Women, Men, and Sport (Part 1)
At least for the purposes of sport, the line between women and men is not blurry
Many of you who will read this don’t know that Julie and I led another life before we started Substacking. For several decades, Julie was a seriously good triathlete. Her superpower wasn’t obvious to look at her - she wasn’t seven feet tall like Wilt Chamberlain, nor did she look like she could lift a house like an Olympic weightlifter. But she had an incredible “aerobic engine” that enabled her (along with a hell of a lot of hard work) to compete at an elite international level for many years in long-distance triathlon. I was the tag-along husband. Good at a local level, but not at all in her league. I’ll come back to us in Part 3.
Although some in the laptop classes consider sport frivolous, we love it. Besides competing in hundreds of events ourselves from the 1980’s until recently, we ran a swim club for nearly 20 years, organized running races, bicycling events, and more. We still look at sport as a means to physical and mental health and community-building.
Sadly, like so many other things that used to be fun, positive, and a respite from politics and the stresses of the workaday world, sport has been caught up in the net of the culture wars. Just one aspect of cultural battles being fought in the sporting arena is the issue of transgender athletes.
Let me briefly pause to give a few definitions.
A natal male is someone born with male genetics, hormones and characteristics. A natal female is someone born with female genetics, hormones, and characteristics.
MTF (male-to-female) trans means a person born male who later in life changes to self-identify as female. FTM trans is the opposite.
“Intersex” describes a person born without the typical binary sex characteristics. This can be due to a number of genetic conditions. This is a rare condition.
A “disorder of sexual differentiation” or DSD is what can cause people to either be intersex, or display outward sex characteristics that are a mismatch with their chromosomal/genetically determined sex. ie: a person can be XY but in every way appear as a female, or vice-versa be XX and appear to be male. DSD’s are also rare.
The issue of male-to-female (MTF) transgender athletes competing in women’s events is very difficult, as it pits the realities of science and human physiology against our cultural inertia, which includes an extreme push for “inclusivity”.
Although the issue of MTF trans in women’s sports has started to receive a bit of pushback, it’s far from solved. It is not inconsequential, but rather an issue that threatens the future of women’s sport. I will attempt to explain in some detail why this is true.
Most female athletes feel too uncomfortable to speak out against inclusion of MTF-trans in their sporting events. Such complaints can sound like sour grapes. Like an excuse for not winning. One is automatically accused of being “transphobic”. So women (and men) keep quiet. And women lose.
This is not a new issue
The issue of gender classification in women’s sports has been a problem for a long, long time
When I was a medical student, I looked after an elderly man who I’ll call Bob. I had occasion to sit with him for quite some time, and we chatted. Bob was (I believe) in his 80’s, but looked fit. He looked at my build (scrawny) and my running shoes (worn) and asked if I was a runner. Our conversation was “off to the races”.
Bob had been a sprinter way back when and “lettered” for Dalhousie University in Halifax, when lettering was a thing. He told me a story I will never forget.
He recalled that there was a serious professional track and field event coming up in Canada. International competitors had arrived (by sea at that point in the history of travel) and one of the female sprinters was staying in town for a few days before travelling on to the race. She wanted to do a workout to shake out the cobwebs from travel and was warming up on the infield. Bob and his teammates had just finished their workout and were sitting in the bleachers. Her coach approached. Would one (or a few of them) mind running a few practice sprints against her? She pushed herself much better when she had someone to run against. Bob agreed, but his friends made excuses.
Long story short, he got his ass handed to him over and over. His friends stayed politely quiet as they watched. But once out of earshot of the coach and the female athlete, they never let him live it down that he had been shown up by a WOMAN!
Many years later, Bob picked up the morning newspaper and read that the lady he ran against had died. The autopsy “showed she was actually a man”. (His words). I remember the next thing he said verbatim: “The only thing I regretted was that all of the guys who had laughed at me were dead, so I couldn’t show them the article”.
Many years after med school I stumbled across an article about a female sprinter named Stella Walsh. I pieced together given Bob’s age and the unique story that this was the woman who had bested Bob. The year was likely 1935, when she came to run in the Canadian track-and-field championships (winning the 40 and 60-yard dashes, and setting a new Canadian record in the process).
Stella was a standout sprinter, including winning Olympic medals, but there was suspicion at the time that she was not actually female. Her premature death (she was sadly shot during an attempted mugging at age 69) confirmed what many people were long suspicious of. She had “ambiguous genitalia” on autopsy. She wasn’t clearly a man, but was clearly not a typical woman either. She had the benefit of naturally-produced testosterone. You can read a long article about her here.
