For a decade, there has been a movement in politics that calls itself Gender Critical. And as of now, this movement has won in two different countries, the US and the UK, and defined women based in ‘biological sex’. Let’s see what their idea of victory looks like, and try to figure out what they have just come up with.
So we’re talking about the Trump administration’s recent executive order, or rather the results of that order 1:
There are only two sexes, female and male, because there are only two types of gametes. An individual human is either female or male based on whether the person is of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs (ova) or sperm.
The sex of a human, female or male, is determined genetically at conception (fertilization), and is observable before birth. Having the biological function to produce eggs or sperm does not require that eggs or sperm are ever produced. Some females or males may not or may no longer produce eggs or sperm due to factors such as age, congenital disorders or other developmental conditions, injury, or medical conditions that cause infertility.
A person’s sex is unchangeable and determined by objective biology. The use of hormones or surgical interventions do not change a person’s sex because such actions do not change the type of gamete that the person’s reproductive system has the biological function to produce. Rare disorders of sexual development do not constitute a third sex because these disorders do not lead to the production of a third gamete. That is, the reproductive system of a person with such a disorder does not produce gametes other than eggs or sperm.
This is a regulation, not a law per se, but there are laws about ‘biological sex’ already. And one assumes that, as laws continue to be made about this, and courts have to make decisions based on laws, this is the sort of regulation that would be used to decide what biological sex someone was.
So…let’s pretend we’re in court, and try to figure out someone’s sex using that!
(In case anyone cares, the UK has not even bothered to try to define what it means by ‘biological sex’.)
Sexing people
We could ‘gender’ people, but according to Gender Criticals, gender is not real, and even if it was, it would be distinct from sex. And this is, very clearly, sexing people.
Be aware I will be blaming Gender Criticals for these regulations, and that is because this definition is directly taken from them. You may notice the strange use of ‘human’, a word that almost never appears in regulation or the law, instead of ‘person’, which is what the law commonly calls…uh…people.2 That’s a pretty big clue that the ‘adult human female’ people have wandered by. And those of us who have argued with them recognize pretty much all of this definition.
At first glance, there appear to be two possible ways to legally determine someone’s sex. There’s the second sentence of the first paragraph, and the first sentence of the second paragraph. But the latter is a red herring. I don’t think they mean ‘sex is determined genetically at conception’ as a statement of how we legally should determine someone’s sex, based on the extremely obvious fact that no one tests that, or has ever tested it, and it would essentially be impossible (and really dangerous if it was possible!) to test someone’s genetics at conception. We don’t even know people exist at the point of conception, we usually are not aware until a few weeks later. I’m pretty sure they’re saying that philosophically, Sex Is Created At Conception.3
So, it appears to determine if someone is female or male, we are supposed to use this sentence: An individual human is either female or male based on whether the person is of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs (ova) or sperm.
My first observation is you need a ‘respectively’ in that, buddy. Forgot to say which was which! More seriously, let’s break this sentence down, because it is convoluted.
Let’s just look at one sex, to simplify: An individual human is female based on if the person is of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs.
That is still convoluted. I think it’s supposed to be understood broken up like this: An individual human is female based on if the person is of the sex characterized by [a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs].
Which is: An individual human is female based on if the person is of the sex characterized by [ovaries].
Sounds good. And ‘the sex characterized by ovaries’ is…the female sex. Right? So, to condense more: An individual human is female based on if the person is of [the female sex].
*long sigh* Okay, that didn’t work. What did we miss here? What is this sentence trying to say? What sticks out?
Biological function
It said ‘biological function’. That’s odd. They talk about that in two other places in that regulation. None of those define it, though. Let’s check what a biological function is.
We appear to have two definitions, but they appear to be basically the same thing. One of them is ‘What does this thing do, directly?’, and the other is ‘What does this thing do, evolutionary speaking?’. I.e., if you were to look at ‘peacock feathers’, the biological function directly is ‘not much, it’s somewhat a hindrance’, but the biological function evolutionary is ‘increase attractiveness to potential mates’.
Alright, simple enough.
Except, we have a problem because it appears that a ‘biological function’ is ‘the reason that something biological does what it does’, so by definition, it has to do that thing. Systems that do not accomplish things do not have a biological function. So saying ‘Having the biological function to produce eggs or sperm does not require that eggs or sperm are ever produced.’ is just wrong, that’s not what that means.
Why are they using this term wrong? Wait. There’s a paragraph we under biological function on Wikipedia, way back at the top of that page. Was it important?
In the philosophy of biology, talk of function inevitably suggests some kind of teleological purpose, even though natural selection operates without any goal for the future. All the same, biologists often use teleological language as a shorthand for function.
The term suggests something that isn’t there? Let’s look at what teleological means.
You’re almost going to have to read that whole thing, but if you can’t, here’s my takeaway: It looks like asserting that biological systems have a ‘function’ is a pretty big terminology argument in biology to start with. And the people involved on both sides appears to mostly agree that biological systems don’t have ‘function’, and the dispute is over whether or not it’s okay to talk like they do, or should we not talk that way, or if it’s completely unavoidable to talk that way, because that’s just how language works.
It seems like this is a giant misleading statement in biology, something they’ve been arguing about since Darwin, who himself realized some of his early work on natural selection was misleadingly assigned goals and purpose to biological systems, so he changed how he talked about it, but people keep doing it.
