypothetical cooperation in the interest of kindness, but something didn’t sit right with me with the pronoun switcheroo. And to my great embarrassment, out in the real world, I found it all but impossible to comply — to say “she” when the object of reference in the sentence was clearly male.
But then I ran across a detransitioner who clarified my vague unease and clumsiness around the pronoun thing. She made an offhand comment about it subverting our own conclusions, our own lifelong practices of observation and navigating the world.
That really resonated with me and got me thinking.
Human beings are sorting monkeys. We’re the best thing going at sorting stuff. And correctly identifying and sorting elements of our surroundings is critical to the next step of manipulating our environments.
This-is-this and that-is-that and, before you know it, you’ve got escalators and skyscrapers and spellcheck and iPhones and frozen dinners and machines that will massage your feet for you.
And it’s easily demonstrated that even infants can tell the difference between men and women. It’s one of the first and easiest evaluations we make of a person. (Interestingly, females are better at it than males. But that isn’t really surprising when you consider how much better females need to be at threat assessment.)
Transwomen rarely pass. I’m sure this is the source of much frustration and pain, considering how much effort goes into even attempting it.
But any insistence that I jam a stick into the spokes of my own cognition — the thing that helps me thrive and enjoy life, not to mention keeps me from wandering into traffic and sticking my hand into the tiger cage at the zoo — and substitute a falsehood for a patently obvious truth is undermining to my own psychological comfort and even development.
I’m not sure it’s a fair request or an intelligent concession.
I hope the Overton window on this topic is opening up enough to discuss this aspect more deeply. In many corporate environments, one is expected to include one’s pronouns in emails and text chat channels. That can feel like being forced to explicitly sanction a host of related political views under the guise of politeness, for the reasons you’ve articulated.
Excellent points, Doug. I’d add the category of those in denial of their same-sex sexual orientation and who see transition as a way of resolving their internalised homophobia by becoming “straight”. There’s also plenty of evidence of homophobic parents taking a similar approach and “transing” children that they fear will grow up to be homosexual adults.
On pronouns, I think that they can be the top of a slippery slope. When Barb is routinely referred to as “she” and “her” at work, her size 12 stilettos are a step or two nearer the inside of the women’s bathroom. And as the “Pronouns are Rohypnol” essay points out, using “preferred pronouns” places a cognitive burden on those having to deny the reality that their own eyes are perceiving. https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/
Oh wow. I had not seen this article. Fascinating!
Wow! That colour exercise is very instructive.
That’s very good, Doug. Outstanding.
I’ll just add that in most contexts you are using his preferred pronouns purely for your own benefit, not for his at all. You fear, rightly, that you will suffer ostracism or even official discipline at work for creating an “unsafe” environment if you decide to help him escape his delusion by reminding him he is a man every time he overhears you talking about him. Or even if you don’t care about him one way or the other and just don’t want to do the cognitive workload of, say, a surgeon being compelled by his regulator to reverse the definitions of right and left in the operating room if that’s what the patient wants the operative note in his chart to look like. And call arteries veins just because it’s Opposite Day today.
Way behind here, so late to this party. Good points Doug, but I have a question – would your comments be the same if the trans person was a close relative or dear friend? Your hypothetical is real for me. I had a student in several classes and in my research lab, who I shall call Robert. After he graduated and we left CU, we had little interaction other than Facebook posts. Out of the blue, Robert’s posts were now from Sarah [also not real identity]. It took me a little while to figure out what was going on, but I accepted that this is what Robert wanted. He did not chose a feminine or diminutive for his new name, such as Roberta or Bobbie, or an ambiguous name like Leslie, but rather a definitive female name. Robert was likely somewhere around 30 when he transitioned, and I presume that this is something that he pondered and did not take lightly, just like many others who chose a difficult path. Sarah wants to be a sister and an aunt, and I cannot imagine ever calling Sarah Robert, or using he/him pronouns. I certainly would never say “Hey bro, you’re still a dude.” I believe that Sarah knows that she is a trans-woman and not a woman, and that she has no desire to compete in women’s sports or inappropriately invade women’s spaces. For me, it’s obvious that trans-women are still chromosomally and gonadally male, and as such there need to be definitive guardrails to distinguish trans-women from natal females/adolescent girls/adult women.
My comments would not change, neither would my actions. But your question illustrates the difficulties one might face, particularly if trying to maintain a relationship with a child or grandchild. I have far more understanding for those who are struggling with how to maintain close relationships than I do with those who simply don’t want to be seen as “transphobic” or “right wing.” (Let’s not even talk about the opportunists.) But you are asking a man who also avoids the word “transition” simply because it isn’t possible to change sex, just as I avoid the word “gender,” it being a nebulous and ideologically-loaded abstraction.