After her autopsy results became public, there were calls for her medals to be rescinded, including from a Canadian sprinter who had come second to her. The science can be clear, but politics are always more fuzzy. Rightly or wrongly, she remains a female Olympic champion.
Intersex is a challenging issue for sporting regulators
Stella was intersex - a rare condition but one that presents legitimately challenging problems logically and scientifically, let alone politically. Stella likely didn’t “decide” to be female. She was intersex, and it is likely that as a baby her parents decided to raise her as a female, for better and for worse.
Because intersex athletes have the advantages of male hormones and body characteristics, they have significant advantages over women in sport.
In 2023, this problem of “What is a Woman” in the sporting world is not just an issue of intersex athletes but also the recently-much-more-numerous men who transition (to different extents) and then claim to be women for purposes of sport categorization.
Melissa Bishop - the top 800m runner nobody ever heard of
The above photo shows the top 3 people from the women’s 800m final at the Rio Olympics. Notably absent, and now forgotten, because she came 4th by a hair, was a Canadian runner by the name of Melissa Bishop. Melissa was the best female 800m ever in our country: naturally gifted, and having honed her craft through years of dedication and hard work with the goal of being best in the world. She was beaten by Caster Semenya (who is self-admittedly intersex) and 2 other people who in all likelihood to have DSD’s. I heard Bishop interviewed immediately after the race. Her interview was notable for her obvious frustration, and the things she could have - but didn’t, and as far as I know has never - said. To my knowledge there was nobody - from the Canadian Olympic Committee, her sponsors, a politician, anyone - who spoke out to say perhaps this result was unfair. She was alone in her loss and frustration. I can’t even imagine how hard that was for her to have been thwarted from the primary goal of her life to that point. Thwarted not by underperformance, or lack of commitment, or simply that another woman was better, but by being beaten by people with advantages due to male genetic traits.
Just off the top of my head, in the last number of years we have the thorny issue of Caster Semenya mentioned above, a trans weightlifter from New Zealand, an MMA fighter who broke a female opponent’s facial bones, and most recently, an NCAA swimmer named Will Thomas who changed his name to Lia and now identifies as female. Lia swam 3 years as a male in the NCAA, then crushed the competition after switching to the female category in 2021-22.
This is just a short list. A quick google search (better to use Qwant.com, as google will automatically “politically correct” your search results) will show that this has become a big issue at the high school, college, and now Olympic levels.
Is it fair for someone who has the physical advantages afforded by male hormones and male pubertal development to switch to the female category? From (notoriously non-right-wing) Wikipedia: “By the conclusion of Thomas's swimming career at UPenn in 2022, her rank had moved from 65th on the men's team to 1st on the women's team in the 500-yard freestyle, and 554th on the men's team to 5th on the women's team in the 200-yard freestyle”. (I think these are actually NCAA and not team rankings, but am quoting Wikipedia directly)
In part two of this series, I’ll explain the science around this issue: science that has increasingly been obfuscated by political correctness.
Thanks for another great article. as I'm sure you are both aware, this is a much larger story than blurring sexual identity in sports and its consequential 'unfairness'. It is, as Jennifer Bilek has suggested, ultimately an on-ramp to transhumanism, which I'm sure you'll deal with in subsequent installments.
First, you 'normalize' anything Goes and Nothing Matters, in a strategy to induce identity and cultural vertigo, and then you roll out (mandate) the New Normal.
Five years ago I would have balked at these suggestions. But the evidence is everywhere to be seen.
Jennifer Bilek's blog: https://www.the11thhourblog.com/
Policy Horizons Canada : The future of "Reproduction"
https://youtu.be/EB3RPHU34YI?list=PLKk1nn40bfVDtsire0deChL7axHEqUBpf
Policy Horizons Canada: What Is Biodigital Convergence?
https://youtu.be/YDuv63Qa8DE
Note how the public messaging of this strange and clandestine "forecasting think tank" within the government of Canada has such tight fidelity with WEF promotional materials in its cartoonish and schizophrenic iconography, music choice, and overall texture and flavour.
Canada is a Beta test because we are a credulous, trusting, innocent and naive people.
Like so many things of recent years, more BS. If you call it out, you are obviously shunned and shamed. Society is being destroyed, fabric by fabric.