Banning Biological Reality is Ridiculous!

 What could be more ludicrous than declaring biology to be against the law?

Over the past few months, since Trump was inaugurated again, information has been disappeared by the administration. Datasets have been taken down, historical images removed from archives, websites have been removed or revised, research defunded, and books have been purged from libraries. In just one example, the United States Naval Academy--a college--has removed 381 books from its library thus far, having been so directed by Pete Hegseth, our current Secretary of Defense. Hegseth may be incompetent at actual military leadership, spilling secrets on Signal, but he's great at imposing his ideology that the military should be the preserve of cis straight white men. . .

The books removed include studies on the KKK and lynching, on women in the Holocaust, on trans issues, on 19th century masculinity, on slavery. Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird sings was removed. All of these were framed as violating federal executive orders on "DEI" or "gender ideology," and thus figuratively to be burned.

You know what else was removed? Books on intersex statuses. Intersex statuses are inborn, and are found in all animal species-- humans and dogs and songbirds and mice and tropical fish. This is how nature works: sex is way more complicated and interesting than some singsong child's story!

But on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order written by Project 2025 authors--radical Christian nationalists--titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." The media reporting on this was shallow. (So much media reporting now is shallow, because there's so much chaos going on that nobody can keep up.) The EO was framed as an anti-trans statement, often with some discussion of popular opposition to the participation of trans women in sports. Then the story sank in the flood of developing news.

But that EO continues to have a powerful impact, being the basis of a huge, ongoing wave of purges of books and research projects and federal employees. So you should know what the EO declares to be law under President Trump. The EO states that is that there is no such thing as gender, only biological sex. And biological sex is stated to be a binary of male and female that is set at conception.

Thus, the EO does not just declare that people cannot gender transition, that nonbinary gender identity does not exist, that trans people must be detransitioned on their passports, that schools and prisons and scientific studies etc. etc. must not recognize gender transitions, and all the other transphobic discrimination it requires. It also declares that intersex statuses do not exist.

This is ridiculous and bizarre! You can no more erase the fact that intersex babies are born all the time than you can erase that curly-haired babes are born all the time by making a proclamation. The authors' vision of physical sex--that at the moment of conception, we're all either XX or XY, which will determine which of two gonads we develop, which in turn will determine what our genitals look like, is that singsong child's myth. Some embryos are XXY, some are XXYY, some are XX/XY. Some embryos that are XX develop into fetuses that look typically male, with phallus and testes. Some that are XY develop into fetuses that look typically female, with vulvas. Fetuses of any genotype can develop intermediate ovotestes. Fetuses of any genotype can develop intermediate genital configurations. That's how biology works!

But the EO declares this biology to be intolerable, to be ideology, to violate the Trump-declared reality of the singsong children's myth. And the federal government is taking action to impose this inversion of biology and ideology on the nation--for example, by banning books on intersex from the US. Naval Academy library.

All book bans are evil. But banning books on biology as "denying biological reality" has the cherry on top of being ridiculous.

Puberty Blocker Hypocrisy

 

Here's a handy graphic you can share that summarizes the hypocrisy of the laws that now ban gender-affirming care for those under 18 in half the states. 

All of them make an exception for intersex minors.The laws claim that puberty blockers are "experimental," "unproven," and putting patients' future bone health and fertility and body image at intolerable risk? That could be considered child abuse? Why, they are perfectly fine for intersex children. They're medically necessary! Proven, effective, and in use for decades.

Oh, and the genital reconstructions that absolutely nobody is performing on trans kids? Perfectly fine for intersex ones. 

There are only two possible conclusions. One is that legislators really believe puberty blockers constitute torture and child abuse--and think it is fine to torture and abuse intersex young people. More likely is the second: that the people enacting these laws don't really believe they are protecting trans kids from medical harm. They just want to make being trans illegal, while continuing to impose unrequested sex-change procedures on intersex kids whose bodies make them uncomfortable.

Gender Policing at the 2024 Olympics

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!

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.

Understanding the Biblical Binary of "Male and Female"

 

According to certain Christians, the fact that the Bible states "male and female created He them" means that God only recognizes two genders, those assigned at birth. To be trans or nonbinary is unacceptable, and intersex status a tragic birth defect that must be corrected.

