It would seem superfluous now to argue that women and men are equally competitive in athletics and thus there should be no sex-spcific categories.  We know that, with puberty, comes differences in may traits involved in athletic success, including muscles mass, bone density, grip strength, throwing speed, and so on. (Equestrian sports may be one in which women have either no disadvantage or even an advantage, but I haven’t looked for the data.)  This intersexual difference in athletic ability is in fact why we have separate men’s versus women’s leagues. I was surprised to find, in the Lundberg et al. paper below, that even before puberty boys have significant athletic advantages over girls, which one has to consider when deciding whether to separate the sexes in secondary-school competitions.

But the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which a few years ago punted in a general policy for its athletes, deciding that each sport has to set its own rules, has led to the publication of the Lundberg et al. paper, reiterating again that there seems to be no physical sport in which men don’t have an inherent, sex-related advantage (largely coming from testosterone), so the Bayesian presumption is that there will be a difference. The paper’s publication was apparently prompted by the IOC’s abandoning standards. As the authors note, “The IOC framework does not provide suitable guidance to sports authorities to protect the female category in sports.”

But of course the burning question now is whether or not transgender women (natal men), even under testosterone suppression, retain athletic advantages over natal women, and, if so, whether those advantages disappear over time. And Lundberg et al. paper says that advantages remain and do not go away with time. (We’ve had evidence for this for a long time.)

In classifying individuals for athletics, then, “transgender women don’t count as women”, a fact that goes against all the mantras of gender activism. Nevertheless, truth is stronger than mantras, and the data show that, in those sports that have been examined, transgender women have a similar (but smaller) advantage over natal women as do natal men do over natal women.  The authors (and I) see the inclusion of natal men in women’s sports, then, as unfair. But others disagree, thinking that inclusivity trumps fairness. Since all of us think that those who want to compete athletically should have a way to do so, some hard thinking is involved. Should we have “open” categories, in which only a few will compete? Or should trans women compete only in men’s sports? I have no solution, but surely we need to know the facts before we make a decision like this.

I found the Lundberg paper because a reader sent me an article from the conservative Federalist that linked to it. And yes, the Federalist does accurately characterize the paper. You can read the Federalist by clicking below, but if you want a deeper dive in to the data, one with lots of references, click on the second headline too (get the pdf here). All access is free

Excerpts from the link above:

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) developed its 2021 framework on sex and “gender” around the concepts of fairness, inclusion, and non-discrimination. This framework leaves it to each sport’s governing body “to determine how an athlete may be at a disproportionate advantage against their peers.” However, they admonish sports organizations against “targeted testing … aimed at determining [athletes’] sex, gender identity and/or sex variations.” Instead, it’s up to each sport to “[provide] confidence that no athlete within a category has an unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage.”

The IOC’s sophistic gymnastics to deny sex-based categories in sport prompted 26 researchers from around the world to rebut the IOC’s framework. Their paper, published last week in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, is the latest peer-reviewed study providing evidence of the obvious about sex in sports.

The researchers reviewed studies from “evolutionary and developmental biology, zoology, physiology, endocrinology, medicine, sport and exercise science, [and] athletic performance results within male and female sport” to refute the IOC’s position that male athletes warrant “no presumption of advantage” over female athletes based on “biological or physiological characteristics.”

That statement “is ridiculous on its face,” says Kim Jones, co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS). “This is the basic knowledge we all understand and see play out in front of our eyes every day. [This new] paper is brilliant at laying out how clear the differences are between men and women. There are thousands of differences between male and female development in humans across the entire maturity path that result in these huge performance gaps.”

John Armstrong, a mathematician at King’s College London who was not affiliated with this research, highlights this “central flaw” of the IOC’s framework. “To say we should not presume male advantage in a sport unless we have specific data for that sport is like saying that just because most of the apples in a tree have fallen to the ground, one shouldn’t presume the remaining apples are also subject to gravity,” he said.

“There is overwhelming evidence of male advantage from across different sports and there is little to be gained from demonstrating this again and again, sport by sport,” Armstrong noted.

So much for untreated natal men versus untreated natal women. What about when testosterone is suppressed?

But even sports that have copious research into sex differences in performance have permitted males to compete in the female category at all levels of competition and age. One path has been through misguided policies based on testosterone levels.

Over the last decade, various sports governing bodies — including the IOC and USA Boxing — have attempted to define females through testosterone levels. Those organizations relied heavily on a publication by Joanna Harper, a trans-identifying male medical physicist. The paper consisted of eight self-reports by trans-identifying male recreational runners who had suppressed their testosterone pharmacologically and recalled that they ran slower after doing so. Harper excluded the one respondent who said he ran faster and then concluded that males who were suppressing their testosterone could compete fairly in the female category.

Read the paper if you want to see how weak Harper’s evidence was, yet was used to buttress allowing transgender women to run against natal women. The subjects, whose times were self-reported, weren’t even athletes.  But I digress:

Last week’s paper builds on research by lead authors Tommy Lundberg, Emma Hilton, and others who demonstrate the persistence of male advantage after testosterone suppression.

While testosterone suppression decreases various measures of anatomy, physiology, and physical performance, those changes are a small fraction of the differences between men and women on these metrics. A testosterone-suppressed male will have less muscle mass than his former self, but as a category, testosterone-suppressed men remain larger and stronger than women. Further, testosterone suppression does not change attributes like height, bone length, or hip and shoulder width.

And the part below surprised me, as I always thought athletic differences became significant almost entirely after puberty, which could justify having only a single league for younger kids. I’m not so sure now, but remember that winning may not be as important for younger kids than for high-school, college, or professional athletes, so combined leagues may still be considered “fair” in, say, elementary or some secondary schools.

