I listened to the Clue Podcast on women in sport

[MrsWednesdayteatime]

I just found it really sinister

helloclue.com/podcast/hormonal-podcast-clue

It's the third podcast on the page (I can't link directly)

I'm not great at summing up my feelings on this, but

From the transcript
In other words: You can't say that all individuals with ovaries are women. Or that all individuals with testes are men. There are actually women who have testes. So, this is true for every single sex trait you can think about

And

And so you might say, “Well why? If you want to know somebody’s testosterone level, don't you just look in the blood grab a blood sample?” And that's absolutely one way to determine it. But there's two pieces to having testosterone. One is that you have a level in your body. The other is that you have tissues or receptors that respond to it and you need both of those pieces in order for your body to be able to use the testosterone that you have.So, this is where the genital exam comes in. Clinicians and others think that the clitoral size is a very good indicator of a person's testosterone receptivity. Basically what they do is a gynecological exam to look at the size of the clitoris and in many ways this must sound utterly ridiculous, like you know there's no such thing as clitoral weightlifting. So, they look at the clitoral size to determine, as a proxy if you will, to try to understand how sensitive someone's tissues are. And essentially, the larger the clitoris, the more bang for the buck, they think, in terms of somebody’s athletic capacity

And I think they go on to conclude that sex segregation is probably quiet patronising and could be done away with in many sports

And I think that's a really important question to ask. I think one of the very first questions to ask is as long as sport is sex segregated, why are things like ice skating routines different lengths for men and women there is no reason for that to be the case. So there's a lot of ways, right, in which gender ideology is infusing these regulations, is infusing what we think is right, in ways that are harmful to women. And so one of the things that I've long thought is that protection of women is the cloak under which discrimination against women takes place. And if we want to stop that discrimination I think it's important to open for conversation the assumed necessity of sex segregation for all sports

In the whole podcast they don't mention TW, only intersex women & women,

Help me get my head around this! For an app that crows about it's basis in/love of science this is creepy & gaslighting stuff?

Intersex is a tricky area , but could be thought of as a type of disability. A genetic disorder that means your body doesn't do what is expected. You could be blind, have Down's syndrome, be intersex.

None of that means that we don't have 2 basic sexes ( and that blindness isn't a disability)

It does mean that we should think how we can best ensure all people are fully included in society. In many cases, that is through special categories of sporting event for such people. It may be that science can help us say that many DSD people can compete as one or the other sex, perhaps with some additional constraints

Just because it's difficult doesn't mean we should abandon sex classes for most sport, becuase then instead of excluding a small group of people, you would then be excluding a large group of people. Ie making things worse

Clue are incredibly woke. I have stopped using them. It irritates me no end that they have all this interesting science around menstruation, but they somehow refuse to recognise that only females menstruate.