There is no such thing as ‘goals’ in biological systems, there are only results. Biological systems are not ‘intended’ to do things, they are not ‘supposed’ to do things, they do not have the ‘function’ of doing things. They just do things.
And GCs took that misleading phrase, and not only decided it was literally true, but then added the idea they could determine those goals even when those biological systems did not accomplish the thing they have decided it was trying to accomplish!
Bad science on top of bad science.
Let’s pretend this makes sense, and keep going
And now that I’ve just spent a giant chunk explaining what ‘biological function’ means, we’re going to ignore all that. It’s bad science, but we’re going to pretend it’s not. Let us pretend reproductive systems have goals, specifically, the goal of making certain specific gametes. It’s easy to figure out that goal when they do make the gametes, but how do we figure out the goal if they don’t make any?
Let’s check what the regulations say:
Rare disorders of sexual development do not constitute a third sex because these disorders do not lead to the production of a third gamete. That is, the reproductive system of a person with such a disorder does not produce gametes other than eggs or sperm.
That’s a philosophical statement about the nature of reality and how GCs conceive of the sex binary. It has absolutely nothing to help sex people with those ‘disorders of sexual development’. Aka, intersex people.4
Anyway, GCs have asserted that that of course the laws designed to stop people about their sex from ‘lying’ wouldn’t impact intersex people. And now, we get the actual laws and regulations being passed, by GCs. Do they do what GCs always asserted, and protect intersex people? Let’s try to apply their definitions to someone with a specific DSD, CAIS.
That is an intersex condition that effects between 7,000-24,000 people in the US. Making an inventory of body parts, they have breasts, a vulva, a vagina, and non-descended undeveloped testicles. They look like women, they have a body that developed on estrogen. They are XY. If you are wondering what’s going on, it’s because testosterone does not have an effect on their body. The SRY gene on their Y chromosome said ‘make testicles’, their bodies did, and the testicles proceeded to pump out some testosterone to cause a traditional male body to develop, and…their body completely ignored that testosterone, and proceeded to develop as a female. They eventually even go through female puberty because testosterone, if not used by the body, is aromatised into estrogen. Although, as their testicles do not develop properly, they ironically do not have enough estrogen because they do not have enough testosterone, so usually end up on estrogen directly also. (I am extremely simplifying some of this.)
The only real indication that anything is wrong is a lack of a period (Due to no uterus) and a vagina that often doesn’t (but can) develop to full depth.
And to be clear, this is not some rare, very blurry edge case. I picked this because this a situation where the GC people themselves have said that that of course someone with CAIS, who was assigned female at birth, grew up as a girl, thinks of herself as female, has a body based on estrogen, etc…of course such people were girls, despite being XY. Of course the much needed laws to ‘protect women’ would would include them. How dare gender ideology activists say otherwise!
This is thousands, possible tens of thousands, of people-who-consider-themselves-women who need to legally know what sports they can play. Or restrooms they can use, or whatever we’ve started making laws about.
So what is the verdict?
What is the biological function of these people’s reproductive system?
*dramatic pause*
*longer, confused pause*
Um. Hmm. They have testicles, right? But a vagina. They also are XY, but that’s not…part of their reproductive system, per se.
I can’t really figure out what ‘biological function’ was intended for this reproductive system. It doesn’t do anything close to anything useful WRT reproduction! You see how dumb the idea of biological function is when talking about something that very obviously doesn’t ‘work right’ is?
Okay, can we figure this out statistically? This is a disorder, aka, an abnormality, so what would be ‘normal’ for this person?
People who have reproductive systems that look like theirs, when looked at from the outside, observing a vulva and vagina, generally produce eggs? Is what where we are going? Does that make sense? I have to say no, because we know these laws are very deliberately made to exclude…let’s say, ‘people who have had surgery down there’.5 The law steers clear of what anything looks like, and talks only about gamete production. So ‘that ‘visual observation of genitalia’ seems very unlikely to be how we should parse things.
Well, statistically, people with CAIS produces no gametes. But I’m assuming that ‘no sex’ is not an option here.
So…I guess the most specific normal functioning closes to this is ‘people with testicles produce sperm’. That seems to be the place where the part of the reproductive system we care about, the gamete producing part, diverged from normal…their testicles should have gone though a male puberty, and start producing sperm, and did not. Because even their testicles are essentially immune to the effects of testosterone, even while they paradoxically produce testosterone.
Granted, even if that part of their reproductive system worked, it still would have been difficult to use in actual reproduction, considering they don’t have the penis part, so it would be hard to get that sperm where needed, but we are only concerned about gamete production, not ‘can the person then plausibly impregnation of others with those gametes?’. And artificial insemination is a thing, at least.
So they have to be legally defined as male, right?
Again, these sort of people were exactly the sort of people that the Gender Criticals claimed would protected, the ‘XY person who is nevertheless female in every aspect that supposedly matters: socially, hormonally, physical body, etc’. GCs were supposed to allow them into the woman club! They have less testosterone influence on their body and brain than endosex6 women, who at least get very small amounts. They get zero influence, despite the fact they have a lot of it in their system. JK Rowling herself was like ‘Of course those are women!’
And they failed to even try to include them.