In your situation, I would have no difficulty addressing “Sarah” and using the proper pronoun “you” when talking with him. (I understand that some people see no difference between using a “feminine” proper name and a “feminine” pronoun, but names are not pronouns, which is a discussion for another time.) In private, I might even play along with him, with comments like, “Oh, I’ll leave that to you girls to decide.” But as a public matter in which one’s language suggests the content of one’s beliefs—and particularly if children were present—I could not facilitate either the fantasy or the delusion. Moreover, if Sarah truly believes that he is a transwoman—meaning, not a woman—then Sarah will also realize that he cannot be either a sister or an aunt—no more than he would have any right to insist we call him professor, doctor, judge, or president without holding the proper credentials and office. But, who knows, with so many people who want to be kind, perhaps I can make a career change despite lacking the proper preparation. Or do people care more about defending the sanctity and meaning of their titles than they do about defending the meaning of “woman”?
Thanks for your thoughts.
If “Aunt” Sarah takes my young daughters to the water park, I’m going to be explaining to them why he can’t come into the women’s change room with them. (Except in Canada, where it would be actionably transphobic for the other girls/women to complain or for the park staff to throw him out.)
Might be good to have this discussion before strapping the kids into their car seats. Remember it was a small child who called public attention to the emperor’s non-clothes and made everyone uncomfortable.
Doug, I can see where you’re coming from. I would also likely be more inclined to be agreeable in a situation like this. It’s a vise.
The trouble for me would be actually being able to do it. My children are just out of college now and toward the end of their high school careers and all throughout college, they both had friends who started swapping out pronouns.
To my continued embarrassment, I found I couldn’t do it. I was hopeless at it. Back then, I hadn’t even taken on enough info to be terribly offput by it. I was game enough to try. I was just bad at it. Really bad. (I also had a good friend who legally changed her first name and it took me literally years to get it right more often than I got it wrong.)
The more I learn, the more conflicted I become. All people should have equal civil rights, which necessarily includes all gender non-conforming people. (A term that is rather curious considering gender roles in the home and workplace have been hugely blurred into welcome wider lanes in the last decades. Partly the reason the trans movement can easily feel regressive and even misogynistic.)
Certainly, western society seems to have a ways to go in feeling accepting toward men in dresses and make-up, and this suggests some interesting anthropological investigation into why that would be.
But as far as medical transition, I’m becoming more convinced that it’s either ethical medicine or it’s not. Outside possibly chemotherapy for cancer, there is no other disorder, psychological or physical, where the prescribed treatment is the upending of a crucial and healthily-functioning bodily system and the amputation of healthy body parts.
And unlike cross-sex hormones, chemotherapy is specifically intended to end, and the patient transformed into a non-patient.
There are certainly extreme body-mod enthusiasts who seek out off-book amputations and procedures, but no one thinks having limbs voluntarily amputated, genitals mutilated, scleras tattooed, and tongued bifurcated is medical care.
The latest edition of the WPATH Standards of Care (v8) includes an entire chapter on creating eunuchs as a legitimate medical procedure; the origins of that chapter are very dark indeed! https://reduxx.info/exclusive-leading-transgender-health-authority-cited-forum-co-founded-by-convicted-pedophile-in-standards-of-care/
I had seen that. Vile. It really horrified me.
Here’s WPATH’s list of their SoC 8 chapters: https://wpath.org/publications/soc8/chapters/
Creepy! These people are strange.
Many people now must know young people who are “non-binary” and use the pronouns “they” and “them”. I have one close relative who is non-binary and uses “they” plus a somewhat more distant cousin and also the daughter of a colleague. Many other colleagues have non-binary kids who go by “they”. This is a somewhat different matter from trans people, but it is certainly striking to see one’s colleagues training themselves to speak of a daughter or son as “they”. As JezGrove mentions, this involves placing a cognitive burden on those who take themselves to be obliged to comply.
Do most most of us routinely demand respect for our sense of our own identity?
Or do we recognize the uncomfortable fact that others will probably not see us as we see ourselves?
“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
And ev’n Devotion!”
http://www.robertburnsfederation.com/poems/translations/552.htm
I have learned a lot about this issue after finding this site. Someone put me onto Kathleen Stock’s book: Material Girls: Why Reality Matter for Feminism. Good book!
JK Rowling is a heroine.
Regarding politics, I’d had no idea that the Democrats were getting hammered so badly on the trans issue — but afterwards, my wife was railing how Biden never tried to raise the minimum wage — and the first thing they did was enshrine “trans rights”…
I think Bryan’ first comment (1) may be misleading re the meaning and intent of Simone’s statement — JK Rowling unpacked it in a different way. But it certainly can be appropriated by trans-nonsense.
If anything, the immigration policy of Biden was directed to lowering wages.
Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls is excellent, although I think that Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality is better.
The idea that male advantage in sports doesn’t begin until puberty is another outrageous lie.
Male athletic advantage begins in utero.
.
Late first-trimester male foetuses already have uniformly higher concentrations of type IIa and IIb muscie fibers across skeletal muscles. This differential in IIa and IIb concentration continues throughout all of life and is one of the major reasons for greater male performance in speed/power (IIb) and speed-endurance (IIa) events.
It’s pretty well documented that elite men’s track records are on average about 10% faster than elite women’s, across essentially all the contested distances. What most people don’t know—but certainly should—is that essentially the same 10% differential obtains between boys’ and girls’ track records, ALL the way down the age groups.
