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.

The Silly Idea of Your "Real" Binary Sex

 

Today, a lot of people insist that they can tell you what your "real (binary) sex" is. Let's talk about how strange that is.

Intersex is a fact of nature, found throughout the animal kingdom and across all of human history. Today, in Western societies, being assigned a binary sex at birth is a legal requirement--you need an M or F selected on birth certificates in most countries. This is so taken-for-granted that people are often astonished to learn that this is historically and culturally strange--that most world societies have traditionally recognized more than two sexes, allowing them to recognize and provide cultural places for intersex babies, and social roles for gender-variant people. This includes, by the way, Judeo-Christian societies, up until the Middle Ages. Jewish tradition recognizes four birth sexes: female, male, both (androgyne), and neither (tumtum), and early Christians followed this tradition.

But in the Medieval period, Christian authorities decided to abandon the Jewish halachic approach. They decided that the Biblical phrase "male and female created He them" was not a poetic phrase, but a prescriptive one: God demanded binary sex. 

The problem, of course, is that intersex people continued to be born. So you find court cases and church records in which judges and priests tried to decide what to do when there was a conflict over whether an intersex person (or even animal) was living in the "correct" binary sex, or "violating the law of nature" by being a man who menstruated or a rooster who laid eggs. Parties often fought vigorously, because the fact of the matter is that an intersex person or animal cannot be fit into the category "male" or "female" by definition, and what to do about that was a perpetual issue.

Then, in the 19th century, medical doctors seized on this issue and the social fascination with nature belying human ideologies of binary sex. The field of medicine was professionalizing and gaining status. And medical practitioners realized that they could gain social respect by claiming to be able to answer questions that laypeople could not. They said laypeople were confused when they saw a person with mixed sex characteristics, and could not categorize them as male or female. But medical doctors framed themselves as having impressive skills and arcane knowledge that laypeople lacked. They could dissect a person's body after death, examine their gonads, and usually, decide that those appeared to be ovaries or testes, only in rare cases finding those organs impossible to assign a binary sex status as indeterminate ovotestes.

Nineteenth century medical doctors seized on this process, as it proved successful in generating fascination and deference from the public. They proclaimed themselves teratologists (a term that literally means "having knowledge of monsters"), and declared that where unschooled laypeople saw intersexuality in a body before their eyes, doctors could determine a person's "true sex." And to do this, they announced that it was scientific law that one's "true sex" was defined by one's gonads. A person with a penis who had ovaries they named a "female pseudohermaphrodite," and a person with vulva and internal testes, a "male pseudohermaphrodite." Only people with ovotestes so intermediate doctors could not assign them as ovaries or testes, or those with one ovary and one testis, were "true hermaphrodites"--and this was rarely the case. 

And thus, long before they developed the ability to perform sex reassignment surgeries on intersex infants, medical doctors erased intersex people through classificatory sleight of hand. And in so doing, they both increased their professional prestige, and propped up dedication to binary sex ideology in the face of its obvious factual refutation.

Then, in the 1930s, scientists discovered the "sex hormones"--testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, etc.. Gonads as anatomical organs lost their luster, as it was the hormones they produced that were the new subject of fascination. And for the next several decades, the idea that testosterone was the "essence of maleness" and estrogen the "feminine essence" was all the rage. Doctors made all sorts of strange assertions: they could "cure" an abrasive, nagging, shrewish wife with estrogen therapy! Homosexuality was caused by a hormone imbalance, as men with too little testosterone mimicked female behavior and desired a husband to dominate and penetrate them! Testosterone "causes" leadership, and high testosterone would make one a politician or CEO or general! Meanwhile, low testosterone would impede mathematical ability or the capacity to read maps!

Only it turns out that people of all sexes produce and require all of the sex steroid hormones. And that women who are housewives tending young children produce more testosterone than women who are employed outside the home in business careers. And that there are no hormonal differences between people of differing sexual orientations. Yes, testosterone causes the growth of facial and body hair, and estrogen the growth of breasts and hips. But there are endosex cis men with very low testosterone who are elite competitive athletes. As a way to determine supposed "true (binary) sex," hormones didn't cut it.

So, scientists and medical doctors dropped sex hormone levels as the way to determine the "true sex" of an intersex person. And they switched their focus instead to chromosomes--particularly, the presumption that all females have the XX genotype, and all males XY.

Now, we should note that by this point, there were doctors and scientists arguing that no single factor could determine a person's "true sex." This camp would go on to develop the language of "best sex" rather than "true sex" in choosing a binary sex assignment for intersex infants (which sounds nice enough, though the outcome was the same--by this time, forced surgical sex reassignment was presumed "necessary" by doctors across the spectrum).

