Transcript of R4 RM/ED/SD intervew part 1:
ED: There is a growing row as to whether or not transwomen should be competing against natal women, people born as women, in women’s sport There was a girls track race in Connecticut earlier this month - transwomen won the first two places and some say this is distorting women’s sport and it’ll do so more, as more social attitudes change and more people feel free to redefine their gender at birth.
Now this is a somewhat a different debate to whether people who are born intersex can compete - that’s the one Caster Semenya is litigating at the moment but the trans debate rapidly becoming one of the most fraught issue in sport.
Now earlier I spoke to Rachel McKinnon. She’s a world champion cyclist, trans, a professor of philosophy, and an activist as well, and I asked her whether gender, which is sometimes seen as subjective, and psychological, or biological sex, should be the factor for determining distinction for sporting purposes.
RM: it’s important to recognise that the IOC and therefore any international sports organisation and every national Olympic committee, they do not make any distinction between sex and gender, Also many governments so the Canadian government, the US government, the British government, they treat sex and gender interchangeably, so on my birth certificate it says female, which is a sex term. None of my identification says woman on it, they all say female and so for the purposes of sport in a 2015 court decision at the court of arbitration for sport, they take your legally recognised sex or gender as your sex for sport.
ED: But you’re not making the contention, are you, that sex and gender are literally the same thing, you’re saying we treat them as the same thing. Or are you saying they are the same thing?
RM: They are both socially constructed concepts and categories. Gender is made out of social stuff and sex is made up of biological stuff…
ED: Yeah, that’s not social construct is it, I mean, many babies are born boys and many babies are born girls. There are non-socially constructed differences there, clearly, aren’t there?
RM: No, actually, pick a natural physical characteristic we can find boys that have it and girls that have it.
ED: Can I ask you this, this is important. Taking what you say, why do we have separate sport for women and men?
RM: Well, just to finish the point, there are many intersex conditions. Around 2% of the world’s population has some form of intersex condition. That is 140 million people worldwide, so this is not an aberration. These are lots of people. There are ways, for example, for someone to be born with XY chromosomes, to produce testosterone but they have complete androgen insensitivity syndrome so they develop as phenotypically female from birth. There are ways to be XX and yet develop male. There are XXY, there are XYY, there’s an XO chromosome make-up, so the idea that there are only two sexes and that we can neatly carve them up based on biology is a fiction.
ED: Mmm. I think, you know, there are cases, the Caster Semenya cases, going through the court for arbitration for sport, that precise issue is being dealt with. But that would take you, I think, to some extent, back to biological interpretations of the difference, would it not?
RM: No. The point behind the (?) court of arbitration for sport decision and what I fully expect in the Caster Semenya case is that there is no scientific evidence supporting a testosterone limit on women.
All of the current scientific evidence we have shows no relationship between endogenous natural testosterone and performance.
ED: Can I ask you this, do you think it is transphobic to ask the question whether you are close enough to biologically female that you should be in, if you like, the female sport, the women’s sport?
RM: I don’t think questions in themselves per se are transphobic, but there are absolutely transphobic ways to ask questions. it is not the case that anyone who supports trans-inclusive sport has called someone transphobic merely because they disagree with us. However, the ways in which these people like Martina Navratilova are disagreeing with us are transphobic because they’re based on irrational fears, misleading and lies about transwomen.
D: I wonder how you will ever convince people that born male, identifying as female, is the same thing.
RM: So there’s always going to be people I can’t change their mind. But first again, there is no relationship between performance and endogenous testosterone . The second is that is a myth that all men have more testosterone than all women. In fact, if you look at the graph of the distribution of natural testosterone values, the men’s values go all the way to the bottom of the bottom of the women’s values. So the men’s values go from basically 0 up to about 40 or 50 ng/dl per litre, the women’s range go from about 0 to 20 to 30 ng/dl per litre. Also 16.5% of elite men are already within the female range of testosterone. There is no relationship between testosterone and performance between endogenous. There is a relationship between exogenous, which is why it’s doping. The final point I want to make is that some sports are gender-segregated not for biological reasons but for social reasons, for example I’d like to talk about the Olympic shooting event back in in, I believe it was 1992, it was not gender segregated men and women competed together, a Chinese woman, Zhang Shan, won the gold medal in the 1992 Olympics , in the 1996 Olympics they gender-segregated the sport, and did not offer a women’s event, so the idea we only gender-segregate sport because of biological reasons is a lie, we gender-segregate darts, billiards, and all kinds of other sports that there is no physical justification for, there’s only a social justification. And it’s not only a social justification.
ED: Rachel McKinnon. World champion cyclist. Trans activist. Let’s get some comments on what you’ve just heard there from Sarah Ditum, columnist, critic, a feminist. Could we start Sarah with that last point that the distinction between male and female support is not about biology because we distinguish in things like shooting which the biology doesn’t really play any part?