It’s because they’re lying
Everyone who thinks there is a discussion to be had in good faith needs to understand that one side is lying to everyone. That side does not care one bit about the things they claim to care about. Including a bunch of women. It was always a lie. Their entire goal has always been to harm everyone who doesn’t conform to their idea of the sex binary and sex/gender conformity in general, even if that non-conformance is a genetic condition.
But in addition to being evil, this renders their entire regulation nonsense: Almost no one is aware they have CAIS until puberty. There’s no clues, no symptoms that they are not an endosex female, until that point.7
So these people are going to be assigned female at birth. But sex can’t ever change, according to this rule. So how do they stop being female and start being male? Are we going to reissue birth certificates? And do we retroactively pretend they were always male? Do people who are being granted the right to sue because a male player plays on a woman’s team get to sue them for playing on a woman’s team years before they even knew?
Again, I picked the most obvious and simple edge case, one that even Gender Criticals say ‘Yeah, those are women’, and the regulations give us ‘a man’ and ‘we somehow having to change their sex to male when we realize that they are a man despite the entire premise being we cannot’. Also, this isn’t incompetency on the part of the Trump administration. GCs have literally been working on this definition for a decade, workshopping stuff like this, getting yelled at on Twitter about stuff like this, and if there was some better way to do this, and they wanted to use it, it would be used.
Now, could the Trump administration make ‘better rules’? Well, they certainly could make more detailed rules that would cover this particular DSD and others. In fact, if they’re willing to make things completely arbitrary, if they’re willing to do detailed testing and write in specific genetic sequences and hormone levels and size of body parts, drawing lines at arbitrary points, they could probably get everyone in one side or the other, in much the same way could define everything as ‘red’ or ‘blue’ if they just…picked some level of reflected red light that things became red, and below that, they were blue. Sure. They just…make a line.
People can invent the rules for perfectly sexing people. Federal regulations can be huge! I bet, somewhere in federal regulations, there are dozens of pages defining what a ‘door’ is. It would be pretty hard to find doctors willing to write such nonsense, but not impossible. Pretty expensive to run the tests on everyone, too. But we could!8 It would be pretty clear the rules were completely arbitrary if they did that, but they could.
But they don’t want to get everyone, and they don’t want it to be easy for the people they think of as freaks to figure things out.
None of this will actually happen
See, the thing is, they made these rules, but they don’t intend to follow them at all. Almost everyone with CAIS will be regarded as female to start with. Even those with actual diagnoses and known genetics of XY.
We will start classifying specific women as male when we, as society, don’t approve of them.
It will be used disproportionately against Black female athletes, for one. Darker skin is already read as more masculine by a generally racist society, and their behavior and successes are policed more by society. They are the people who will pointed at and checked.
Meanwhile, white female athletes won’t generally. At least, the feminine ones won’t. I suspect a lot of the more muscular one with short hair, and muscular builds, and small breasts, and girlfriends (Wait, where did that last one come from?) will be checked.
And the law, the entire concept of ‘biological function’, so vague, that it will almost certainly include people with DSDs that have ovaries. They’ll just…pick something else. Someone who wrote an article against Trump has PCOS? ‘Oh, your testosterone levels are really high. That shows your ‘biological function’ is to produce sperm.’.
The actual way this definition is going to be used is the way all groupings are used under fascism: Completely arbitrary.
It will be something fascists will keep in their back pocket to use randomly against anyone that disagrees with the administration, same as revoking a visa. The best situations is where they can punish, at their own whim, literally any person they want.
So most people with CAIS, despite federal regulators sitting down and writing out a regulation that very clearly defined them as men, and criminalizes them doing things as women, will probably continue to be considered women. Until they’re arrested, and someone checks some medical records or DNA tests them, gleefully discovers they are ‘XY’ (Which will almost certainly be the actual determining factor, despite what the regulations say.), charges them with lying on documents, and sends them to a men’s prison to be raped.
Wow, that got really dark really fast, didn’t it? I was being all funny, and suddenly, here we are.
Welcome to fascism, where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter. Because the categories that fascists sort people into mostly exist to give society an underclass of people to punish, and a threat of sorting you into them if they do not like you.
- Different executive agencies might have different definitions. But I think it’s a reasonable assumption that the best written definition would be found in Health and Human Services. ↩︎
- Interesting fact: The only places the law generally talks about ‘humans’ is in regard to treating a person’s body as an object. Like ‘human remains’ or ‘human trafficking’. It does not bode well for regulations to be talking about ‘humans’. ↩︎
- There is a lot of philosophical stuff in this regulation to try to justify their bad law and bad science. ↩︎
- GCs like to pretend that intersex people prefer saying they are people with DSDs. This is not true, according to both polling of intersex people and intersex advocacy groups. They generally say they are intersex as an identity, and have a ‘disorder of sexual development’ as a medical condition, and hence I’ll just be calling them intersex. GCs are just extremely weird with language and very good at telling other people what those people should be calling themselves. ↩︎
- You may notice there’s a word I’m literally not saying once in this entire discussion. ↩︎
- Endosex is the opposite of intersex, aka, normal functioning. ↩︎
- Indeed, almost no intersex condition that didn’t create ambiguous genitalia will be discovered before puberty! As long as your outside bits look fine, no one is going to notice how weird your reproductive system is until the point that things are supposed to Start Happening and they Go Weird. And considering our state of sex ed and our reluctance to talk about sex and bodies with teens, often it’s not even noticed at that point. Sometimes it’s realized at fertility clinics. ‘So you’re trying to get pregnant, when was your last period? You don’t know? You think you’ve never had one? Uh, let’s get an ultrasound….you don’t have a uterus! Hold on, we need to run some more tests.’ ↩︎
- A lot of people would be very surprised if tests were run on literally everyone, there’s a reason they don’t do have freshmen in college biology look at their own chromosomes anymore, and that’s because they got tired of how, every few years, a woman discovered she was XY or a man discovered he was XX, and they had to deal with that fallout midclass. ↩︎
This is your money quote:
Though the Whose Line reference is also well played.
