When Bigots Claim One Thing to Exclude Trans Athletes, and the Opposite to Exclude Intersex Athletes

This is Caster Semeya. Caster was assigned female at birth, without controversy, and raised as a girl. She always loved athletics. She found her calling as a runner, and trained hard, day after day, for years. In 2009, at age 18, she won gold in the World Championships 800 meter race. She was elated. But a competitor claimed to the officials that she did not believe Caster was really a woman. Caster was subjected to “sex verification” by an endocrinologist, a gynecologist, an internal medicine expert, an “expert on gender” and a psychologist. And it was found that she has an intersex status. In fact, the media found out before she did.

Caster has had to live her life under a gender-policing spotlight ever since. She’s been forced to take drugs to suppress her body’s naturally-high levels of testosterone, and had constant social media attention paid to how she dresses, the fact that she is a lesbian, and debates over whether the muscularity of her Black, athletic body reveals her admirable hard work and dedication to her sport, or some intolerable natural advantage.

Lately, transphobic “feminists”, otherwise known as the TERFs, have really been piling on Caster Semenya, in ways that reveal deep hypocrisy. Consider:

TERFs: There are only two sexes, you’re assigned one at birth, and that is your real eternal sex.

Also TERFs: I don’t care if Caster Semenya was assigned female at birth, he’s a man.

TERFs: Being raised as a girl socializes you to be a woman. Being raised as a boy socializes you to be a man. That determines your personality for all eternity and cannot be changed.

Also TERFs: You can tell just by looking at Caster that any attempt to raise him as a girl failed. Caster’s father says that as a child, Caster hated wearing dresses and liked to play sports with the boys.

TERFs: Trans boys are just girls who are tomboys with transgenderist parents! Their parents hate gender transgression and want to convert their inconvenient toyboy daughters into gender-conforming sons! Feminists must stand up for butch girls and save them!

Also TERFs: Caster Semenya walks like a man, dresses like a man, makes muscles like a man, and therefore is a man.

TERFs: When someone says a child or teen is a trans boy, the truth is that the youth is a lesbian, and their parents reject that and are forcing conversion therapy on their lesbian daughters to try to make them appear heterosexual by convincing the poor girls that they are really straight boys! We must stand up for lesbians!

Also TERFs: Caster Semenya married a woman, and the partner wore the white dress while Caster wore pants! Therefore Caster is a man.

TERFs: Prescribing medication to suppress someone’s sex hormones is pointless, as it doesn’t change who you really are. Also, it’s experimental, goes against nature, and is an intolerable thing to suggest to anyone.

Also TERFs: It is absolutely vital that Semenya be made to take testosterone suppressants, and be tested before every race.

TERFs: Taking testosterone or estrogen can’t change your sex. You are the sex you were assigned at birth.

Also TERFs: It’s irrelevant that Caster Semenya was assigned female at birth. Caster’s body was flooded with testosterone at puberty, making him male.

TERFs: Transgenderism is based on enforcing gender stereotypes. It equates being a woman with looking pretty and delicate and wearing makeup and being submissive. That’s evil misogyny!

Also TERFs: I can tell who is really a woman by looking at them, and that’s not a real woman. Caster’s too muscular, never wears makeup, is aggressive, and looks like a man. It’s not misogyny if *I* do the gender-policing.

There’s so much hypocrisy in all of this. And lest we forget, in Caster Semeya’s case, a whole lot of racism as well. The competitors who have challenged Caster’s right to compete have all been white women, crying white-women tears for the cameras. The TERFs who’ve been serving as talking heads in media interviews? Also a bunch of white women. There’s one who seems to find every Twitter conversation on the topic and post photos contrasting women athletes she claims are “really men” due to presumed intersex status—every one of them Black or brown—with women she says have been cheated of their rightful medals—all white.

(This makes me recall the weird racist claims made by a certain fringe about Michelle Obama—that she was really a trans woman or intersex, because she was too strong, and seemed to the racist detractors to have overly-broad shoulders.)

In the end, what we see are that trans-exclusive “feminists” are largely white women who believe they have ownership of the category of woman by right. And they seem to have no problem with deploying one set of arguments to exclude trans women, and totally opposite arguments to exclude intersex women. It’s sad and it’s ugly.

Yet Caster Semenya continues to rise up to compete, enduring intrusive media questions about her genitals, endless discussions of her dress and demeanor, and years of being forced to take testosterone-suppressant drugs against her will in a way that no person competing in men’s sports, no matter how high his natural testosterone levels, has ever been forced to do. Sometimes she’s allowed to compete and sometimes barred from competition, depending on rules that keep being changed for how typical a woman’s body must be in order for her to qualify for the Olympics.