Even before puberty, though, males outperform females in athletic competitions. Greg Brown is an exercise physiologist at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and was a co-author on the Lundberg paper. Brown recently published research based on national youth track and field championships. He found that by age 8, the boys ran faster in their final rounds than the girls did in theirs, at race distances from 100 meters to 1,500 meters.

Again, click to read:

 

Here’s the paper’s abstract with the IOC’s unjustified conclusion and the data from transwomen (my bolding). Note that what they consider most fair is disallowing transwomen from competing against natal women.

ABSTRACT

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently published a framework on fairness, inclusion, and nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations. Although we appreciate the IOC’s recognition of the role of sports science and medicine in policy development, we disagree with the assertion that the IOC framework is consistent with existing scientific and medical evidence and question its recommendations for implementation. Testosterone exposure during male development results in physical differences between male and female bodies; this process underpins male athletic advantage in muscle mass, strength and power, and endurance and aerobic capacity. The IOC’s “no presumption of advantage” principle disregards this reality. Studies show that transgender women (male-born individuals who identify as women) with suppressed testosterone retain muscle mass, strength, and other physical advantages compared to females; male performance advantage cannot be eliminated with testosterone suppression. The IOC’s concept of “meaningful competition” is flawed because fairness of category does not hinge on closely matched performances. The female category ensures fair competition for female athletes by excluding male advantages. Case-by-case testing for transgender women may lead to stigmatization and cannot be robustly managed in practice. We argue that eligibility criteria for female competition must consider male development rather than relying on current testosterone levels. Female athletes should be recognized as the key stakeholders in the consultation and decision-making processes. We urge the IOC to reevaluate the recommendations of their Framework to include a comprehensive understanding of the biological advantages of male development to ensure fairness and safety in female sports.

Finally, the data on transwomen athletes.  I’ve left the references in showing the plethora of studies concluding that testosterone suppression doesn’t eliminate male advantage. Bolding in the text is mine

4. TESTOSTERONE SUPPRESSION POST-PUBERTY DOES NOT NEGATE MALE PERFORMANCE ADVANTAGE:

The IOC framework suggests that testosterone concentrations could be investigated as a means to mitigate performance in transgender women. However, no study has demonstrated that transgender women with suppressed testosterone levels after puberty reach biological or physical parity with females. Conversely, numerous studies have shown that biological differences persist after testosterone is suppressed,^25, 44, 46 with physical performance implications. There is no plausible biological mechanism by which testosterone suppression could reduce height and associated skeletal measurements (e.g., bone length and hip or shoulder width) that may confer a discipline-dependent performance advantage. Consequently, no study has reported reductions in skeletal advantages in transgender women who suppress testosterone after puberty.²⁵

Twelve controlled longitudinal studies^44, 47–57 collectively following more than 800 untrained or moderately trained transgender women have shown that testosterone suppression for 1 year induces only a 5% loss of pre-transition muscle mass/strength. This loss accounts for only a fraction (one-fifth or less) of typically observed male versus female muscle mass and strength differences.^25, 26, 58 For example, in the study by Wiik et al.,⁴⁴ thigh muscle volume differences of 39% between transgender men and women were reduced only marginally with 1 year of testosterone suppression, and 83% percent of the initial male advantage was retained. The result is higher levels of muscle mass and strength in transgender women compared to females for at least 3 years after testosterone suppression (i.e., the longest sampling duration of current longitudinal studies), with male advantage still evident in cross-sectional studies of transgender women who suppressed testosterone for up to 14 years.^59–61

Note, however, that factors affecting endurance performance, like supermarathon running, have not been tested sufficiently to come to any conclusion. It may turn out that in these endurance sports transwomen are on par with men. But certainly this isn’t the case for marathon running.

The effects of testosterone suppression on biological factors underlying endurance performance are less well explored than those of strength and power. Nonetheless, untrained or moderately trained transgender women who have successfully suppressed testosterone after puberty achieved female-typical hemoglobin concentrations within 3–6 months.^44, 46 In contrast, the effect on hemoglobin mass, which, unlike hemoglobin concentration, is strongly related to VO_2max,^39, 62 is unknown, and other factors related to endurance performance, such as work economy and fractional utilization, have not been studied.

We argue that the existing literature on physical changes induced by testosterone suppression constitutes the most robust dataset currently available, and is relevant for elite athletes, because it confirms the principle of persistence of biological characteristics even in the absence of training. These longitudinal studies are then complemented by studies in which testosterone suppression in males has been accompanied by exercise training, which demonstrate that training can partly, or even completely, attenuate reductions in muscle mass and strength.^63, 64 Therefore, a rational hypothesis based on current evidence would be that retained male advantage would be larger, not smaller, in highly trained transgender women if they continued to train during testosterone suppression, compared with untrained or moderately trained individuals. This hypothesis is also supported by the observation that sex-specific differences in athletic performance are at least equally pronounced in elite athletes compared to untrained or moderately trained individuals.²⁶

The findings documented in the scientific literature, and the hypothesis that retained male advantage would be larger in athletes, predict that the relative ranking of transgender women in competitive sports would improve significantly after they switch from the male to the female category. This is illustrated by a case study of an American transgender swimmer, who achieved significant National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) ranking improvements (from middle to top) across a range of events after switching from the male to the female category.⁶⁵ This occurred as a result of performance decreases that were significantly smaller than male versus female performance differences, supporting the retention of male biological advantage and illustrating the resultant unfairness.