As much as I despise this attempt at social control, why always stickers with me is how much these folks feel they have to twist words to hide intent. It’s like they know they are morally repugnant and don’t want to own that.Report
Shockingly, Trump and his crew didn’t handle this issue competently.
Big picture we have laws and rules designed to protect women from men. As a class, men are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive. How these rules and laws interact with men who identify as women hasn’t been worked out.Report
Equally not-shockingly all the hullabaloo about protecting women’s spaces heaps insults on women AND defies statistical analysis. It’s also ONLY about trans women – trans men are apparently not a threat.
Guess you can’t have a Strict Father hierarchical society without cementing who gets to be a father and thus in control.Report
Well of course trans men aren’t a threat- they don’t have the biological context in mens’ spaces that gives the trans woman in womans’ spaces the bite it does. Quite the inverse actually.Report
Biological context? Transphobe much?Report
Reality based more like it; I don’t consider reality to be innately transphobic. Trans men are, on average, slighter and more lightly build that their non-trans male compatriots- they simply don’t present a believable threat to non-trans men. The dynamic is reversed for trans women which is why the rights incendiary charges and accusations find some measure of traction.Report
Great. Another short dude who uptalks and complains that nobody wants to date him.
We have enough of those, thanks.Report
SnerkReport
And of course trans men are now going to be sorted with the rest of the biological women.
I don’t know how to embed an image here, but please just google Chas Bono, now coming to a women’s restroom near you. It’s the law, you know.Report
It’s a clusterfish, yup.Report
Phil: trans men are apparently not a threat.
As a class, men are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive. So yes, trans men aren’t considered a threat.
Phil: all the hullabaloo about protecting women’s spaces heaps insults on women AND defies statistical analysis
In athletics, I’d say we’re well past “statistical analysis” and are finding that “men being bigger and stronger” is why we have women’s sports.
Similarly we’re starting to see reports that trans-women are a lot more violent than women. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/
https://legislature.maine.gov/testimony/resources/CJPS20210518Gingrich132664242197478414.pdfReport
Hey Dark, you probably should be aware that the UK has been taken over by transphobic assholes, so trying to cite something that the government has said about trans people as proof of anything is kind of ridiculous.Report
Fair enough. But we still have the issue that men are bigger, stronger, and way more violent than women.
Ergo we should expect that trans-women are too. If there’s some reason we shouldn’t expect that, please put it on the table.Report
As I said, this isn’t bad wording that Trump came up with, this is wording that the Gender Criitical movement has been testing for a literal decade, the only thing it has to do with Trump is that he’s the person who was willing to do it.
There’s not some better version of this out there that he should have used. Mostly because there’s not actually a good way to do this, exactly like there’s not a good way to determine, under the law, exactly what race someone is.
We not only have not decided that, we have decided the exact literal opposite of that. And by we, I mean second wave feminism, AKA what happened in the 1960s and after.
For those of you who are not aware, one of the foundational premises of second wave feminism is that women should be treated the same as men under the law and by society. Essentially every single feminist law from that era (and beyond) requires women to be treated identically to men. In fact, they don’t even say that, they don’t say women or men at all, they say the people cannot be treated differently based on sex.
Feminists from that era would be appalled at the idea that the law should do things to protect women, as a class, from men, as a class. It’s literally the opposite of what they were working for, in which the law did not see women or men, and in fact made no determination based on sex whatsoever.
Even laws that you would think would only apply to women, like abortion laws, are not written that way, very much on purpose.
This is because feminists were quite aware of the fact that such laws giving rights based on who someone is were very easy to turn against people, by merely redefining the terms used in them so that person isn’t under it anymore. As I mentioned in my first post here, feminists knew this because first wave feminism was like 50% lesbians, and if there is one class of women that historically has been de-womaned and excluded from protections granted to women, it is lesbians.
This is why the gender critical movement has spent a decade lying to people and propagandizing that we do have such laws. Claiming that the law gives certain privileges to women, thus making the argument that certain people who don’t deserve them should be excluded from those privileges.
There are no such privileges. Women have no special rights, under the law, whatsoever. It is not feminist to claim that they do and try to defend those rights, it is literally the opposite, that is one of the things that feminists actively worked against because they knew exactly this thing could happen.
People, have rights under the law, regardless of sex. That is the law in this country, or sort of is, except we never actually (or say we didn’t) passed the ERA…but to the extent that such laws do exist, they do not ‘protect women’, they protect everyone by requiring the law to treat everyone identically.
And the only reason you need to know who was a woman, under the law, is if you wanted to change that.Report
…women should be treated the same as men under the law and by society.
We have women’s sports and women’s prisons for good reason. I’ve never heard of “feminists” calling for those to be merged.