Of course, the Bible also says "the Lord makes poor and rich." This binary of rich and poor appears multiple times in biblical language. Do conservative Christians therefore say it is an abomination to be middle class?

Or consider the verse, "He will bless his loyal followers, both young and old." You'll find this binary of young and old many times. Yet there is no Christian movement to declare that people cannot be known as middle-aged, but must either be designated as old or as young.

The phrase "male and female created He them" comes from the book of Genesis, in what Christians call the Old Testament and Jews call the Torah. Christianity started as a Jewish sect, reading Jewish Torah scrolls, and practicing Jewish religious traditions. Many of these traditions were relinquished fairly early in Christianity, such as the requirement of circumcision. By 300 years in, kosher dietary laws had been abandoned.

But many other Jewish traditions lasted much longer. One of these was recognition of intersex babies. Under the Jewish religious rules of halacha, babies were not just classified as male or female, but under a four-sex system that also designated babies androgyne (both) or tumtum (neither). People born androgyne were to perform the religious duties assigned to both men and women; people born tumtum were not required to practice either set of duties. Jewish tradition also recognized additional categories for those whose gender status changed, due to intersex characteristics manifesting at puberty, or to never experiencing puberty at all, or to human intervention such as surgery--all categories later Christians would lump together as "eunuchs."

For many centuries, Christians recognized androgynes, tumtums, and eunuchs as well as men and women. The Church canonized saints with these designations. It was not until the Middle Ages that the novel idea arose that the phrase "male and female created He them" was not a poetic dyad, but a limitation the Church should implement in categorizing human beings. And the courts immediately started dealing with a stream of cases involving people assigned to one binary sex at birth, but living as the other, or living in their birth-assigned sexes but having intersex bodies that they or the community felt was more like the sex to which they were not originally assigned.

This shift from accepting sex and gender diversity to squashing it into a binary was awkward from the very first. And violent, too: some intersex people were burned at the stake, like witches. The categories of witch, intersex person, and gender-transgressor were often conflated. It was a ugly time in history--witness the Inquisition--in which all sorts of people who deviated from norms were tortured and burned alive in the name of God.

Today, Christians are not in the witch-burning business. That period of history is viewed as one of superstition and terrible persecution. Yet some conservative Christians continue to revile people who are gender expansive, deem gender transition illegitimate, and demand that intersex babies receive forced genital reconstruction. They claim they must impose an eternal binary, for the Bible tells them so.

But there's no need for that. The phrase "male and female created He them" is a poetic dyad, just like the phrases "rich and poor" or "old and young."

Persecuting the socially marginal is the exact opposite of what Jesus called on Christians to do. Justifying such persecution by referencing a snippet of poetic Biblical language is not just nonsense. It is a great moral wrong

The Department of Inhumanity and Ideological Services

A memo was recently leaked from the Department of Health and Human Services. In it, the HHS defines sex as a binary determined by chromosomes (presumed to come in only two forms, XX or XY), and states that sex cannot be changed.

The memo has caused outrage, because its goal is to define gender transition out of existence. Its aim is to discriminate against trans people, declaring them to be deluded or deceptive, their lived genders irrelevant. In so doing, it ignores the conclusions of every mainstream medical and psychological association, which is a bizarre position for a department supposedly aimed at recognizing and supporting medical treatment paradigms to take. Unrecognized as yet is how this proposed policy would also work to shatter the lives of intersex people. As is so often the case, intersex people's lives and needs go unrecognized, so in this post I will try counter that.

First, we need to understand where this memo is coming from. The Director of the HHS Office of Civil Rights is currently Roger Severino. He used to work for the Heritage Foundation. He has no special knowledge of medical issues--he was hired by the Trump administration to please conservative Christian groups. He is an advocate of conversion therapy for LGBT people. He says being LGBT is "against biology." He believes in a radical conservative Christian ideology that states that patriarchy, heterosexuality, and cisgenderism are compelled by the Bible and nature, and that Christians are forbidden from tolerating gender egalitarianism or LGBT people. Unsurprisingly if very sadly, rather than doing his job as Director of the HHS Office of Civil Rights, which is to see that the medical needs of all people, as understood by the medical profession, are met, he is seeking to impose his ideology. Rather than fostering humanity and human services, he seeks to advance discrimination and a radically conservative ideology of sex and gender.