The swimmer referred to above is certainly Lia Thomas. At any rate, 12 women athletes are suing the NCAA for forcing them to compete against trans women. You can read about the suit at the Free Press, by clicking the link below. Again, Lia Thomas seems to have been the spur for this suit (article archived here). The unarchived piece has a YouTube discussion of the lawsuit by two of the plaintiffs, Riley Gaines and Réka György:

 

Why are men better than women at chess?

This is the question that Carole Hooven, author of the excellent book Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, takes up in a new article in Quillette. What I like about the article is that it appears to consider every available hypothesis, and uses a scientific approach to finding evidence that either supports or weakens many of them. She tentatively settles on one that may be evolutionary in its origin, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Click below to read:

I believe Hooven got interested in the question when FIDE, the international chess federation, recently decided that transwomen would not be permitted to compete in their official chess events that were limited to natal women. Since transwomen are natal men, this implies that there is some advantage in being a natal man when it comes to winning at chess. Of course this move by FIDE could be considered transphobic, as it already has been, but in fact the evidence is that, regardless of cause, men are much better than women at chess.

How do we know this? Because, although some chess tournaments are limited to people of one sex, there are also mixed-sex tournaments in which women play against men. And those show a result similar to that in tennis: rankings based on those tournaments show that the top women chess player would probably rank below the top 200 or 300 men.

But why is this? After all, in tennis and other sports, men outdo women because there is an inherent athletic advantage associated with the male body: more muscles, higher bone density, greater grip strength, and so on. These advantages become prominent at puberty because they’re associated with the higher testosterone of males. (This does not mean, of course, that no woman can ever beat a man in mixed-sex sports; it is a difference, and a big one, in averge performance.) Likewise, transwomen, biological men who assume the identity of a woman, also retain these athletic advantages over natal women, especially when they transition after puberty. That’s why several sports associations have banned transwomen from women’s athletics.

But chess?  None of the athletic advantages I mentioned should obtain for chess, which involves only moving light pieces of wood or plastic around a board. So why are men so much better at playing chess?

Hooven lists a number of hypotheses, which I’ve divided into the following categories in bold (my words). Carole’s text is indented.

a.) More males take up chess in the first place. If this is the case, then regardless of average performance, the top players will be weighted with more men, simply because even if the average performance is the same, a bigger curve for men (frequency versus score) means that the upper tails of high performance will contain more men.  This will be the case regardless of the variation in performance itself, and simply reflects the fact that at every performance level, there will be more men than women.

This is a reasonable hypothesis, but one Hooven thinks is weak because of Scrabble and bridge, which more women than men take up but ultimately the championships are heavily dominated by men:

In a game of Scrabble, as most readers will know, two competing players earn points for creating words using one or more of the seven lettered tiles in their inventory, which they place on a grid-spaced board. Like chess, Scrabble uses a version of the Elo rating system. But unlike in the chess world, women dominate the recreational ranks of Scrabble, accounting for about 85 percent of all recreational players. Even at the competitive level, women generally outnumber men (which isn’t that surprising given that Scrabble is all about words, and verbal ability is one area in which women tend to outperform men). So if the participation-rate hypothesis were correct in this context, then women should be dominating the elite Scrabble ranks.

But they’re not. Instead, men dominate Scrabble’s upper tiers, as they do in chess. And the same goes for Bridge, another game that’s dominated at the recreational level by women.

Scrabble tournaments usually feature separate divisions, which are classified according to Elo ratings. Players with the highest ratings compete in the first division, in which there are few women. As the skill level goes down, the proportion of women increases, until you get to the lowest level, where women vastly outnumber men. No woman has ever won a national or World Scrabble Championship. (However, just last year, Ruth Li from Toronto did win the North American Championship in the High School division, becoming the first female to ever win any such regional championship.)

Of course, Scrabble and chess are different games that require different skills, and lessons from the former may not cleanly translate to the latter. But even if one confines one’s focus to chess, the participation-rate thesis doesn’t present a convincing explanation for the observed sex differences in performance.

In addition, over the last few years women’s participation in chess has increased substantially, but the average gap between men and women hasn’t narrowed much, though it has a bit in some places. Overall, though, this hypothesis seems weak.

Second, over the last 50 years or so, female participation in chess has increased measurably around the world—a fact that should, according to the participation-rate hypothesis, lead to a narrowing of the sex gap at the highest levels of play. And in a few cases, that has happened. In France, for example, the female participation rate increased from 6 percent to 15 percent from 1985 to 2015, and the sex gap in ratings also significantly narrowed. But overall, the evidence is mixed. In the mid-1940s, the Elo difference between the world’s highest-rated male and female chess players hovered around 150 points. Eighty years later, that figure hasn’t really changed. (Note that such comparisons are based in part on retrospectively calculated Elo ratings, as FIDE didn’t start using them until the late 1960s.)

b.) Sexism: women are driven out of chess or don’t take it up because of misogyny in the game. Sexism can manifest itself in many ways: simple harassment of women (which is reported), not taking women seriously, which can lead to a lack of self-confidence, lowered expectations, and a higher dropout rate.  This should be mitigated to some degree by the existence of all-women’s leagues and tournaments.  But Hooven doesn’t think that this is an important hypothesis because reduced sexism over time hasn’t narrowed the performance gap:

Such reports [of sexism] should, of course, be taken seriously. But I’m far from convinced that sexism and harassment are the main reasons why men outperform women at chess. We’ve already come a long way in battling sexism during my lifetime. And yet, even as women have made great strides in such areas as medicine, law, engineering, and academia, the sex gap in chess has barely budged since second-wave feminism took off in the 1960s. This all suggests there’s something else going on.