If we do merge them, the instant result is woman won’t be competitive in multiple sports and female prisoners will be raped on a regular basis.
Further, I don’t remember seeing mixed shower rooms outside of a few SciFi movies and public bathrooms are also segregated.Report
A lot of this comes down to whether or not one believes that womens’ equality depends in some part on separate accommodations for situations where women are particularly vulnerable.
Always worth remembering that one of the (many) ways that a lot of Muslim countries enforce a second class status on women is simply by not having womens’ accommodations in places where they aren’t wanted or allowed. In light of this debate I’ve found it useful to occasionally ask myself ‘would a woman really be allowed here if there weren’t separate bathrooms’? Sometimes the answer is clearly yes but a lot of times it isn’t so clear cut. Ponder this next time you’re at a big sporting event or a bar or some other place with a lot of drunken or rowdy behavior.Report
A lot of this comes down to whether or not men and women are different. That’s why I keep bringing up “bigger, stronger, and more aggressive” and is also why I get no reply on those points.
If we pretend that those aren’t issues, then everything has to be motivated by trans-phobia.
In reality, men are two full standard deviations bigger than women, stronger at the same size, and so violent that men commit the vast majority of violent crimes.Report
It’s almost the inverse, actually.
Or, to rephrase: A lot of this comes down to whether or not one believes that we can reach women’s equality by concluding that we cannot actually solve any problems at all. To the extent of being unwilling to stop rape inside _entirely controlled-and-monitored facilities_, so we just have to throw up our hands and make sure that _one_ group doesn’t rape women. (Guards raping women, a much larger problem, totally fine. Likewise, other women, totally fine.)
That is the totality of effort: In this one specific case, we are willing to physically stop this very particular sort of rape of some women by a certain specific group.
GO FEMINISM! *raises hands in victory sign* WOO!
Or, new idea: We should not have rape essentially running wild in prison. We should not have male prisoners raping other male prisoners , we should not have male prisoners raping female prisoners, we should not have male guards raping male or female prisoners, we should not have male prisoners raping trans female prisoners, we should not have female prisoners raping other female prisoners, we should not, in fact, have any of that happening at all.
Which is a thing we could trivially do.
Instead, we have built a system where it is happening openly and _encouraged_ by prison staff.
Hey, InMD, I said it to Dark, but did you happen to google v-coding? Do you know what that is? It’s when prison guards reward a well-behaving prisoner, or just one that bribes them well, with a trans woman cellmate to rape.Report
Then you have never listened to feminists.
Let me explain something that a lot of people get very very wrong about sports: The feminist argument was not that women should get their own team. The feminist argument was that women _should be allowed to play_, period. They were not allowed to play sports in any manner whatsoever before that, and if they were, it was absurdly underfunded segregated dumb games.
The feminist position was, and always has been, that women should be allowed to play with them men. Women’s sports do not exist because of feminists. They exist _despite_ feminists. The regulations in Title IX, when it was created in 1972, originally said in 1972: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
You may notice that doesn’t say anything about segregating sports. Indeed, the original regulation, as pushed by the national Organization of Women and other feminist groups, would seem to prohibit it. If an educational athletic team does not allow women, it would be illegal.
Which got a lot of female college potential athletes suing, because they wanted access to sports, to play actual real sports with the men, and still were not allowed to play.
So, eventually, these Federal regulations were made into law, in 1975. And an amendment was added: A recipient which operates or sponsors interscholastic, intercollegiate,club or intramural athletics shall provide equal athletic opportunity for members of both sexes. In determining whether equal opportunities are available, the Director will consider, among other factors:… Whether the selection of sports and levels of competition effectively accommodate the interests and abilities of members of both sexes …
You may notice _that_ doesn’t require a separate women’s sports either. But it’s suddenly moved from allowing access to any ‘education program or activity’ without consideration of sex to allowing ‘equal opportunities’ while considering sex. I.e., recreating separate but equal. With a whole bunch of rules about how we would know if something was equal.
This amendment was added by Senator Jacob Javits, a Republican, although a fairly liberal one who did seem to be pretty much in favor of civil rights. It’s called the Javits Amendment.
This was not at all what feminism organizations asked for. It wasn’t a step forward, it literally undid some of the existing regulation and created an _exception_ to anti-discrimination law. It was a step _backwards_, designed to fix the new and exciting ‘problem’ of women attempt to try out for college sports and the revenue impact that was perceived to have on sports.
Or just read this: https://lewisbrisbois.com/blog/category/sports-law/fifty-years-of-progress-the-legal-history-of-title-ix
The law has certainly seen its fair share of adversity and backlash, particularly in its application to sport. Immediately following its enactment (and in the years thereafter), Title IX faced an onslaught of challenges, whether through subsequent proposed amendments or through lawsuits challenging its legality and attempting to narrow its scope. In 1974, Senator John Tower proposed the “Tower Amendment,” which sought to exempt revenue-generating sports from Title IX’s reach. When that failed, Senator Jacob Javits submitted an amendment directing HEW to issue regulations providing, “with respect to intercollegiate athletic activities, reasonable provisions considering the nature of particular sports.”
tl;dr – Women’s sports under Title IX do not exist to advance feminism, they exist as an _exception_ to the anti-discrimination rules a school would normally be required to follow, the rules that feminists pushed for. At best, they can be considered as a political compromise made 50 years ago when it became clear that collegiate sports were a particular sticking point for the law.Report
The feminist position was, and always has been, that women should be allowed to play with them men.
