“Decisions are always difficult when they involve conflicting needs and rights between different groups, but we continue to take the view that we must maintain fairness for female athletes above all other considerations. We will be guided in this by the science around physical performance and male advantage which will inevitably develop over the coming years. As more evidence becomes available, we will review our position, but we believe the integrity of the female category in athletics is paramount.” —Sebastian Coe, President of the World Athletics Council (WAC)
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
WAC president Sebastian Coe during a press conference on March 23, 2023.
National Public Radio (NPR) reports that the governing body for international track and field will bar trans women athletes from elite competitions for women. The council’s policy, which goes into effect at the end of this month, focuses on athletes who “transitioned from male to female after going through puberty as a male.”
The false claim that individuals in our species can change their sex is typical of NPR’s anti-scientific standpoint, a standpoint we see has also affected Scientific America and other progressive-captured media outlets. Unfortunately, this language is also in the WAC’s verbiage. This is embarrassing given what Coe has said appealing to “the science around physical performance and male advantage.” However, presumed in the statement, the WAC recognizes that such persons remain male and retain those biological advantages regardless of their self-proclaimed gender identity.
NPR reports that the WAC plans to form a working group to consider the issue of “transgender inclusion” over the next year. The committee will speak with trans athletes to seek their perspective, review research on the matter, and submit recommendations to the council. Presumably, the working group will speak only with males who live as women, for reasons I explain in a moment, as well as the specific reference to “transgender women.”
“At the center of the issue is whether transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over other female competitors, even after lowering their testosterone levels. But there is limited scientific research involving elite transgender athletes — which the council also acknowledged,” opines Juliana Kim of NPR. After suggesting that the WAC is “without strong evidence of an advantage,” she continues, “World Athletics Council said that they have conducted their own research over the past decade and that they found there can be an impact in performance. Several international groups including the Human Rights Watch have called the council’s evidence flawed.”
What evidence could possibly negate the observation that, on average, males have many and obvious advantages over females in physical sports? (See Fair Play for Women for a comprehensive review of the differences.) Why is “inclusion” so important that we must deny what we can see with our eyes confirmed by every piece of scientific evidence that, while these are overlapping distributions, on every metric relevant to physical sports the average is widely disparate? We might need to remind the religious-minded that we are as a tenet of human rights free not to live in their worlds. However, we and they have to live in the real one.
Common sense matters, too. By this, I mean the obvious uncontroverted by some underlying fact. If there is so little difference between males and females, then we should expect to see that insignificance working in both directions. If being male provides no advantage in women’s sports, then being female provides no disadvantage in men’s sports. So why aren’t females who live as men dominating men’s sports? Where are the trans men football players leading NFL teams to the Super Bowl? Where are the trans men boxing champions? Who really believes that will ever happen?
I am sure a reader will come back with a counter example in some sport. But anecdotes don’t contradict general truths. Moreover, on an ethical plane, and safety issues aside, the ability of a female to compete against men is different than males competing against females for the obvious reason that only one of these genotypes as an average advantage over the other.
Men can live as women. Most people don’t care (I do see in the face of compelled speech, harassment, suppression, and violence growing numbers of people reverting to an uneasy tolerance). But let’s not forsake fairness and thwart women in the pursuit of the dreams of a handful by pretending that trans women and women are the same thing in track and field and other sports. One is a male and the other is a female. That’s a result of natural history. The human species is a species of great ape and, like the other great apes, there is considerable sexual dimorphism between the the genotypes, which are always only two. Sex is not a social construct. Sex is a scientific reality. It exists independent of culture, politics, and social history.
There is a tricky issue when it comes to intersex conditions (e.g. Caster Semenya). But on the question of trans gender, this is not a complicated matter. One does not get to move from an average athlete to an exceptional one by changing genders. Or maybe one does, if the power elite decide that “transgender inclusion” is more important than fairness in athletic competition. What is the point of athletic competition? Why segregate sports at all? As I wrote a few days ago in the blog The Casual Use of Propagandistic Language Surrounding Sex and Gender “Maybe it’s time to end sex segregation in sports. If authorities are not going to recognize the biological differences between men and women, then why put women at a distinct competitive disadvantage in divisions that were created specifically for them in order to level the playing field? Just eliminate women’s sports altogether and let individuals compete regardless of sex. Why all the pretense about hormone levels and such? Abandon any pretense to science altogether and just throw individuals into the arena and let the best person win.”
The framing of NPR reporting reveals that state media (which should be public media) has been captured by progressives who are determined to push a cultural and ideological agenda rationalized by the crack pot theories of academic elites and political activists that have come to dominate popular discourse. Without the power of the corporate state behind them, these “theories” would remain outside the boundaries of acceptable scientific discourse. In light of the power of the corporate state, my greatest fear is that these ideas will corrupt science so thoroughly that it will become difficult for people to know what science is anymore, erasing centuries of progress in enlightenment. Elites will simply appeal to ideology that pretends to be science (scientism) and the masses will shrug their collective shoulders.
freedom and reason 