London Review of Books’ contribution to sex & boxing furore

[SarkyMummy]

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/august/fair-competition

This article is being promoted via Instagram feeds, I assume to garner some clicks, but it reads to me like a very confused set of non-arguments. Can anyone salvage anything from the wreckage?

Blimey. It seems pretty confused. But one thing I get from it is that IK and various other non-white athletes from the global south ( including Caster) have been picked on because we in the north are prejudiced against them, as we used to be against the Russian women because we judged that they didn't look feminine enough.

Yes. And I think that may be fair. But this seems to ignore the fact that people’s sense of unfairness about these athletes is driven by medical evidence.

Oh my God.

Yes of course racism, both individual and structural, exists and is as visible in sport as anywhere else.

Poor application of true consent in surgery to individuals with DSDs is a scandal.

None of this means it is impossible to define what being female is, or impossible to define what sex people with DSDs are.

And the East German athletes that were 'subjected to gender testing' were women being coercively and sometimes unknowingly doped by corrupt regimes for political advantage. Isn't that a scandal too? And if you allow sex to be real, can't you analyse the sexist element to that?

Once more the Thai boxer is not even mentioned in this. And once more the goalposts of the past are hurried forward. The specific changes in sport rules that gave permitted this are now a foggy collective 21st century 'it ws always like this, everything was fine once we got away from' what Mark Adams deathlessly called 'the bad old days of sex testing'.

What a fucking ignorant (or deliberately manipulative) MESS.

Thanks for posting this OP, I shared a link on the megathread but had wondered if it deserved its own. I've literally this second been looking at the author's Twitter page and her pinned Tweet advertises a paper published in 2022 entitled 'You Ain’t Woman Enough: Tracing the Policing of Intersexuality in Sports and the Clinic' which she describes as an 'article on the surveillance of intersexuality'. I haven't read it.

One reason why there a no white western athletes with DSDs are appearing in the Olympics as female is that they would have been tested as infants, had a Y chromosome identified and been registered as male so would not be eligible!

This used to happen in the west as well. Austrian skier Erik Schinegger (born in the 1940s) discovered he was male in his late teens.

To suggest women’s issue with IK is racism is untrue but in any event ignores the large number of black and non-white athletes pursuing their sport fairly in their correct sex class. These black and non- white sportswomen also lose out when men compete as women in their sport. It’s the XY chromosomes we object to in our sports. Skin colour is irrelevant. Male chromosomes and advantage are not.

@maltravers I could not agree more.

It is in fact observably true that a majority of men and women of particular ethnic origins actually excel in particular sports, and I've never seen anyone class that as an 'unfair' advantage. Because it isn't 'unfair', The attempt to sandwich actual unfair advantage with racial difference is in fact the only racially-motivated commentary I can see here.

It is so mental to me that people are pretending this isn't the case, that I am fairly sure they are, in some way that I can't quite understand, deliberately overlooking it.

It is also known that these specific types of DSD's are more prevalent in African and Asian populations.

They could have found a picture without razor burn, surely.

If we eventually see an XY-5ARD white Western athlete competing against WOC they'll have to come up with new talking points.

Can anyone salvage anything from the wreckage?

Sorry Sarky, I tried in vain. It’s just left me wondering the writer got commissioned by the London Review of Books.

It's unlikely tbh. In my experience, very few genitalia are truly ambiguous to the point where you can't tell, most just 'don't look right'. If there was even the tiniest doubt chromosomes are tested.
But a bifid (split in two down the seam) scrotum with no testes present with a buried micropenis could be assumed to be female if the observer hadn't come across ambiguous genitalia before and there's also a social and cultural bias where it's considered better for them to be assumed female because that's not as bad as being a male without a functioning penis.

If the complaints are motivated by racism, how come all the other black or brown female athletes went unchallenged?

It always strikes me that this 'black and brown women don't look like women' is the most racist thing of all. Also something I have never heard, probably because I don't live in the USA.

The first athletes to disappear after sex testing was introduced for female athletes in 1966 were white Russian athletes.

And the author even makes that point, without seeming to notice that she's contradicted herself...

Thanks all. I’ve always, perhaps naively, assumed that LRB was concerned with - I don't know - rigour of thought, evidence? But this piece really threw me and underlined how unmoored from reason thus debate has become.

I think what we're seeing is a kind of oppositional defiance from many "right thinking" organisations that is aimed at the political right. Musk says the boxers are men and have an unfair advantage. And as Musk says it, it must be wrong and therefore must be vocally opposed... because that's how facts work now.

US and UK politics has got caught up in this viscious circle where populists on the fringes on both sides have turned their political opposites into existential threats that must be countered at all costs. Sensible positions like "we want to eliminate toxic car pollutants from housing estates" or "men shouldn't be fighting women in the boxing ring" become test cases for political purity. Are you on the good side or the bad side? The thought that huge swathes of daily life should be fairly apolitical and don't need to be part of a political ideology never seems to occur to them. Possibly on purpose.

And because social media is such a shit-show, those in the middle (e.g. the BBC), those who rely on clicks from over-emotional progressives (e.g. the Guardian) and those whose natural readership are already right-wing fruit loops (e.g. the Telegraph) get dragged along in the wake of the various Twitter storms. And to stay relevant they contribute to the mess.

That's interesting, were they being doped (knowingly or not) with testosterone, or DSD?

When I've spoken to people about this, they seem to be entirely unaware that is the case.

The sensible argument (via Dr Emma Hilton) is that these DSDs appear to cluster in certain countries/races/ethnicities because the medical systems in those countries are not so universal, and are doing basic stuff to keep populations alive.

She also points out that in some cultures, women/girls are seen as lesser or imperfect boys/men, and so an apparently imperfect male baby might well be re-assigned as a girl, because he is an imperfect male.

It's worth listening/watching Dr Hilton on Andrew Gold's show, Heretics. She's really clear, sensible and extremely compassionate about people such as Khalif and Semenya.

John Lanchester had an explainey 'short cut' piece about Caster Semenya in the LRB fifteen years ago, and even then all the confusions and misleading stories were getting set in, reference to 'gender testing' not 'sex testing' and a final respectful reference to 'Ms Semenya'.

That case was a significant place-marker for the genderist campaign.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n19/john-lanchester/short-cuts

I think there’s also an undercurrent here - if males with DSD’s were forced to compete with men, then they wouldn’t be competitive, and it’s not ‘fair’ to force a whole (tiny!) group out of competition. I do think the same applies to transwomen.

Of course, the argument is ridiculous. The vast majority of people were born with a body which is never going to achieve elite athleticism, no matter how hard they train. Women’s sport is not a consolation prize for non-elite men

In any case, we have Olympic categories for athletes with conditions that make them unable to compete with the general population.