Remember this: virtually every person competing in the Olympics has an atypical body. These athletes may be endowed with atypical levels of fast-twitch muscle, or unusually flexible joints, or huge lungs, or extraordinarily long legs. We don’t 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 has been policed. And it's policed intensively, intrusively, punitively.

And it’s all based on magical thinking about what testosterone does. Ten percent of cisgender women have PCOS, which makes them produce high levels of testosterone, but doesn’t magically make them athletic. And actually, when studied, it turns out that 17% of elite male 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.

I myself am an intersex man, who has been taking testosterone for many years. My athletic abilities? Well, they’re better than those of a potato. But they are poor. What sort of feminist would argue that I should not be allowed to compete against women Olympians, because I have an innate male advantage over them and would win? That’s magical thinking, of a sort that posits a binary of male superiority and female inferiority. And it’s ridiculous.

The last thing a feminist should be doing is gender-policing women, telling them if they get too strong and muscular, they are no longer women. That refusing to wear dresses makes them men. That marrying a woman discredits them.

That’s not feminism, friends.

When Intersex People are Collateral Damage in Transphobic Battles

As intersex people, we have to deal with a host of issues because our bodies lie between the socially-expected bodily norms of male and female. Our bodies are treated as disordered, as problems to be solved by the medical profession. Doctors and people on the street alike treat intersexuality as freakish and fascinating, both intriguing and repellent.  Our bodies are surgically altered without our consent as children, and we must live with the lifelong aftereffects of limited sensation and ongoing genital atypicality. We are taught to view our differences as shameful and to keep them secret. Very often we hesitate to enter romantic relationships, fearing rejection because our bodies challenge the very ideas of heterosexuality and homosexuality through which most people understand themselves. We may be pursued, however, by sexual fetishists.

It's a lot to deal with, for many of us.  And then, on top of the challenges we're already facing, we find ourselves targeted by people who don't even recognize we exist: transphobic activists.

Today, trans gender people are making some social progress in securing protection from discrimination--but they face resistance. A central tactic of those who oppose trans gender rights in the U.S. is to propose legislation prohibiting trans people from using particular gendered facilities such as bathrooms, changing rooms, or locker rooms. Those proposing the legislation argue that the new law will protect  (cis) women and children from being harassed, attacked by sexual predators, or made to feel unsafe or uncomfortable.  Now, we should note a couple of things--first of all, proposed laws like these are aimed at trans women and girls--not even trans men, let alone intersex people. Those drafting the legislation clearly aren't imagining the situation in which an intersex teen using a school locker room is greeted by uncomfortable stares, or imagining that a trans man using a men's bathroom will make cis men flee the facility in fear. The proposed laws are transmisogynist: aimed at trans women, who are framed as "really men" who are some sort of sexual perverts. Secondly, sexual harassment and assault are already illegal, in bathrooms or elsewhere, so the only thing the proposed legislation actually accomplishes is to transform informal policing of the ideology of the sex/gender binary into formal policing. Those whose bodies don't clearly conform to expectations for what a woman's body is "supposed" to look like now become literal criminals.

But the drafters of transphobic bathroom laws run into a problem. People police binary sex/gender norms all the time, but they do so informally. The drafters have to come up with objective language to put into their proposed legislation.  Early efforts banning people from using bathrooms tended to require a person challenged upon entering a gendered bathroom to show ID with that gender listed on it. Of course, as part of the process of gender transition, large numbers of trans people have the gender listed on their driver's license or other ID changed. So the transphobic activists proposing these laws switched to using language of "birth certificate sex." But in some states, people who medically gender transition are able to change the sex listed on their birth certificate.

And that's why recent proposed bathroom-exclusionary language has moved to requiring people who use gendered facilities to have a matching "biological sex at birth" or even matching binary genotype of XX or XY.

Now, all forms of sex-policing bathroom bills, while aimed at trans people, are bad for at least some intersex people who are ipso gender (that is, who identify with the binary sex they were assigned at birth). An intersex person may be assigned female at birth, and identify as a woman, but have substantial amounts of bodily and facial hair, leading her to have to deal with a lot of sex and gender policing. Such an individual is likely to face many of the same issues of bias and outrage that visibly trans women encounter when they try to use women's bathrooms.