c.)  Men and women have the same average performance, but men have greater variance, manifested as relatively more players in both the highest and lowest tails of the performance distribution. Hooven calls this the “greater male variability”, or GMV, hypothesis. The variability can involve many traits possibly involved in chess success: spatial ability, drive to win, willingness to practice, and so on. The key here is that there need be no average difference between men and women, but still the greater variation of men ensures that in the upper tails, where the champions reside, will be mostly populated by men. (The hypothesis can still hold even if there are some differences in means.) GMV may be the case for intelligence, as the average performance of men and women on IQ-related tests are about the same, but men are more variable. But again, this doesn’t seem to be telling for chess, though it could be important in STEM fields:

The GMV hypothesis is the explanation often given for sex differences in STEM fields, particularly the “hard” sciences such as physics. The idea is that even if there’s no male-female difference in average math or physics ability, there would still be more men at the very high (and low) end of the ability spectrum. These are the extreme outliers who are most likely to earn prestigious faculty positions, file many patent applications, and win career achievement awards. And there is, in fact, strong evidence supporting the hypothesis; many traits do tend to be more variable in men than in women.

But if the greater male variability hypothesis explained the male advantage in chess, then we should observe that Elo ratings [these are measures of chess proficiency involving games won as well as the quality of the opponent] for males would be more variable than those for females. That is, we would expect more male grandmasters not because males are better at chess, but simply because there would be fewer females at both the high and low end of performance.

But in most populations of chess players, that statistical pattern isn’t reflected in the distributions of Elo ratings. Those for males are not more variable than for females. In many cases, in fact, the variability among female ratings is actually higher.

d.) Males are innately better in traits that lead to success in chess.  These involve average differences in traits and not just variances, and could include spatial ability, degree of aggression, drive to win, other aspects of cognitive ability, dedication to the sport so that one practices a lot more, and so on. Note that “innately” implies the differences don’t result from socialization or sexism, but are the same kind of differences that gives men advantages in “regular” sports. Of course these innate differences could interact with other factors, as the phenotype here (chess performance) always involves an interaction between genes and one’s environment.

Ultimately, Hooven considers this the best explanation because there is independent evidence that men excel in the kind of motivation, competitiveness, and “obsessive passion” that leads to monomaniacal focus not just on winning, but on practicing:

 A more promising explanation for male dominance in elite chess involves motivation. A large body of research strongly suggests that the sexes differ in their preferences for competition. As both Kasparov and Repková have intuited, men are simply more competitive—that is, they have a stronger motivation not just to compete, but to win, in formal physical and non-physical competitions of all kinds.

Men are more likely to choose games that involve direct, one-on-one competition, in which the result is a clear winner and loser—such as chess. Women are less competitive even when interacting anonymously—for example, in online arenas such as massive multiplayer role-playing games. This applies even when players interact using avatars of the sex opposite to their own; situations in which social expectations and stereotypes should have a reduced influence on in-game behavior. Women’s performance and enjoyment tends to suffer when the competition intensifies; that is, when the stakes are highest or time pressure is applied. For example, the average male-female sex difference in “blitz” chess games, which allocate ten minutes or less for each player to make all of their moves, is greater than that observed in standard chess, in which each player has at least an hour and a half. Moreover, relative to men, in experimental and real-life conditions, women tend to opt out of tournament conditions.

So it’s not surprising that females, being less focused (on average, as usual) on crushing an opponent in some future tournament, might be less motivated to go in for the kind of hardcore practice that’s necessary to develop elite skills (“deliberate practice,” as it’s called, as distinct from simply practising by playing).

. . . . If your instinct tells you that males will be disproportionately drawn toward this kind of intense practice style than females, you’re correct. Studies show that boys and men are more likely to exhibit a “rigid persistence in an activity,” by which “the passion controls the individual” (“obsessive passion” in the literature). In anecdotal terms, we are talking here about the man who drops everything to become, say, a 16-hour-per-day videogamer, or a day-trader, or chess addict. Yes, some women take on these kinds of fixations. But men do it more often, and with greater intensity.

It’s long been known that measures of risk-taking, competitiveness, persistence, and aggression are higher in men than women, so this may be a key factor in the explanation.  But are these differences due to evolution or socialization? After all, men are expected to be aggressive and behaviorally conform to a “male stereotype”.  On the other hand, that stereotype itself could reflect behavior instilled by natural selection more in one sex than another, so it’s seen as the norm.

Hooven comes down on the evolution side, and I pretty much agree with her given these arguments as well as others (e.g., socialization should differ among human societies but the average behaviors don’t; our closest primate relatives, who aren’t socialized, show similar difference in aggression and competition, there are biological reasons to expect higher competition in males, and these traits begin to manifest themselves at a young age, presumably before much socialization can take place).  Luana Maroja and I discuss similar sex differences in behavior (and their possible evolutionary roots) in our Skeptical Inquirer paper on ideology and biology.

Hooven:

That said, I don’t see evidence for the idea that socialization alone explains the stronger male tendency to focus obsessively on doing whatever is necessary to win, even at board games. And there are good reasons to think that this tendency has an evolutionary basis: In the animal kingdom, males tend to devote more time, energy, and risk to status competition, since this tends to pay more reproductive benefits for males than females. So it’s not unreasonable to suspect that boys and men have some kind of biological advantage—possibly underpinned by higher lifetime exposure to testosterone—that helps explain their over-representation in tournament-level competition in general. (While this particular brand of competitiveness may have a strong evolutionary explanation, it is unlikely to be the wisest reproductive strategy in today’s world.)