The fastest boys are still faster than the fastest girls, by the same 10ish %, all the way down to the 8-and-under age group. https://www.usatf.org/resources/statistics/records/championship-meet-records/usatf-national-junior-olympic-track-field-champion
(All the boys’ records are clustered in the first half of the page, followed by all the girls’ records in the second half. The easiest way to compare them is to open the same page in two tabs, shrink each tab to half-screen height, stack the two tabs on top of each other and then navigate to N year old boys’ records in one tab and N year old girls’ records in the other.)
.
Moreover.
Almost all joint angles differ on average between the sexes, with these differences already being well established between male and female foetuses (relevant papers will appear under the area of forensic fetal osteology
One of the most consequential differences is in the “Q angle” or “quadriceps angle” between each femur and the pelvis. The Q angle in women and girls averages about 2x as far from the vertical as in men—so that female legs in standard gait are angled inwards from the hips, with female footfalls from both feet almost in single file. Male hips are narrower on average, with male legs closer to vertical and male footprints generally in two easily distinguishable, left and right, tracks. (Please understand “on average” to be attached to each observation in this paragraph.)
The Q-angle differences are hugely significant to athletic performance. Jumping, pushoff and leg pressing power are developed only as vectors perpendicular to the ground, so women’s wider Q-angles reduce their potential jump height, sprint speed and maximum performance in any “closed chain” weight lift (squat, deadlift, clean/jerk/snatch etc). Furthermore, the stresses exerted along the residual (parallel to ground) component of female legs place women and girls at far greater risk of ACL tears and related injuries
Another example many readers may at least have noticed—if not considered here—is that women’s elbows typically hyperextend a few degrees beyond straight (https://musculoskeletalkey.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/F000067f006-014-9781455709779.jpg) and are deflected a few degrees laterally (https://musculoskeletalkey.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/F000067f006-002-9781455709779.jpg).
These two types of deflection of women’s arms away from straight—as opposed to male arms, which are quite close to perfectly straight at full extension—is the most important reason by far behind the almost unfathomable sex differences in punching power (men punch 263% as hard as women of similar size and height). The same female hyperextension and deflection is the reason why girls and women hold and bow violins differently, with different types of chin rests needed even by very young girls and boys.
ALL of the differences mentioned in this post exist systemically between the sexes not “from puberty”, not even “from birth”, but from long, long BEFORE birth. Every single one of them is already a statistically significant distinction between male and female foetuses by the end of the FIRST TRIMESTER of pregnancy.
Sports and other pursuits of physical performance just need to be sex-segregated, at all ages, period. This is not complicated, nor is it an issue with two sides or with ‘nuances’ or ‘subtleties’—let alone a ‘human rights’ issue (a phrase that in the 2020s is guaranteed NOT to have anything to do with actual human rights).
Thank you for the useful information. I don’t think I purveyed a lie; I was simply unsure when the male advantage began, though I KNEW it began after puberty.
Dr. Coyne, I apologize if that comment seemed to be directed at you. I meant that as a condemnation of how the transgender lobby operates—by “flooding the zone with bulls··t” and lies and buying (literally) enough massive media and institutional bandwidth for the lies to start influencing public positions.
Great post!
In addition to the differences you cite, there are also differences between sexes for things like limb length and other anthropometric proportions.
These physical attributes translate into performance and movement differences that we see. For instance, women’s physical attributes create a walking pattern that we call “grace”. This is also the reason why men’s vs. women’s gymnastics are vastly different – there are things each sex can do better than the other, and these are highlighted in this sport: men do strength and power moves, women do flexibility and grace moves.
Thank you to the WEIT community for posting on this esteemed website such valuable comments and links. I made an effort in my callow youth to read the literature of the French existentialists (Sarte, Camus, De Beauvoir, et al). I read The Second Sex then, but I will most assuredly re-read it with a clearer understanding.
When I hear this issue discussed, I find that there seems to be a difference in opinion delineated between those who have competed and / or coached sports and those who have not, regardless of party affiliation.
Those who have not will often believe that people should compete in sports based on their own chosen gender while those who have actually trained and competed or coached say, “Are you kidding me?”. The exception I’ve found is with extreme progressive types who have somehow been brainwashed to believe that men who claim to be women are truly women.
I suppose that many who have never competed in sport, especially in martial arts, also believe that a 5′ tall, 95 lb. female dressed in a spandex costume can beat up a 6’5″, 250 lb. male bad guy like in the movies.
Absolutely. I was going to close my post a few up with “Or… just ask anybody who’s ever coached youth sports” but, after fetching the links, I just forgot. |:
Just so you don’t feel too alone, a lot of us scrawny and largely uncoordinated people who were always picked last for teams in gym class : ) totally get this, too.
I don’t need to have lived it to see it with my own eyes. Logic will lead.
But yes, certainly women who have left it all on the mat, in the pool, and on the field have to feel this in their well-trained bones.
I hate that the path to sanity might be over their frustrated blood, sweat, and tears.