An interesting and informative Quillette article by Duke Law School Prof. Doriane Coleman, who has guest-blogged here on gender and sports. An excerpt from the introduction and the conclusion:
With the return of the Olympics, it's time for another predictable global uproar about XY athletes competing in the female category. This is now a century-old problem in elite sport that we've somehow not yet managed to solve in a uniform way. The Paris 2024 iteration of this debate is arguably the most explosive ever due to a confluence of at least three factors:
- This time around, the athletes are boxers not runners, which means they're going to be punching their competitors. Physical safety and gender norms, not just competitive fairness, are front-and-centre in people's minds.
- After the debates about Lia Thomas and Caster Semenya (which I discussed in an essay for Quillette in 2019), the public knows a lot more—though still not enough—about the two categories of XY athletes who might be included in female competition: transwomen like Thomas and people like Semenya with disorders or differences of sex development (DSD). DSD are also sometimes called intersex conditions or sex variations by those who prefer non-medical terms.
- The domestic culture wars around sex and gender have since heated up significantly to become a global battle, with LGBTQI-rights organisations and their allies in the international human-rights community arguing that sex isn't real or doesn't matter—either at all or as much as gender identity. Authoritarian regimes led by the Kremlin, meanwhile, describe gender diversity as a harbinger of the end of Western civilisation.
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I will close by reiterating the three basic points that I and other experts in girls' and women's sport have been making for a long time.
First, the female category in elite sport has no raison d'être apart from the biological sex differences that lead to sex differences in performance and the gap between the top male and female athletes. The suggestion that we could choose to rationalise the category differently—for instance, on the basis of self-declared gender identity—or that we could make increasingly numerous exceptions in the interests of inclusion (as the IOC seems to have done to allow Khelif and Lin to compete in Paris) has no legs outside of certain progressive enclaves.
Second, any eligibility standard—like the IOC's framework—that denies or disregards sex-linked biology is necessarily category-defeating.
Finally, federations that are committed to the female category and to one-for-one equality for their female athletes must step up and do two things. They must craft evidence-based rules and then stick to them consistently. And they must seriously embrace other opportunities to welcome gender diversity within their sports.
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