If this is the case, what about FIDE’s decision to ban transwomen from their women’s chess tournaments? (Some countries, including England, Germany, France, and the United States, don’t uphold this ban in their national tournaments.)  In the end, since Hooven concludes that biological factors play a key role in men’s dominance in chess, for the time being FIDE’s ban makes sense:

Ultimately, sex differences in complex behaviors and skills are always a product of interactions between biology on the one hand (that is, our genes and their relatively fixed effects, such as hormone levels and body size) and our environment on the other (that is, factors such as our family circumstances, social dynamics, and cultural norms). Interactions between the two shape not only our skills and abilities, but also any emerging group differences. But none such complicating factors change the fact that the sex gap in chess is real and persistent. Given the circumstances that led to the creation of the female category, and the fact that many girls and women appreciate what this category offers, FIDE is correct to take the steps necessary to protect its integrity.

Of course the data we really need are the chess performance of transwomen playing against biological women, and as far as I know we don’t have that kind of data.

****************

A coda:  Perhaps the thinnest book I own is called “Jewish Sports Heroes”, given to me by a Jewish relative. It’s thin because Jews are not usually among the best baseball, soccer, football, or basketball champions we can think of (Sandy Koufax is a notable exception). I’m not going to hypothesize about this religious lacuna, but what amuses me is that the last chapter in the book, and the longest one, is on chess, as Jews have always excelled in chess. If the writers wanted to produce a book of reasonable length then, they simply had to add chess as a “sport” coequal with sports like football and basketball.

The new Kiwi government under Christopher Luxon is weighing a rule that women’s sports will remain women’s spaces—at least in publicly funded sports, which clearly includes those in schools. But there’s a lot of pushback, as you can see from reading this piece in the New Zealand Herald (click to read):

Excerpts are indented:

The Government is threatening to withhold millions of dollars of public funding from New Zealand sports bodies if they do not comply with a push to separate transgender athletes from grassroots competitions.

The hardline and potentially divisive policy from the Government sets out the agenda to “ensure publicly funded sporting bodies support fair competition that is not compromised by rules relating to gender”.

The policy is led by New Zealand First, whose sport and recreation spokesman Andy Foster says it is “about fairness and safety in sport for women”

. . . .While previous Governments have left sporting organisations to work through the vexed transgender space at arm’s length, the National-led regime intends to tackle the issue head-on.

International sporting bodies, including cricket, rugby league and swimming among others, have banned transgender women from their respective elite female codes.

The NZ First-National policy agreement, however, applies to the amateur end of the spectrum by targeting participation in community sports.

Are community sports different from school sports? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Rather, I think that the government is leaving professional sports to work out their own rules. But the government is clearly of the mind that it’s unfair to have trans women participating in women’s sports, something I agree with. But the issue is inflammatory (much of NZ is still woke), and so the government is also a bit timorous:

Sport and Recreation Minister Chris Bishop was uncomfortable discussing the coalition agreement.

“New Zealand First are very keen to make sure we have an inclusive environment and atmosphere for everybody – and that rules relating to gender don’t get in the way of that,” Bishop told the Herald.

“It is a tricky one, a thorny issue. There’s strong views on both sides of the debate. I’ll work through that with the relevant sporting bodies.

“Ultimately it’s got to go over to sporting bodies to make sure that we have fair competition.”

They’re very careful in dealing with such an inflammatory issue, but they’re going in the right direction:

Next year, Sport New Zealand will invest $9.3 million in 38 sports at the community level.

Pressed on whether sporting bodies that objected to the separatist policy would find their funding frozen, Foster said: “If a code says ‘We don’t want to do that’, that’s their choice but they shouldn’t then expect the taxpayer to say we’re delighted to support you doing something which we see as unsafe and unfair.

“That’s the policy.”

. . .Foster, a former Wellington mayor, outlined the rationale for attempting to separate trans women from female community sports.

“It’s about fairness and safety in sport for women in particular,” he said.

“Looking at some of the debate that’s been across different sports codes around the world about transgender people who have transitioned from male to female, particularly after puberty, and the evidence around the advantages that happen in weight, speed, all those sorts of things, it compromises fairness in competitions and in some cases safety as well. We’re saying, for publicly funded sports bodies, we think it’s really important for women to have a clear line in the sand drawn.

“With rugby, athletics, boxing, you can see why power, weight and speed become a real issue. If there’s a teenage girl against a former teenage boy, your child is going to get hurt.”

Foster suggested the policy would not apply to all sports, citing equestrianism as an example of men and women competing in the same field.

That’s fair enough. Foster is right about the athletic advantages of post-puberty trans women who have had surgery and puberty blockers, but if data show no inherent advantages of trans women over women in horsey sports, it’s fine to have them compete.

A lot of the article is devoted to criticism from trans women athletes and others about the policy, but the criticisms mostly aren’t workable. For example:

However, transgender athlete and two-time national champion mountain biker Kate Weatherly fears it will lead to athletes being forced into men’s competitions or sidelined completely.

. . . . Given the minimal number of trans women competing in amateur sports, Weatherly fears it could lead to their exclusion from the grassroots arena.

The “small number” argument fails because if a trans women wins because of the advantages she has from male puberty, it is unfair to any number of women or girls who can’t win.  There may be few winners, but there are plenty of losers.

Here’s another from Weatherly:

“Sports are inherently unfair. It’s so heavily dependent on money, where you were born, access to coaches, support networks. There are so many factors that determine how successful you are at sport.

Sports are inherently unfair, she says, so it’s okay to add a big source of unfairness to the mix. Nobody doubts, and it’s clear from recent results in sports, that trans women have a palpable advantage over women in nearly every sport in which they participate.

And there’s the inclusivity argument as well:

Former sport minister Grant Robertson condemned the policy’s intention.