Then they’ll lose in most sports. Badly. The best female tennis player in history (Serena Williams) got crushed by the number #200+ male, so all of the top #100 players would be male. This is also true in track and field, basketball, football, weight lifting, swimming, and so on.
Why would be a good thing? Who exactly is arguing for this?
And you totally ignored the result of merging prisons, i.e. the females will get raped.Report
That’s completely irrelevant to the point being made here.
Your claim was you didn’t think that feminists would like women’s sports going away, not some hypothetical ‘fairness’ argument that _you_ believe but actual feminists do not.
Feminists don’t care if there are statistical differences. Feminist theory does not, and never have argued that random things should be ‘fair’. I know that’s what the _right_ has pretended, for decades, but that’s not at all true.
Actual feminists have a lot of things to say on these issues. Here’s what, for example, is said about grade schools sports:
Grade school athletics are supposed to be _educational_, not ‘a record-defining competition to see who is literally the best’. It is okay and even expected to have differing skill levels. Especially considering that a major factor in ability in grade-school athleticism is literally just ‘who is the oldest’ and ‘who hit their growth spurt first’, and when there is that much variation in a single grade, and that sports are often played across grade, it is pointless to pretend girls are weaker, especially since girls usually hit their growth spurt first.
Additionally, sports as provided by grade schools are very weighted towards ones that boys appear to be better at. Almost no one is doing sports programs that girls generally dominate in, like gymnastics. This seems…odd. But there’s a reason for that: We have allowed the popularity of sports to be a huge funding source to school, allowing any general societal sexism to dictate what sports exist and demand that teams ‘win’ instead of just having sports as, again, _education_ and general activities for students, which is what it should be.
To summarize: Claiming that ‘girls will not do as well as boys while playing on a mixed-sex team’ in _grade school_ fundamentally, and somewhat deliberately, misunderstands why we _have_ sports in grade school. It is not to see which school is ‘the best’. It is not to see which individual player is best.
It is because being part of a sport and a team and competing as such is very good experience.Report
Please supply links to a few of these groups calling for sports to be mixed by eliminating women’s sports.
Ideally that would be women’s rights groups.Report
Sure, have some entire books:
https://academic.oup.com/book/53445
https://www.amazon.com/Frailty-Myth-Approaching-Physical-Equality/dp/0375502351
A magazine article:
https://www.howwegettonext.com/is-gender-segregation-in-sports-necessary/
One from a legal direction:
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol95/iss5/13/
However, I feel you have misunderstood my response.
I claim is that feminists _did not want separate sports_. Feminists are not the reason those exist, they were never lobbied for by feminists, they often were enacted in direct opposition to what feminists were trying to do. They were seen as a compromise, one that feminists mostly went along with. (It was way, way, WAY more important to have, for example, bank accounts and laws against spousal rape.)
These sports are, at this point, pretty entrenched as a compromise, so generally feminists just work with that compromise existing. Spending time and effort trying to change them is pointless.
To be clear here, there is a difference between ‘We are going to work within the law as it is, and if we urge changes, they are minor changes’, which is what mainstream women’s right groups do, and ‘Feminist theory’.
If we’re going to start listening to women’s right groups like the National Organization of Women, we should probably just, more directly, listen to what they say about laws barring trans athletes from women’s sports. https://now.org/blog/even-if-bigots-insist-it-is-waging-a-hate-campaign-against-trans-people-is-not-feminist/
Although, NOW is pushing for passage (and was always one of the main backers) of the ERA, and one of the right-wing attacks _on_ the ERA, back in the 70s, is that it would not allow separate ‘women spaces’, exactly like women’s sports, and as a more deciding issue back then, women’s restrooms. (Although then, as is now, it was pointed out we don’t actually have laws about who can use what restrooms!)
No one has really come up with a reason why that interpretation would be incorrect, how such segregated categories could hypothetically be legal under the ERA. The ERA basically forbids the US government (and, by incorporation, state governments), from taking sex into consideration _at all_, and the government (including, for example, a local high school) would be exactly as unable to make a rule saying ‘Women cannot play on the men’s team, or vis versa’ as they could make a rule saying ‘Blacks cannot play on the white’s team, or vis versa’.
So NOW is, in fact, lobbying for dissolving women’s sports, and always done so. They just aren’t _saying_ that. Because they rightly realized what a (moronic) hotbutton issue it was to have sex integrated teams, and NOW is doing respectability politics. (And the far-right decided to make it hot button issue about trans people anyway, and NOW, to their credit, pointed out idiotic that is.)Report
I read Playing With The Boys 15 or 16 years ago in a reading group. I think it’s a flawed book, but worth reading. The biggest issue, I think, is that separate but equal always does separate well, but never approaches equal, and it’s difficult to assess the potential of female athletes relative to men when their training, facilities, even diets, are unequal, as is the case in virtually all major sports (and probably the minor ones as well). On top of that, there are likely some women who’d do well in major men’s sports, even if that’s not true for most women in sports, so excluding them entirely on the basis of race starts to look a lot like discrimination on top of the unequal part of separate but equal.