What's especially insidious is that this extremist political position is not being proposed for debate--not that human rights recognized by the UN and international community should be debatable. But by inserting its bigoted assertion--that sex is a binary determined by chromosomes that cannot be challenged or changed--into the HHS definition, radical conservative Christian ideology is disguised as scientific fact. This is a common tactic today in that segment of the far American right that seeks to dismiss scientific consensus. They find some person of supposed authority who will ignore what the vast majority of experts affirm to be true, and present the assertions of that person as "disproving" the voice of the vast majority--this is very evident when we look at their approach to defying the national and international consensus of climate scientists.

In this case, the action is even more radical. The idea is to have the institution created to protect people's rights to health simply declare gender transition invalid. Many Americans will be unaware of the politicization of what is supposed to be a scientific body. They will believe that the medical profession actually opposes recognition of trans people's identities based on scientific study. Therefore, they will believe they need feel no guilt when gender policing people, and discriminating against those whose appearance strikes them as insufficiently conforming to binary sex and gender expectations.

As an intersex person who has gender transitioned, I can attest that if this proposed policy becomes law, trans people--some of whom are intersex--will suffer greatly. This is the aim of the radical conservative Christians who have been given an outsized voice by the Trump Administration. I have lived a decade in my identified gender as a man. My wife, an intersex woman, started her gender transition over two decades ago, as soon as she turned 18 and could control her own medical destiny. These decades of our lives, our gender identities, and the understandings of our friends, families and colleagues would all be declared lies. Humiliating us by misgendering us would be proclaimed "healthy." Discrimination against us would be declared justified.

But many more people than just trans people would suffer. The majority of intersex people in the U.S. today do not gender transition. But all of us have been fighting for social acceptance, for an end to infant genital surgeries that rob us of the capacity for sexual sensation, and against the stigmatizing and concealment of physical sex variance. Our battle as intersex people has been for recognition of the sex spectrum, and for respecting our physical sex diversity.

Think what will happen to us now. Consider, for example, those of us who have complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, born with female-typical genitalia but XY chromosomes. Virtually all people with XY, CAIS are assigned female at birth and are raised as girls--but suddenly, they'd be declared men. This would disrupt not only their lives, but those of their parents, their spouses, their neighbors and friends. Or consider all the children born with intermediate genitalia. Doctors have forced surgeries onto so many, basing their decision on factors like gonads, or surgical convenience. Suddenly, many intersex people would find that the surgeries forced on them took away the parts of their bodies that the new HHS policy declares to be the ones that should have been kept under the new chromosomal standard. This will compound their trauma--and perhaps lead to a further round of unwanted surgical interventions.

For those of us intersex people whose chromosomes are XX or XY, this new policy would counter all of our efforts to push back against forcing sex reassignment surgeries onto us, mutilating our genitals. Instead, the policy would declare that these are not sex reassignment surgeries at all, because our penises are "false penises," our vaginae "fake." And for those of us who have one of the many other sex genotypes this policy fails to recognize--XXY, XYY, Xo, XX/XY, etc.--ironically, even if our bodies have appeared typical enough that we've escaped surgical mutilation or social stigma, suddenly, we become the "true intersex," our lived genders falsified, leading to confusion, discrimination and shame.

The intersex community's central goal for many years has been to put an end to nonconsensual infant genital reconstructions. And our best bet for seeing this happen has been to educate parents--to let them know that intersex status is fairly common and in no way a tragedy, so long as children have the respect and support of their communities. This HHS policy would undo our good work in parental education by declaring to parents that what we've been telling them is false. The HHS policy says that only binary sex can be recognized, physical sex variance is intolerable, and "corrective" surgery a necessity. This is a tragedy for our community.

The deepest irony here is that we as intersex people have bodies that prove that this proposed HHS policy is, to be blunt, complete BS. Sex is not a binary--empirically speaking, it is a spectrum. If you look at world societies over history, most have recognized more than two sexes. This is not because until the modern West appeared with its binary gender ideology, everyone was deluded--it's because there have always been intersex people. The capacity to attempt to erase us surgically is only a century old, and other societies dealt with us very differently--by recognizing and accommodating us. Sadly, binary gender ideology is so passionately adhered to in our society that most Americans are unaware of both this world history of diversity in social sex categories, and of the prevalence of intersex people today.

And what this proposed inhuman policy does is attempt to codify that ignorance, declaring binary sex ideology the law of the land. The aim is to trample upon trans people--but the victims will include intersex folks, and empirical truth.