“It’s incredibly sad the government is undermining the work done to make grassroots sports more inclusive,” Robertson said. “We should be doing everything we can to encourage people to participate in sport and recreation. Chris Bishop should be ashamed to be facilitating this nonsense.”

New Zealand Cricket is the first sport to publicly resist the policy – even if that means losing its $425,000 allocated government funding next year.

“Our position is that we’ll continue to prioritise inclusivity and accommodate transwomen in women’s cricket at community, amateur, social level,” NZ Cricket spokesperson Richard Boock said.

Sport New Zealand chief executive Raelene Castle indicated its focus remained on inclusion.

“We have developed a set of transgender guiding principles for the sector, to help organisations develop their own policies for the inclusion of transgender participants in community sport.

Now this is an argument that can’t be dismissed: trans athletes want to compete, and isn’t it unfair to say they can’t? There are various solutions to the problem, including an “other” category for trans people, or allow “men’s sports” to include trans athletes. That may seem unfair to trans women, but, as they say, “sports are inherently unfair.” (I am just using their own argument against them; I do think the problem should be considered seriously.)

Finally, there’s this argument, which was suggested, I believe, by Neil deGrasse Tyson as well:

Weatherly, a trans woman athlete, acknowledged fairness and safety concerns but pointed out that sports such as boxing featured weight categories to minimise risks.

The problem is that you simply can’t use “weight categories” for trans women competing against women. Even in boxing that would give trans women an inherent advantage. And for other sports, I can’t see a way to “group” women so that the trans women have no inherent athletic advantage. Try doing that in, say, the 400-meter dash.

I’m afraid that I see women’s sports as “women’s spaces,” with no clear way to include trans women. We should try hard to hit on an equitable solution for all trans people, but that demands both philosophical rumination and empirical data, neither of which we have. The New Zealand government is going in the right direction, for, in sports the mantra “trans women are women” does not hold.

h/t: Jez

The Center for Inquiry (CFI), founded in 1976 by luminaries like James Randi, Martin Gardner, Isaac Asimov, Paul Kurtz, and Carl Sagan, has this mission:

The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit organization dedicated to defending science and critical thinking in examining religion. CFI’s vision is a world in which evidence, science, and compassion—rather than superstition, pseudoscience, or prejudice—guide public policy.

To make a better world, we need to use our heads and our hearts. To confront the challenges that face us as a planetary civilization, we need to use the tools of science and reason guided by compassion and respect for the dignity of every individual.

To move forward, we need to discard old superstitions, prejudices, and magical thinking and embrace facts, evidence, and critical thinking.

It’s about more than whether or not God exists. It’s about more than whether ghosts roam among us, aliens hover above us, or psychics can see within us.

And now there’s a new brand of pseudoscience: that deriving from wokeness. Like the other forms of pseudoscience like psychics and homeopathic medicine, the distortion of science to conform to so-called “progressive” ideologies is damaging to society, largely by injuring our organs of reason, making us see in nature what we want to see rather than what is.

Robyn Blumner is the current President and CEO of the CFI as well as the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.  As part of the CFI’s mission, she’s now written two articles decrying the ideological distortion of reality. The first, “The truth matters and secular humanists should defend it,” was published in Free Inquiry, one of the organs for CFI. I discussed that piece on this site, quoting her criticisms of science distorted by the “social justice police”, including touting indigenous ways of knowing as coequal to science, the opprobrium attending any studies of behavioral genetics, and the unwise rush to use of puberty blockers to treat gender dyphoria. (She also went after older forms of religious distortion of science, namely creationism, as well as right-wing attempts to interfere in issues of sexuality and gender transition.)

Although attacking both woke and right-wing distortions of science was a bit of a departure from the normal fare of the CFI, it adhered strictly to the organization’s mission of showing the “the truth matters.” To that end, Robyn also helped Luana Maroja and I publish our paper “The ideological subversion of biology,” dealing largely with left-wing distortions of evolutionary biology, in Skeptical Inquirer, another organ of the CFI. And of course a few disgruntled skeptics wrote in saying that our piece was a wrongheaded departure from the normal fare of the magazine. Why discuss how many sexes there are in animals when the magazine should be attacking psychics and homeopaths?. But our piece was attacking the equivalent of psychics in biology: those who make claims about reality that are not only false, but harmful to society.

At any rate, Robyn’s now published a new piece in Skeptical inquirer that you can access by clicking below. The topic, of course, is a hot potato, but also ripe for scientific discussion. Robyn’s discussion is one of the most fair-minded takes on the issue in print, and is a good piece to show to ideologues who argue that, on the basis of fairness to transgender women (biological men), they should be allowed to compete in athletics against biological women.  Robyn concludes that no, this shouldn’t be allowed because trans women (even under hormone treatment) have, as we’ve discussed before, athletic advantages over biological women in strength, musculature and other traits that give them an unfair advantage in competition.

Click to read:

First the question is raised, and although in the end it’s a moral issue, it also depends heavily on scientific data. If by suppressing testosterone, trans women lose all athletic advantages over biological women, there would not be an issue. Is this in fact the case?

But an issue has arisen that requires us to look more carefully at something we took for granted: Is it truly necessary to segregate sports by sex? The issue arises because transgender women athletes who have undergone male puberty are seeking to compete with natal women athletes. In the name of transgender rights should this be permitted, or does it inherently undermine the fair playing field that sports demand?

The question is a legitimate one, and people who ask it shouldn’t be maligned as transphobes and bigots. We need to lower the temperature on these discussions. There are competing interests at stake. For transgender women, it’s a way to be treated as women—full stop. For natal women, it’s a question of fairness. There are incontrovertible biological differences between biological males and females that puts the question of transgender women in sports into the realm of science in addition to public policy.

