That Alice Dreger piece is illustrative of the manipulative and disingenuous arguments that are being forwarded in favour of males in women's sports.
It:
- Spends a lot of time guilt-tripping readers with gender studies guff about 'identity' and what makes a 'real woman', which is irrelevant to sports, and falsely implies that those who say it isn't fair for intersex males to compete against females are denying the dignity and worth of intersex males and/or their right to be recognised socially as women, and even driving them to suicide.
2.) Claims that the existence of intersex conditions means that male and female don't exist as coherent categories, and athletic officials cannot reasonably distinguish between them.
- Spuriously equates differences in body size and shape between members of the same sex to the physiological differences between the sexes, and implies that it therefore follows that dividing sporting competitions by sex makes no more sense than dividing them by height or arm span.
I would add a point 4) for the ludicrous 'It's all hormones, innit?' bit where she says that because female athletes are allowed to use the pill they have no grounds to object to competing against a male with internal testes pumping out testosterone, but I'm losing the will to engage further with that piece. It's just so pomo and fundamentally dishonest.
The one thing I DO agree with Dreger on is that sporting bodies need to drop their singular focus on testosterone as the only marker of 'advantage'. Even with lower testosterone levels, male athletes have different skeletal structures, more muscle fibres and larger hearts and lungs. That should be enough to exclude them from women's sport.
BTW physiologist Ross Tucker deftly shoots down the absurd and disingenuous argument made in point 3 here:
We have a separate category for women because without it, no women would even make the Olympic Games (with the exception of equestrian). Most of the women’s world records, even doped, lie outside the top 5000 times run by men. Radcliffe’s marathon WR, for instance, is beaten by between 250 and 300 men per year. Without a women’s category, elite sport would be exclusively male.
That premise hopefully agreed, we then see that the presence of the Y-chromosome is THE single greatest genetic “advantage” a person can have. That doesn’t mean that all men outperform all women, but it means that for elite sport discussion, that Y-chromosome, and specifically the SRY gene on it, which directs the formation of testes and the production of Testosterone, is a key criteria on which to separate people into categories...
The advantage enjoyed by a Semenya is not the same as the one enjoyed by say, Usain Bolt, or LeBron James, or Michael Phelps, because we don’t compete in categories of fast-twitch fiber, or height, or foot size (pick your over simplification for performance here). So Semenya has a genetic advantage, by virtue of A) having a Y-chromosome and testes, and B) being unable to use that T and/or one of its derivatives enough to have developed fully male.