But there was great appeal to framing a person's "true sex" as based on their chromosomes for medical professionals desiring to hold onto the claim that their scientific abilities made them into oracles, able to perceive and proclaim a "true binary sex" where laypeople saw a spectrum. Chromosomes cannot be seen with the naked eye, so they make an impressive divination prop. Take a cheek swab, subject it to esoteric technical tests, and mysteriously out would pop the answer: XX or XY, female or male.

In fact, the claim of a neat binary sex division in chromosomes also proved quite false. There are so many variations, including people with the genotypes XXY, XYY, XXYY, XYYY, Xo, and more. There are people who are XX/XY, having some body cells with XX chromosomes and some with XY. This "macrochimerism" is accompanied by totally normative "microchimerism" in people who have gestated. It turns out that fetuses and their gestating parents exchange genetic material, so a typical XX woman who has gestated an XY baby will have XY cells found scattered throughout her body. Then there are people who have typical-appearing male bodies who are XX, and vice versa. 

In short, whatever tool medical science devises to divide the sex spectrum into two will always fail, because sex is not a binary.

However, there are those who are intensely devoted to the ideology of binary sex. These people have made a religion of it, and indeed, in the U.S. today they are often white evangelical Christians. But it can also be a secular faith--as we can see exhibited by TERFs. These are the trans-exclusionary radical feminists who screech that sex is an inborn binary that creates predator males and victim females, and frame trans women as males in dresses who pose a sexual threat to cis women. TERF ideology holds that sex cannot be changed, and that no matter what hormone therapies or surgeries a trans woman accesses, she will always remain "truly male" due to having an XY genotype that cannot be changed. This is a position of transmisogynistic bigotry, framed as "scientific fact." (That's hardly novel--the tactic of claiming one's bias is just a statement of scientific fact proved very potent in eugenics, culminating in the Holocaust. It's morally repugnant--but it's also effective.)

TERFs like to say that they have great sympathy for intersex people. They claim that most of us are disturbed by our status, and desire nothing but to have it corrected and to keep this medical past quiet, so we can lead normal lives. This position is the exact same one taken by doctors whose imposition of unconsented-to surgeries on intersex infants intersex advocates deplore. It also allows TERFs to frame intersex people who oppose their assertion that chromosomes determine "true sex" as at best unrepresentative, and as more likely charlatans--trans people pretending to be intersex to try to excuse their "delusional mindset."

But an intersex person need not be at all unhappy with their binary birth sex assignment to be appalled by Christian fundamentalists and TERFs championing the idea that one's "true sex" is determined by chromosomes. Consider a person with CAIS (complete androgen insensitivity syndrome). She has been assigned female at birth, having been born with typical vulva. Inside, she has no uterus, and what lie in the typical position of ovaries are testes. But because her body cannot respond to testosterone, and because some of the testosterone that those testes begin releasing at puberty is naturally converted to estrogen, she has developed breasts and broad hips in the course of a typical feminizing puberty, though she does not get a menstrual period. Her birth certificate says F, she was raised as a girl, her body looks like that of an endosex female, and she identifies as a woman. But according to the TERFs, because her chromosomes are XY, she is "really" a male.

This is just like how a 19th century teratologist would approach our intersex individual. Dissecting her body after death, they'd find that her gonads were actually testes, and declare her a "male pseudohermaphrodite." 

And this is violence. Sex policing and misgendering are always violence.

The fact remains that no matter what scheme devotees of binary sex ideology dream up to try to force the nature of sex into two boxes, it will always be silly, and it will always fail. By nature, sex is a spectrum of great diversity. Our intersex bodies are real, and they are not evidence of disorder or failure, but rather of the beauty and complexity of all of the natural world. Any claims that science can determine our "true (binary) sex" deserve no more than eyerolling.

What If We Treated White Femme Celebrities Like Caster Semenya?

South African track star Caster Semenya has been barred from competing in her races in the Olympics because her body naturally produces higher levels of testosterone than is considered typical for women. Oh, but this is not discrimination, says the International Association of Athletics Federations, because she is welcome to compete in the men's races instead!

I've written at length before about why policing women's naturally-produced testosterone levels and banning them for being intersex is both morally wrong and nonsensical. Testosterone is not a magic elixir of male superiority--that's a ridiculous myth. And even if we imagined that it were, all Olympic athletes have atypical bodies. Swimmer Michael Phelps, world recordholder of 28 Olympic medals, has been the subject of lots of reporting celebrating him as a "mutant." (He is double-jointed, with very unusual body proportions, huge lungs, and muscles that only produce half the amount of lactic acid when exercising than normal.)

But let's not go over all that again. I want to address another issue: that the women being singled out, tested, and excluded for having high testosterone are vastly disproportionately women of color from the global south who are perceived as "too masculine." And often, it is feminine white women competitors who have demanded that they be tested. "Experts" relied upon in Semeya's case have used explicitly racist imagery in their presentations of her as posing some sort of threat to "normal" feminine white women competitors.