Robyn goes through the advantages of male over female athletes, true in nearly all sports, and then asks if a biological male suppresses testosterone, one step in becoming a trans female, are these sex-based advantages eliminated? Increasingly, data show that they’re not:

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].)

Certainly that does not mean that every transgender woman athlete will win against all natal women, just as many natal male athletes would lose against better women athletes. In Serena Williams’s case, all but perhaps the top 100 men tennis players would lose in a match with her. [JAC: Actually, the #203-ranked male player beat both Venus and Serena.] It’s just that the innate advantages conferred by male puberty are not significantly dissipated through hormone adjustments. So the initial reason we sex segregate sports remains valid: to ensure a fair opportunity for women to compete and potentially win championships.

The counterargument that it’s a non-problem because there so few transgender women want to compete with biological women doesn’t stand up because although trans women athletes are relatively few, they’re not absent, and they tend to win a lion’s share of the prizes.  To keep things fair to biological women, there had to be a ban. It happened in cycling, swimming, and now, as I recall, rugby.

Reportedly there are now dozens of transgender women competing in women’s cycling, and they are starting to take top honors and cash prizes—including American transgender woman cyclist Austin Killips, who won a women’s stage race at the Tour of Gila.

So, what happened?

Soon thereafter, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the governing body of cycling, decided in July to ban transgender women who had gone through male puberty from women’s competition. They can compete in a “men/other” category instead. This follows on the heels of a decision in May by British Cycling that banned transgender women from women’s competitive events.

Previously, the rules for international cycling had included limits on testosterone levels. But that didn’t suffice to make the playing field level. In fact, some top women cyclists, such as Hannah Arensmen, a thirty-five-time winner on the national cyclocross circuit, announced they were quitting the sport due to this unfairness. Arensmen was repeatedly beaten by transgender women cyclists, including one nearly double her twenty-four years, and she had had enough.

The international governing body for swimming, World Aquatics, announced in July that it would establish an “open” category that would be open to all transgender athletes, thereby giving natal women their own category for competition.

For now the solution appears to be either an “open” category for all transgender athletes (but what about the transgender men, who have an athletic disadvantage against transgender women?), or to allow all transgender athletes to compete in the “men’s” category.  That’s not optimal, but at least allows trans athletes who do want to compete the chance to do so.

In the end, it’s simply unfair to biological women to force them to compete against trans women who were natal men and suppressed their testosterone. Given the rapid grown of in numbers of both trans men and trans women, the problem of fairness is not going to go away.  But keeping women’s sports for natal women seems to be the fairest solution; for surely, with the growth in numbers of trans women, if they compete against biological women then biological women will gradually leave sports, as did Hannah Arensmen. They simply lose their chance to win, which is a huge motivator in sports. In fact, Robyn thinks that the “progressive solution”, which depends on the mantra “trans women are women” (i.e., exactly equivalent to women in all rights, including the right to compete in women’s sports), may be counterproductive:

I am sympathetic to the argument that transgender women are socially disadvantaged and stigmatized. And the way to combat it is to integrate them into womanhood without differentiating between natal women and transgender women. But I wonder if that’s truly the case and if forcing open women’s sports to transgender women hasn’t exacerbated the problem.

A recent Gallup poll shows that a larger majority of Americans now say transgender athletes should only compete on teams that match their assignment at birth than in prior years. Sixty-nine percent now oppose transgender women in women’s sports compared with 62 percent who objected in 2021. And only 26 percent of people endorse the idea of transgender athletes playing on teams that match their gender identity. That’s down from 34 percent in 2021. The appearance of transgender women athletes competing—and at times winning—in female sports categories is not ameliorating the social stigma. If anything, it is driving people away from sympathies with transgender rights.

Christian nationalists and some Republican lawmakers are whipping up a backlash against the transgender rights movement to solidify and energize their base. On the other side, the identitarian Left is demonizing anyone who doesn’t go along with every element of the transgender rights agenda, including transgender women in women’s sports.

Sophisticated people who care about both science and social fairness need to separate the signal from the noise. These are complicated issues that need to be parsed to do the least harm possible to the most people. In that calculation, I stand with the natal women athletes who want to compete against each other.

In ethics, this is a consequentialist and utilitarian solution: the higher social well being comes from not allowing trans women to compete against biological women. But I see no other solution that won’t cause widespread resentment—which reduces well being.

But of course not all people embrace a consequentialist morality, and there are deontologists, opposed to Robyn (and my) view, who simply finesse the problem by saying that “trans women are women,” and that settles the issue. I think they’re wrong because it will ultimately lead to the death of women’s sports, but, as always, there is no objective system of ethics. At the least, though, you can inform your ethics with data, and the data show that, in terms of athletic ability, trans women are not (biological) women. Holding that mantra in the face of statistics makes gender ideologues the equivalent of psychics: they claim to be helping people, but have to ignore the data in fulfilling what they see as their mission.

It amazes me that, in light of the science showing that trans women who have gone through male puberty retain significant athletic advantages over biological females, even when taking therapy to reduce testosterone, people still insist that trans females should be able to compete in women’s sports against natal females. And many people maintain this even if the trans females are simply males who claim that they’re females, without having had any surgery or hormone therapy.

Various sports organizations are starting to cotton on to this brand of unfairness, banning trans women from competing in women’s sports. That’s not a perfect solution, of course, because trans women who want to do sports should have the opportunity to compete. The only two solutions that seem feasible are to allow all trans people to compete in the “male” category (which of course will disadvantage trans women and probably trans men), or to create an “other” category for people who aren’t either natal males or females.  But the previous system of using hormone titers or, in some areas, allowing self-identified or medically treated trans females to compete with biological women, is not a fair solution.