But the bills making it illegal to use a single-sex bathroom unless one was born with the anatomy expected for people of that sex basically declare it illegal for intersex people--by definition born with bodies that are neither male nor female--to use gendered bathrooms at all.

Further, the Texas law basing bathroom use on genotype specifically states, "If the individual's gender [sic] established at the individual's birth is not the same as the individual's gender [sic] established by the individual's chromosomes," that their gender for bathroom-use purposes would be determined by chromosomes. Just think about what this means for, say, a woman with CAIS, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. She is born with female-typical external genitalia and assigned female at birth. She's raised as a girl and identifies as one.  At puberty she develops breasts, but no menstrual cycle, and it's only when tests are done to determine why that she finds out she has XY chromosomes, no uterus, and internal testes (whose testosterone her body cannot respond to). The Texas law tells her she must use the men's room, because her Y chromosome trumps her physical appearance, genitalia, birth certificate, sex of rearing and gender identity.  This law is telling her she is "really" a man.  If she uses a women's room, it's a class-A misdemeanor for which she could get a year in jail. And if her employer finds out she has CAIS--something that her medical records reveal--well, then, if he lets her repeatedly use the women's bathroom at work, then he is committing a felony, punishable by two years in jail and a $10,000 fine.

So what should we as intersex people do about this?

It's very unlikely that we are the intended targets of these proposed laws--we're just collateral damage. Some may argue that few ipso gender intersex people look androgynous enough to trigger enforcement--that nobody's going to call the cops on us.  But some of us *are* physically androgynous and genitally different and regularly have to cope with gender-policing. Furthermore, it's now becoming popular to have provisions in bathroom-panic legislation that either put employers and facility owners at risk of fines, like the Texas law, or give third parties who see a person of the "wrong sex" in the bathroom, locker room, etc. the right to sue the school or business and get guaranteed recompense. For example, high school students in Kentucky who see a student whose sex is "incorrect" in the bathroom or locker room would be entitled to sue the school for $2500 for each time they catch the student in the facility.

Imagine what could happen to an intersex high school child in Kentucky who has a visible genital difference under a scheme in which classmates could earn $2500 each time they complained they saw their "incorrect" genitals.

These proposed laws give people a financial incentive to scrutinize our intersex bodily differences and to report them to authorities. They give employers and businesses a financial incentive to increase their sex and gender policing, lest they face a fine.  They are a bad thing for us.

Now, one solution some might propose would be to educate transphobic legislators about the difference between intersexuality and transsexuality. We could ask that the laws being proposed include exemptions for people born intersex, based on the presumption that if transphobic lawmakers understood what intersexuality is, they would express sympathy rather than bigotry toward us.

I think not only is this naively optimistic, but that it would be a terrible mistake.

Now, I acknowledge that relations between the intersex and trans communities are not always the best.  I validate the complaints of many intersex people that trans people are quick to use evidence of our existence to try to break down the ideology of immutable binary sex/gender--but slow to act as allies, and understand our community's needs, and include us appropriately in their antidiscrimination regulatory proposals.

But I believe we must consider trans issues to be our issues.  Firstly, because the portion of the intersex community that gender transitions is much higher than the proportion of nonintersex people who gender transition. There are a lot of intersex trans folks--like myself, like my spouse--who are active in the intersex community.

Beyond that, it's rational for us to stand side by side with nonintersex trans folks in battles like these precisely because we are impacted just as they are. So many people in our society think intersex people are trans people that transphobia constantly impacts us, even those of us who are ipso gender rather than trans.  We are fighting against our own mistreatment.

Ultimately, I believe that even those of us who, pragmatically speaking, are likely never to be personally impacted by bathroom-panic laws--because our bodies and genitals and birth certificates and chromosomes and gender identities all fortunately align and our intersex differences are not visible--all of us should stand against transphobic laws. We should do so as ethical human beings, opposed to all inequality and bias, not just those forms of bigotry that negatively impact us personally.

Now, all that said, I need to have a word with our trans allies, with whom I hope our community will stand. And that is: please, nonintersex trans people out there, don't try to use us without including us. Though we're taking collateral damage, we're not the primary targets in the bathroom wars.  If you think that femme CAIS women would make great mouthpieces for delivering talking points about how cruelly these laws would impact "innocent" women like them (and I've seen the calls and requests), fine.  But don't use members of our community or the very idea of intersexuality as a way to win your battles--without making an equal effort to fight for our rights, especially the right of intersex people to be free of unconsented-to surgery.

With all these things said--intersex and trans siblings, let's stand together against sex and gender policing laws.