PlayYouLikeAShark
Thanks for posting that, it goes much more into the definitions of an “affected athlete” and so on than most and the importance of protecting girls and women’s sports for girls and women in both a broad and very personal (to author) way.
One gem excerpt relevant to this discussion:
“And so, when we are told that 46, XY males with DSD who identify as female are no different from us because identity is all that matters, the effect is to erase our deeply significant, sex-specific experience both on and off the track. When we are told these things directly and indirectly by sports governing bodies, we feel betrayed. We also feel robbed: of the spots on the podium; of the psychic, financial, and professional goods that would have flowed from earning our places there; and of the opportunities to be role models for little girls who need to see strong, victorious females so that they can dream big dreams themselves. Social science literature focused on race and sex is replete with empirical evidence supporting the common-sense intuition that it matters that people can see successful role models who look like them. To quote Beyoncé, quoting Marian Wright Edelman: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
When we are told that 46, XY males with DSD who identify as female are simply “women with hyperandrogenism,” or “women with high T,” we aren’t fooled. We are just puzzled about why others are—or would want to pretend to be. Elite sport is in the business of bodies, what they can do, and how beautiful they are at their fittest. The movement to normalize and empower gender non-conforming people is enormously valuable, but this doesn’t explain why we would want to replace sex with identity in this of all settings, since the effect of this move is not only to erase our distinguishing traits from the conversation, but also—literally—our bodies from the podium.
Finally, when we are told that we are “ignorant” and “racist” when we notice that males with DSD have male secondary sex characteristics, the effect is to denigrate our well-honed, protective instincts and also our intelligence. The truth is that we know secondary sex characteristics well. We watched them develop over the course of our adolescences and, even on the track, we were witness to their effects on our relative performances: At 12 years old, we were the same or sometimes even faster than the boys, but over time, and certainly by age 18, those same boys were unreachable. For those brown girls and women among us—and we are plentiful in the women’s 800—the effect of these charges of ignorance and racism, especially when they are leveled by white people, is itself racist: as though we somehow can’t tell males from females, or as though we all look like men.
Whenever females in the field have dared to express their concerns about these various erasures, Ms. Semenya’s public supporters can be counted on to launch aggressive public attacks, disingenuously charging them with “ignorance,” bigotry and a lack of sportsmanship. The effect for the females in the field is to censor their voices in their own spaces. It is to bully them into a new and ironic subordination: In a setting that was carved out for females so that they would be protected from athletic dominance by males, they are not permitted even to take note of that subordination. If their faces or body language betray even the slightest hint of unease, Ms. Semenya’s supporters pounce with op-eds and Twitter storms loaded with personal attacks. And so, they learn to stand stoic at the end of each race, and to freeze their faces into what they hope is a wholly neutral, inoffensive expression. Some have sought to turn this forced silence and feigned neutrality into evidence that the female field is actually comfortable with the current state of affairs. This effort would be funny if it weren’t so Kafkaesque. As Sarah Ditum wrote in The Economist last year,
[t]here is a word for a situation where women talking about female bodies is considered impermissibly antisocial, where describing the consequences of sexism for women is systematically impeded, where resources for women are redistributed to male users while resources for men are left in male hands, and where “male” and “female” are rigidly associated with masculinity and femininity. That word is not “progressive”, “liberal” or any of the other terms usually associated with trans activism. The word is misogyny.
A particularly misogynistic form of the poor sportsmanship story is that the females in the field who express concern are sore losers who just aren’t as talented as the biologically male athletes who beat them. Ms. Semenya’s supporters were especially vicious to Great Britain’s Lynsey Sharp, who was fifth in the women’s 800 meters final at the Rio Olympics, after she vented her understandable frustration in her post-race press conference. Ignoring the fact that Ms. Sharp’s performance would have earned her at least a bronze medal had a T-based eligibility rule been in effect, journalists wrote that she wouldn’t have complained if she’d medaled, and that she didn’t medal because she isn’t as talented or doesn’t work as hard as the three male-bodied athletes who did.
These critics betray their own ignorance when they say these things. They don’t know that 18-year-old males routinely run in the 1:55 range, but that running this fast would be impossible even for the world’s best 18-year-old female. They don’t know that men’s championship events are often run tactically but that women’s never are, at least not by the biological females in the race, because the latter don’t have the explosive power to pull off late-race surges; or that, even at their peak, non-doped females can’t plan to negative split–run faster in the fourth 200 meters than the second or third—in a world class race. It isn’t awesome to watch athletes do these things in women’s races; it’s a universal tell.
Females who have specialized in the 800 meters do know these things, as well as our event’s androgen-plagued history: For a long time, the event was overwhelmingly dominated by women who were doping. In the current period, the spurious hormones are mostly the result of 46, XY males with DSDs. In both cases, the athletes in question may or may not have known that they were being doped, or recruited for their DSDs, by their federations to increase their country’s medal count. For the non-doped females on the track, though, the difference is mostly irrelevant.
Bullying people into silence isn’t a respectable solution to policy disagreements. It’s wrong to treat people as though their voice is illegitimate simply because you would prefer to control the narrative. In this space that’s been set aside for our bodies precisely because they are different, it’s especially insidious to try to disguise a new form of female subordination—“You can’t talk about her body”—as progressive politics”