It seems pretty glaring that the reason Caster Semenya is being policed so intensely is that she is a queer black woman who is strong and muscular, and not interesting in performing femininity with long hair or nails for the comfort of certain others. And by "certain others," I mean all those policing bodily binary sex and gender expectations: misogynists who deem athleticism in women to be unattractive, and bigots like homophobes, transphobes, and those who deem intersex bodies horrifying.

So let's think about the outcome in a different context. Instead of strong brown athletes, let's look at women who are white feminine celebrities. Let's imagine that before we let them take women's roles in movies or television shows, we tested their natural levels of testosterone.

All of the women I've shown here would fail, because they all have high testosterone caused by PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome. Each of them has spoken to the media about it. Emma Thompson has talked about her struggles with infertility related to PCOS; Sasha Pieterse has explained that PCOS caused her to gain weight; Daisy Ridley has shared with fans that she battles PCOS-related acne; and Jillian Michaels has talked about her path to adoption after years of attempting to conceive despite her PCOS.

Each of these celebrities has a natural testosterone level outside the norm for women. Why then do we not classify them as having "hyperandogenism," as we do women excluded from athletic competitions? Why, because they are paragons of white femininity in the public eye! Daisy Ridley did acquire a misogynist hate-following from men who were angry at her Star Wars character Rey. But they were angry because they didn't want a "girl" to be the hero Jedi, they wanted a masculine white man. Jillian Michaels might have gotten a backlash because she has a strong, muscular body--something we associate with high testosterone. But she performs the role of the feminine personal trainer, and spent years policing the bodies of fat people on The Biggest Loser, so she got a pass. Sasha Pieterse was widely mocked and trolled in social media about her body--but this was fat-shaming, not policing femininity. Like many people with higher levels of testosterone, she found out that what this made her was fat, not "buffed," and her curvy body never triggered the stereotypes that high testosterone must make you butch.

So, these celebrities with atypical hormones have not faced the testosterone police yet--but imagine if they did. Imagine if some group started challenging women celebrities, claiming that some were bad role models, or taking acting roles away from "real" women, because they had "male" levels of testosterone, which gave them an unfair advantage. Those making this claim could back it up with a wide array of empirical evidence: actors who are men are given more speaking parts in movies; they are paid more; directors are much more likely to be men. They could claim men have a natural advantage due to testosterone giving them more assertiveness and "drive," making them by nature more compelling actors, more competent directors, and naturally running the entertainment industry.

Yes, that would seem obviously bizarre and nonsensical. But people used to make just this argument; it's simply no longer accepted. We no longer buy the old scientific studies, controversial but widely believed in their day, that it is their high testosterone that causes men to dominate politics, business, academia and the arts.

So imagine that each of these celebrities were treated like Caster Semenya, or Duttee Chand, or Maximila Imali, or Evangeline Makena, and had the same experience as these strong brown athletes. They would be excluded due to naturally high levels of testosterone, shamed, and presented as "cheaters." They would be framed as not really women, despite having been assigned female at birth, raised as girls, and identifying as women today. And they would be highly unlikely to feel comforted by being told they were free to try out for men's roles.

If you think it would be nuts to tell Victoria Bechkam or Emma Thompson that they are not really women because they have high T, then you should think the same about Caster Semenya.

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.)

Testosterone and the Sex Policing of Athletes' Bodies

New policies for Olympic and other international athletes set an upper limit to the amount of testosterone considered "normal" for a woman, and require those women who have natural levels of T that are higher than this to have medical interventions to lower their levels. If the women are found to be intersex, these interventions include surgical removal of their gonads, and (though this has NO relation to testosterone production) surgical reduction of their clitorises if these are deemed "enlarged."

This is just crazy. Some facts: first, levels of testosterone vary a lot. Tests of elite athletes show that about 17% of male athletes have testosterone in the "female range" and 14% of female athletes have testosterone in the "male range." Secondly, there is no direct correlation between levels of T and athletic performance; that's simplistic and nearly magical thinking. And third, it makes no sense to define the range of "normal" T levels for women very narrowly (15 - 70 ng/dL) and for men very broadly (300 -1,000 ng/dL), in essence saying that there's no such thing as a natural level of testosterone too high in a man, but there is such a thing for a woman.

Bodies vary a great deal. Why do we focus obsessively on policing the sexed body of athletes, rather than on other "abnormalities?" Basketball players are abnormally tall, which actually does enhance their performance. Many gymnasts are double-jointed and abnormally flexible. In fact, most any sport rewards people with atypical bodies, and we *celebrate* that. But when it comes to sex variance, a variation that is associated with high performance more in fantasy than in fact is suddenly subject to extreme bodily policing, and that's just wrong.