Anyway, I’d recommend the book to people who are obsessed with trans women in men’s sports, but I think it’s safe to say the vast majority of them don’t read books.Report
there are likely some women who’d do well in major men’s sports
We occasionally see female football kickers in college. Sarah Fuller. Leilani Armenta (see link). First one was Tonya Butler in 2003 so it’s been acceptable since at least then.
https://gojsutigers.com/sports/football/roster/leilani-armenta/4416Report
NOW is, in fact, lobbying for dissolving women’s sports, and always done so.
Google’s AI disagrees with you. Your own links supply data showing women would be crushed head to head even though they reach the opposite conclusion through magic thinking.
laws barring trans athletes from women’s sports.
When I look at what the International Federation of Sports Medicine actually says, they disagree with themselves.
FIMS recognizes the importance of fair competition and the need to ensure that transgender athletes do not have a disproportionate advantage over their cisgender peers. Evidence-Based Approach: FIMS supports the use of scientific evidence to inform eligibility criteria and policies for transgender athletes
If we assume that there are no performance differences between men and women on the field, then there is no reason to discriminate against trans athletes.
If we recognize there is a 10% overall difference (your link, although it goes from 5% to more than 30% depending on sport), then women will lose and trans-women should be banned.
That 5% was in 800m free style and ignores how massive 5% is.
At the last Olympics the top 26 male athletes had times better than the female world record. 28 of them did better than the female gold metal winner. And that’s in the sport your own link claimed was the closest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_swimmingReport
Google’s AI cannot agree or disagree with anyone. Google’s AI is a computer program that strings plausible-sounding text together in such a way that it is statistically-likely English. But, sure, what part of what I said do randomly sentences that statistically look like real sentences object to?
Because it is very easy to demonstrate that the National Organization of Women supports the ERA, that’s literally been a focus of theirs from the very start.
And it’s pretty easy to understand that the ERA would no longer allow segregated sports team. There are plenty of conservative sites I could link to that explain this, as opposition. And…they’re not lying there.
Of course, NOW will just ignore that. In fact, they very carefully do not say anything on that topic. They do say this, though: https://now.org/era-frequently-asked-questions/
The general objective of the amendment was to end legal distinctions between men and women as related to divorce, property, employment and other matters where government law and policy is involved.
Hmm. Also:
For the first time, sex would be considered suspect classification, as race currently is. Governmental actions that treat males or females differently as a class would be subject to strict judicial scrutiny and would have to meet the highest level of justification – a necessary and compelling state interest – to be upheld as constitutional.
Weird. It’s almost as if they know it but aren’t saying it.
Supporting a constitutional amendment that would outlaw the operation of women’s sports teams (at least any governmental school or college) does, in actuality, seem to be ‘against women’s sports existing’.
First, again, a lot of feminists argue that suspect that women are not doing as well simply because they are not provided the same support.
But, and I think I need to make this clear, even if these differences turn out to be inherent instead of support and training: Feminists (Or, at least, NOW, which is hardly some extremist organization) does not want laws to exist that treat men and women differently. Period. End of story.
They do not want laws that do that both as a matter of principle, and they don’t want them because having such laws is unsafe for women! Those laws create a precedent that can be used against women. Usually under the justification of ‘protecting women’.
And hey, it is! It’s literally what’s happening here, according to NOW. Not only against trans women, but the policing of all women in sports. Invasive checks and questions and accusations and racism. All because of segregated sports.
What are you talking about? Why do we care about them?Report
International Federation of Sports Medicine
The link you used to support Trans in sports had them as the original source on what should be done. Their actual opinion is not what was represented and only makes sense if we pretend men aren’t bigger, stronger, and so on.
Google’s AI cannot agree or disagree with anyone.
I’ll rephrase. When I search for NOW supporting eliminating women’s sports I get no useful links and an AI saying the opposite. When I asked you for links you gave me individuals who seem to believe men and women aren’t different.
So please supply a link to NOW supporting the elimination of women’s sports.
Supporting a constitutional amendment that would outlaw the operation of women’s sports teams…
That’s your spin on their spin on an amendment that won’t pass.
even if these differences turn out to be inherent instead of support and training:
This is like saying, “even if the sun is proven to always rise in the East”. Men being bigger and stronger is a fact.
Big picture men as a class are 2 full standard deviations bigger than women and are also stronger at the same weight. STD math is grim at the tails.
In sports were small advantages matter a lot, those are massive advantages.Report
And as for prisons, you _really_ need to talk to some feminists, because most of them have pretty serious problem with the entire carceral system, from top to bottom, especially the level of sexual assault allowed to exist within it.
Within the existing system, feminism generally operates off a harm migration system, where decisions are made about individual prisoners and the risk.
And they have much much more a problem with male guards at women’s prisons than trans people. And they also know that v-coding exists, a thing you are about to google and then immediately wish you had not googled.Report
…prisons… have pretty serious problem with the entire carceral system
Do we agree that these problems would be made much worse merging the female and male prisons?Report
Yes, but more importantly, those problems would be made much worse by hosting prisons inside of active volcanoes.
However, as neither of those proposals are on the table, I don’t know why we’re talking about them .
Hey, did you Google v-coding yet?Report
However, as neither of those proposals are on the table, I don’t know why we’re talking about them.
You have made the claim that there is no legal reason to separate men and women. So yes, you were indeed arguing for intersex prisons.
