Alice Dreger is a huge disappointment

[sourdoughismyreligion]

https://twitter.com/AliceDreger/status/1786417022856786056

''Creating hormonal classes within certain sports could balance athletic fairness with respect for gender self-identification by recognizing the biology that matters while not simply equating hormone levels with gender identity. Read more of my oped:''

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/05/03/opinion/hormonal-classes-sports/?event=event25

There is an archived version available.

Dreger is not a stupid woman, but in this her intelligence is being put to use in service to a particularly stupid belief system, the result of which is this absolute nonsense. It has been pointed out to her, repeatedly, that it isn't hormone levels at a particular moment in time that matter, it's the impact these hormones had during puberty.

She has earned herself one hell of a ratio, but I expect this will cause her to double down on her ridiculous beliefs.

I really liked Galileo's Middle Finger :(

She’s a disappointment and not very convincing in her argument (such as it is). She was in an online debate with Colin Wright a few months ago and trying to get her to admit to any of the possible outcomes of her argument was like trying to nail jelly to the wall - she refused to accept there were any possible negative outcomes.

Posted before, but seems pretty relevant here...
https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/why-smart-people-hold-stupid-beliefs

The whole point of Galileo's Middle Finger is that you can't allow activism to dictate scientific truth.

Maybe the roasting she got from TRAs over that has had an effect. She was an early trans ally, long before it was fashionable, and I think she expected that would give her some protection when she went into areas TRAs would rather not have mentioned.

From DameMaud's link (IPC = Identity-protective cognition)

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

What this means is that, while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing.

(my italics)
I was trying to remember where and what I'd read about this, the seemingly intelligent people having such a blind spot, so i'm grateful to Maud for the link

Nobody is equating hormone levels with gender identity.

Gender identity is something only trans identifying people believe they have, which is literally not relevant to anyone or anything else, particularly sport which we play with our physical bodies.

Nobody is equating hormone levels with gender identity.

Nor are we equating sex with gender identity. We're just separating sport by sex, because it works. Sport can ignore gender identity totally.

And, fairly obviously, if you decided you were segregating men and women on the basis of hormone levels rather than sex, then obviously we'd start seeing demands for legal hormone level changes, and insistence that men's hormone level identity should override the reality of their hormone levels.

Men want women's things. Whatever increasingly-convoluted scheme you might come with to say men aren't women, they'll insist it shouldn't apply to them.

If you've conceded "sex" rules can't keep out men, how do you think you'll hold the line on "hormone levels"?

So we have a great system for ensuring fair sport ( sex) where a simple cheek swab might be necessary in some sports ( once then done for life) but we should replace it with a system of measuring thousands of competitors blood levels continuously for ever 🤔

And the weight classes argument is stupid because even in sports with weight classes like boxing they are still first divided by sex.
so she is suggesting in boxing to have a division by hormones first and then a division by weight.

sash

absolutely

i am taller than dh by 2 inches and heavier by nearly 2 stone and i would be slaughtered in an actual fight with him

I thought Galileo's Middle Finger was great. This is so disappointing. It's just cowardice really.

The way I remember it is, Dreger's background is not science as such but history and philosophy of science, which is why I found her so interesting. And her early academic work was in DSDs, which was a really niche subject back then. I think she was one of the first public advocates for people with DSDs.

The way I read her old stance is that she was a genuine trans ally. She wanted to speak up for a small group on the margins of society, and thought she could do it without embracing queer theory or any of the associated pseudo-scientific gobbledegook. Lots of us have been there, and it was tenable when trans just meant a tiny number of HSTS who didn't cause any trouble.

Then came the book, and her defence of Blanchard and Bailey, and all hell broke loose. Dreger didn't know the first rule of Malaga Airport is you don't talk about Malaga Airport.

That's how I read her now coming out with word salad about multiple sexes that she must know isn't true. You can read it as cowardice, but being monstered by people you thought were your friends and allies can have quite an effect. So I think she's done what she warned against in the book, and defaulted to a position that's not true but is politically and socially comfortable for her.

Here is Alice Dreger in a debate: Is Sex Binary? from a couple of weeks ago.

She is highly intelligent, and argues cleverly, but says a lot of words that don't seem to amount to much. Also, if you watch the whole thing you'll see aspects of slippery-ness, for example one informed member of the audience stated she had misrepresented a scientific paper by omission, and what she said about the Faʻafafine was not true. Her Jesuitical arguments about how everyone has a sex assigned at birth were tiresome. Again, a member of the audience helpfully asked "what about societies where people's birth sex is not recorded?"

Essentially, her arguments are to prop up the fact that as a progressive identifying person, the overriding consideration is that society must be kind by not excluding the most vulnerable. But in doing this she gets "intersex" to do most of the heavy lifting and she misses some really basic points, for example in her world it's fine to exclude people, presumably on an individual-by-indvidual basis, when they've done something that provides a justification for them to be excluded. Just think for a moment what that means.