Intersex Athletes of the Times

The NY Times Magazine is running a story on the binary sex policing of intersex athletes. Well, I should say, intersex woman athletes--nobody is testing to find out if men who are competing in international sporting competitions have intersex traits. Because what is really at stake here is ideology, not fact. And that ideology is that sex is binary when it is really a spectrum, and that the line being drawn between women and men is dividing lesser people from greater ones. Intersex men, framed not as "real men" but as lesser, are seen as pathetic. But intersex women are portrayed as unduly powerful, and a threat.

It's time for me to write another post on intersex athletes, as Dutee Chand's case is in the news. Because this issue keeps coming up. Because we, intersex people, continue to be out there, and contemporary Western society continues to frame us as violating the order of things, instead of a part of the natural order.

It's strange, the way we in the contemporary West collapse all the variety in human bodies into a sex binary. We're used to a trick of mind that allows us to say and believe "men are taller than women," while encountering plenty of women who are taller than plenty of men. Height, you see, is a spectrum, but the sexed-height-difference we speak of references just average heights. We ignore the spectrum and speak of the average difference when distinguishing women and men. Now, there are adult men who are under three feet tall, and there are men over eight feet tall. That's a five-foot range of difference. The difference in average height between women and men in the U.S. is five inches--a tiny amount in comparison. And this is true of all physical sex characteristics, including not just height or lung capacity or average hand size, but genital configuration and levels of sex hormones. The characteristics run along a spectrum, but we speak of them as a binary: "men's hands are bigger than women's" and "men have higher testosterone than women." The range of differences within a socially-imposed binary sex category is huge, while the average difference between those categorized as men and women is small. And the overlap between women and men is wide.

People of all sexes typically produce testosterone and estrogen and progesterone, and our bodies rely on all of them--though you might not know this by the way we say all the time that "men have testosterone and women have estrogen." You might imagine doctors and scientists would think less magically than laypeople when it comes to the idea that "T is for boys and E is for girls." After all, they should be aware of facts like estrogen being needed not just for ovulation in women, but also for spermatogenesis in men. But no. Doctors and scientists consulting with the Olympics have been speaking of testosterone in very magical ways. They have decided upon a "normal female range" of testosterone, and banned women who naturally produce more from competing.

Consider these facts:

1. Men competing in elite international sporting competitions do not have limits placed on how much testosterone they naturally produce. Women who produce higher-than-typical amounts of testosterone are treated as "cheating," men who do are not.

2. 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.

3. Bodies vary widely in how sensitive they are to testosterone. Some intersex women have "complete androgen insensitivity syndrome." These are individuals with XY chromosomes who are born with female-typical genitalia due to their body's inability to respond to testosterone. They have internal testes where most women have ovaries, and these produce testosterone at puberty, but their bodies can't use it, so they develop breasts like other typical girls do, not beards. And focus on this fact: their bodies are insensitive to testosterone. The idea that they have some sort of athletic advantage due to having higher testosterone than typical girls is ridiculous--because they can't respond to testosterone.

4. People do not compete in athletic competitions using their genitals. Yet as the Times article discusses, girls with large clitorises are being told to submit to surgery to remove the "excess tissue" if they want to compete in the Olympics. When similar surgeries are performed on girls with average-sized clitorises for social reasons, this is deemed the outrage of female genital mutilation by the international community. Why is it acceptable to impose this on intersex girls? And what could be more magical thinking than saying that how your genitals look determines how fast you can run? By this logic, the longer the penis, the faster a man can run.

5. All Olympic athletes have atypical bodies. As one Olympian says in the article, they're all "freaks of nature." They may be endowed naturally with atypical levels of fast-twitch muscle, or unusually flexible joints, or huge hands, or extraordinarily 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 has been policed. And it's policed intensively, intrusively, punitively.

6.  The "science" being used today to exclude intersex women athletes is as amazingly full of biases and magical beliefs and unsupported assertions as it was many decades ago. Consider this: scientists testifying as to the supposed necessity of continuing to police intersex bodies recently claimed that a woman competing in Olympic track and field events is 140 times more likely to have a Y chromosome than the rest of the population. This is ludicrous, because we have no idea how many women in the general population have Y chromosomes. We don't test the general population for this--only women competing in elite athletic events. Right now, all over the world, there are millions of intersex people who have no idea of their intersex status--it's not like you can see your chromosomes. 

