Whelp, it’s happening again—this year to Lin Yu-Ting and
Imane Khelif. It seems that this is what we have to look forward to now at
every Olympics. One or more unabashedly strong and powerful women athletes will
have their sex challenged, and outrage will wash over the gender-policing,
transphobic sector of the internet. One or more women will be found to have an
intersex trait, or in this year’s cases, be claimed to have an intersex trait—and
out will spill the bigots. One pile of bigots will frame them as trans women—even
though they were assigned female at birth, raised as girls, and lived all their
lives as women. The second pile will claim they are intersex “freaks of nature,”
bizarre creatures who should not be allowed to compete with “real” women.
Both groups of bigots will engage in the same cruel and ugly
behavior. They’ll call the women athletes men and pronoun them “he.” They’ll
present them as a threat to the “real women” competing—both in terms of “stealing”
women’s medals and as a pure physical threat. They will claim the athletes’
bodies are ugly and disgusting.
It’s so depressing, as an intersex person, to witness this.
So let me go over the reality once more. I’ll neatly number the points for you
so you can be allies and use them in rebuttals!
1. 1. All women Olympic athletes used to be subjected
to “gender testing,” while men have never faced this gatekeeping. Why? Because
sex and gender policing always pretend to be protecting "real women"
from "fake ones" who would somehow hurt them. But in fact, they boil
down to preserving the power that has been given to people categorized as male,
by insisting that "real women" are vulnerable, small, submissive,
weak, and men innately superior to them.
2.
2. The Olympics no longer “gender test” all women
competitors. Instead, this is left up to each sporting organization, and they
all have different rules, or make them up on the spot when some woman’s status
is challenged. And guess what? The women whose gender is challenged are now
almost all women of color whose gender expression is androgynous or masculine. Typically,
the challenges are initiated by femme white women athletes who claim to need
protection from their competitors. This reflects ideologies of ideal womanhood
held by conservative white people.
3. 3. Actually, femme white women are just as likely
to turn out to have an intersex trait as anyone else! In fact, it’s quite
common for intersex women with a Y chromosome to (1) have no idea they are
intersex, and (2) have bodies that are considered especially feminine looking,
because their bodies do not respond to testosterone much or at all, meaning,
for example, that they grow little or no body hair on their legs or underarms
or pubic area.
4.
4. We engage in magical thinking about
testosterone, just as we do about Y chromosomes. Sex is a spectrum, and
testosterone levels vary widely among people assigned the same sex at birth. In fact, when
studied, it turns out that 17% of elite cis men athletes have testosterone levels
below the bottom of the "male range." These men are not disqualified
as "cheating by being intersex." They aren't regulated at all,
probably because it's presumed that their low testosterone must be a
disadvantage. Yet these men with low testosterone are not lesser athletes; they
are just as extraordinary in their performance as the men with typical
testosterone levels. This illustrates how there's no direct relationship between
the amount of testosterone a person produces and their athletic abilities.
5. 5.
If we really, truly, actually believed that
testosterone levels determined ability, then we would test athletes of all
genders and assign them to competition classes by testosterone levels. (The
outcome of such a practice would immediately falsify the ridiculous premise.)
6.
6. All Olympic athletes have very atypical bodies. They
may be endowed naturally with extraordinary levels of fast-twitch muscle, or
unusually flexible joints, or huge hands, or atypically long legs. We do not
police these biological differences, or require that to compete in the
Olympics, you must have an average body. We don't randomly pick citizens of
each nation to compete in international sporting events--we get to see average
people running for the bus all the time. We don't find this exciting, and it's
the very atypicality of elite athletes' bodies that enthralls us. It's only
this very specific type of atypicality--being a woman with hormonal or genital
or chromosomal variance--that is being policed. And it's policed intensively,
intrusively, punitively.
7.
7. Today, in an era of surging transphobia, this policing
of the bodies of muscular androgynous women of color is uglier than ever.
Celebrities like JK Rowling are out there calling women assigned female at
birth predatory men who must be shamed, banned, destroyed, claiming that they
became boxers out of a “male desire to beat up women.” Elon Musk is claiming
the Olympics have been infected with the “woke mind virus” and are letting “men
compete against women.” They are misgendering cis women just as they do trans
women, with disturbing gleeful outrage.
What it boils down to is this: bodies don’t cheat. Intersex statuses
are natural, and found throughout the animal kingdom. Since sex is a spectrum,
the division of it into a binary will always be arbitrary. When the gender
police are allowed to demand that women athletes who don’t look feminine enough
to them be subjected to sex testing, we are punishing women for looking strong and
butch (and in practice, for not being white). Meanwhile, more-gender-conforming
women and everyone classified as male are presumed to be endosex (not
intersex), free from this ugly scrutiny, and not forced to confront the
possibility that they too have intersex traits.
And that’s not fair!