In view of this, the Olympics have bailed, throwing up their hands and saying that each sport can decide using its own criteria. (This is an impossible requirement.) But other groups, including World Rugby. FINA (the international body governing women’s swimming), and World Athletics (the body governing running and track and field) have banned transgender women from competing in elite women’s sports.

There are a few holdouts, though, and this report, from Reduxx (click to read), notes that USA Fencing, the body governing fencing with foil and saber, will continue to allow transgender women to compete against biological women—regardless of whether the former have had medical treatment. If you’re a man who self identifies as a woman, you can fence with women. And this despite the reports, documented amply in the article, that men who were mediocre fencers against members of their own sex have after identifying as women, suddenly started winning lots of medals. Fencing is not exempt from the fact that men have physical and physiological advantages (probably not effaced by hormone treatment, though we don’t know) that give them athletic advantages over biological women.

Click to read:

An excerpt:

A number of trans-identified males have been dominating women’s fencing championships despite the fact that many of them floundered in the men’s category. A source has now revealed that many women in the sport fear losing opportunities if they speak out against the inclusion of men in women’s fencing.

In November of 2022, USA Fencing adopted a Transgender and Nonbinary Athlete Policy which stated that division placement would be determined based on self-declared “gender identity” or “gender expression” rather than on biological sex.

“USA Fencing will not discriminate on the basis of gender identity, regardless of sex assigned at birth, or any other form of gender expression for participation in any division,” read the policy. “As such, athletes will be permitted to participate in USA Fencing sanctioned events in a manner consistent with their gender identity/ expression, regardless of the gender associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.”

The policy also stipulated that an individual’s classification will remain unaltered when transferring over to the sporting category of the opposite sex. “Transgender athletes will be permitted to keep the fencing classification that was held prior to transitioning. For example, a transgender woman who held an A classification in the men’s division will keep her A classification in the women’s division.”

But Reduxx has now learned that USA Fencing had permitted males to self-identify into the women’s category for nearly a decade prior to the adoption of the new policy, resulting in a small number of trans-identified players dominating the sport. Of the five that have been identified, most of them had performed poorly while competing in the men’s category.

Thus if you are in a high fencing subclass when you fenced as a male, you keep that subclass when you start fencing against biological women. That’s doubly unfair.

I don’t have much to say about this beyond what I’ve said before and above; the article gives examples of the unfairness.

But one thing did catch my eye: this paragraph from the article:

A vocal trans activist, Wilson has expressed disapproval over a bill in his home state that would prevent the medical transitioning of minors. Kentucky’s Senate Bill 150, which was blocked by a federal judge at the end of June at the behest of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), would prohibit health care providers in the state from administering puberty-halting drugs and performing “gender-affirming” surgeries on children.

Now this is one of those bills passed in the South that is a bit dicey because it could be construed as anti-trans; for one thing, it involves issues like pronoun usage. But the part of the law that actually was blocked by the judge was the part that prohibited “gender surgeries on children,”.  But it turns out that the ACLU was fighting for the “right” of minors to have not just gender-affirming care, but care that included drugs and surgery. On minors.

From WLKY, a CBS station in Louisville, published on June 29. Emphasis is mine:

A federal judge has blocked parts of a law that bans gender-affirming care for trans youth in Kentucky the day before it is set to take effect.

U.S. District Judge David Hale granted the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky a temporary injunction blocking parts of Senate Bill 150 from going into effect on Thursday.

SB 150 was passed by the Kentucky general assembly during this year’s legislative session.

It includes many things, like blocking teachers from using a student’s preferred pronouns and requiring certain bathroom policies.

It also would ban health care providers in the state from performing gender-affirming care for transgender children. This is the part of the bill that is being blocked.

Gov. Any Beshear vetoed the bill, but it was later overridden by the general assembly.

The ACLU filed for an injunction in May, saying that lawmakers are violating the rights and freedoms of parents and their children in Kentucky.

That “gender-affirming care”, as you can see from the bill, includes drugs like puberty blockers and surgery, done on minors (defined as someone under 18). That’s what the ACLU is favoring.  Now we can quibble whether a 17-year-old has the right to get surgery or hormone treatment, but the bill says minors in general, so the ACLU is, I think, favoring kids of any age getting drugs and surgery.  And that’s bad.

But the ACLU says it’s okay because it’s the right of minors to have drugs and surgery. From the WLKY article:

The ACLU filed for an injunction in May, saying that lawmakers are violating the rights and freedoms of parents and their children in Kentucky.

“We are grateful to the Court for enjoining this egregious ban on medically necessary care, which would have caused harm for countless young Kentuckians,” said ACLU Kentucky legal director Corey Shapiro in a news release. “This is a win, but it is only the first step. We’re prepared to fight for families’ right to make their own private medical decisions in court, and to continue doing everything in our power to ensure access to medical care is permanently secured in Kentucky.”

The problem, of course, is that the safety of some gender-affirming care, like the long-term effects of puberty blockers, or even the long-term effect of genital surgery, hasn’t yet been sufficiently studied. That’s why an increasing number of countries are treating puberty-blocker administration as “clinical experimentation” instead of standard care. People are starting to realize that those drugs may have long-term harms that we don’t know about.

But this doesn’t bother the ACLU, which, under the guidance of its gender expert, the unhinged Chase Strangio, believes that it’s the “right” of any minor to get possibly risky medical treatment.  I’d say we should wait until the clinical studies are completed.

Like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU has changed from a civil rights organization into a Social Justice organization.  It now preferentially defends the civil rights of “progressive” groups and people rather than all people, and we should keep an eye on it.