7. This reminds me of the magical thinking that went into the "supermale" theory in the 1950s and 60s. Scientists discovered that some men had XYY chromosomes, and decided that if one Y chromosome makes you a man, two must make you hypermasculine. So they went around testing the chromosomes of men who were imprisoned or institutionalized, and lo! they found out that a significant number had XYY chromosomes. There was a media frenzy about the powerful, predatory XYY superman. Only. . . nobody had done a comparison study. It turns out that when you test men who are not imprisoned or institutionalized, the same number have XYY chromosomes. Men with XYY chromosomes don't produce more testosterone than XY men. They aren't stronger, or more aggressive, or hairier. You're much more likely to be a sweet, tubby old history teacher than a serial killer if you are an XYY man.

What all of this makes clear is that scientists and doctors are just as immersed in our culture as anyone else. And our culture has been deeply invested in an ideology that sex is a binary--and that by virtue of being a male, a person is stronger, faster, more dominant, more assertive. It may be 2016, but our society continues to view women athletes as suspect, because they are strong, fast, and highly competitive. What is really at stake is patriarchy, and its positioning of men as superior to women. Powerful, nonconforming women still get pushback in the form of sex and gender policing, through street harassment, or poor work evaluations, or medical surveillance. And so we continue to scrutinize the bodies of women athletes, and to punish those whose bodies are deemed "too male" in certain ways. While we acknowledge that height is a spectrum, we insist that hormone levels require a no-gender's-land between acceptably female and acceptably male. And really, it would make no less sense to tell every woman athlete that women cannot be taller than 5'9", and that taller women must have their leg bones reduced until their height is in the female range or be banned from competition.

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.

Sex is a spectrum. Bodies don't cheat. 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.) If we really, truly believed that the size of the phalloclitoris corresponds to athletic ability, then we'd have the competition classes "small clitoris, medium clitoris, large clitoris, intermediate phalloclitoris, small penis, medium penis, large penis." That would be ludicrous, but would at least have the upside of being equally humiliating to men as it has been for all the women who have been forced to face genital inspections to get their "gender certificates" over the years.

Since sex is a spectrum, the division of it into a binary will always be arbitrary. We've been trying to hide the fact that sex is a spectrum, but it's time to grow up. And that means we have two choices. If we really think that bodily characteristics must define competition groups, then stop dividing athletes into men's and women's sports, and create competition classes based on leg length, or lung capacity, or body mass, or flexibility, or whatever is most central to a given sport. Or, if we insist on continuing to separate sports into binary gender categories, then stop policing the bodily characteristics of athletes. People who identify and live as women should compete as such, and the same for those who identify and live as men. People with nonbinary gender identities would have to just flip a coin or something, which would be cruel to them, but at least we would have stopped forcing people to submit to genital surgery they didn't want in order to run.

Dutee Chand was assigned female at birth and has always lived and identified as a woman. She has overcome amazing barriers to reach her level of competition, growing up in extreme poverty and running barefoot with no way to afford even a pair of sneakers. She is only 5 feet tall, and competing against women gifted by genetics and nutrition with much longer legs. To say she has an unfair advantage against her competitors because her higher-than-average testosterone level for a woman trumps all the advantages they have over her is ridiculous. Let Dutee run.

(P.S.--Whenever I post on this topic, inevitably I get an outcry from people who believe that simply letting people compete in their lived genders would mean that cis women would be pushed out of sports, which would be overrun with "men pretending to be women." This is the hysteria that has always driven sex policing in sporting competitions. It completely ignores reality. Cis men do not want to live their lives as women. Trans women face huge amounts of social stigma and violence that nobody wants to experience, and that negatively impact their ability to train or compete. And no one is proposing that a person who has lived their whole lives as a man can announce they identify as a woman and run in the women's marathon the next week, then say "oops, changed my mind" after they have a medal in hand. The rules for international sporting competitions in fact actively address this, by saying that in order to compete in women's athletics, a trans woman must have legally gender transitioned (a slow process), and continue to live as a woman for a least four years before any records or medals she wins are permanently awarded. So please, just let go of the myth that the humiliation and exclusion of intersex and trans women is necessary to protect innocent and deserving women from some ominous threat.)