If you are agreeing that it’s a bad idea, then the next question is whether we should expect trans-women to have a violence rate roughly equal to men or roughly equal to women.
Some of my previous links included claims that trans-women who are prison inmates have sex crime rates a lot closer to what we’d expect for men than women.
Hey, did you Google v-coding yet?
Yes. It’s heinous.Report
If you want to know what I’m actually arguing for, it’s not prisons.
Assuming prisons exist, my next level of argument is: Do not blatantly allow people in prison to commit more crimes while in prison against other people.
Assuming we cannot stop _that_ in general,for some reason, my argument is for what literally already exists: Making decisions about where individual prisoners belong based on those prisoners.
Pssst: There is a giant billionaire backed operation that exists solely to produce misleading statistics in this manner. In actual reality, there are almost no meaningful statistics _at all_ on trans people and criminality. No one collects those.
It is also extremely unclear why we should care about ‘statistical rate of sex crimes’ when deciding where to send people. Do you know where there is gigantic spike in actual reported rapes? It’s when trans women are in men’s prisons. If we’re going to care about anything, maybe the most obvious point?!
It appears the logic is ‘Send the trans women to men’s prisons, where there is near certainly they will be raped, instead of women’s prisons, where they are not actually likely to rape but could’. (And ignoring all the other rape.)
Women who raped other women are more likely to rape other women in prison, should we send them to men’s prison?
What sort of weird logic is all this?
How about we do everything in our power to reduce rape? Including allowing and even requiring the prison system to make decisions to keep people safe by sending people where it determines, individually, would be in reducing threats both from and to them?
You know, how the system worked until Trump.Report
Assuming prisons exist…
Prisons existing is a fact.
Do not blatantly allow people in prison to commit more crimes while in prison…
A very good idea, but we shouldn’t insist that we have perfect prisons before we decide that maybe having mixed gender prisons is a bad idea.
there are almost no meaningful statistics _at all_ on trans people and criminality. No one collects those.
Or maybe the results aren’t what we’d like to see? I see serious results on trans victimization but there’s nothing on the reverse.
Trans advocates claim 21% of transgender women have spent time in prison or jail, compared to only 5% of all U.S. adults. Not sure those are meaningful numbers without a further breakdown.
unclear why we should care about ‘statistical rate of sex crimes’ when deciding where to send people.
I’d think that’s exactly what we’d be concerned about.
Send the trans women to… women’s prisons, where they are not actually likely to rape but could’.
You are assuming trans-women prisoners behave like women and not men. In order to make that assumption you handwaved my various links as “misleading statistics” and didn’t supply any of your own (to be fair I can’t find any either).
Briefly looking over existing stats, I’d say trans people are horrifically abused in general and especially by the criminal justice system.
That doesn’t answer the issue on whether they behave more like men or like women as far as aggression is concerned. The sound of crickets chirping from the groups that clearly are gathering data doesn’t suggest good things.
We have something like 5k trans criminals in state prisons. That seems large enough to have their own prison(s).Report
I have a female friend then went into a changing room for “women” to find a “person with a penis” changing. There was no forewarning, no signage, etc.. She was disturbed. I can understand that. For that reason, she’s got issues with how the current situation is working.Report
If we need to have separate space for women and men – which is fishing ridiculous IMHO – the the MLB team that just called up a woman pitcher from the minors has some splaining to do.Report
The Oakland Athletics (Oakland A’s) called up Kelsie Whitmore from the Oakland Ballers.Report
Cite? The Ballers play in an MLB partner league, which is not officially any part of the MLB system. (We have a local team in the same league, the Ballers visit regularly.) As I understand it, players in the partner leagues aren’t generally good enough to make any of the four single-A, advanced-A, double-A or triple-A official minor league levels.Report
Hmm… that was a quote but I now only see Instagram and Facebook. I suspect this was a rumor that went viral and has now been retracted.Report
You know, I deliberately tried to make this discussion not about trans people. Literally did not mention them, just pointed out how regulations trying to define what legal sex someone is can’t really work. That sex actually is a spectrum, and it would be a spectrum even trans people did not exist, and there is no magical dividing line, something which has been pointed out for decades, but the Gender Critical movement always handwaves with ‘That is a very small subset.’.
As I pointed out, I am fairly certain very small subsets of people need to know what bathroom they can use, or what sports they can play. They have to be sent to a specific prison. We do need to be able to sex literally every human that exists if we have laws based on sex.
Absolutely no one in this discussion has talked about that. And instead talked about trans people. A group of people I literally didn’t mention.
People, just a basic observation here: You cannot even start to make the argument about where what prisons someone belong in or what sport teams people should be able to play on, based on sex, until you can demonstrate there is a functional legal method to decide sex. (Besides the current use of ‘Just going with whatever arbitrary thing is written on their documentation’.)
If you cannot demonstrate that, it doesn’t matter what rules you think different sexes should follow.
(This is, incidentally, why we generally do not base rights around people’s biology. In fact, the one other place we base rights on biology is people’s age, and that also is just ‘whatever is written on their documentation’.)Report
You cannot even start to make the argument about where what prisons someone belong in or what sport teams people should be able to play on, based on sex, until you can demonstrate there is a functional legal method to decide sex
And yet we still have women’s prisons and women’s sports. We even have those things for good reason.Report