Excellent summary

[supergee]

Caster Semenya is being forced to alter her body to make slower runners feel secure in their womanhood

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[mneme]

I think there's a kernel of truth in that side of the debate, but it's obscured by a mess of garbage and politics, and most of the answers people push are wrong.

It -is- true that the odd duck of "women's sports" exists fundamentally because historically, women had bodies sufficiently different from men in a significant fraction of sports, the best female athletes couldn't compete with an average male athlete. Thus "women's sports", which like a lot of our some of our more sexist institutions (I found out this July that the NY Democratic party elects "Male Precinct Leaders" and "Female Precinct Leaders". Really. I totally wanted to elect both women and let the men go hang in our district) was originally part of early feminism.

The question then is what to do about trans atheletes. As the author writes, this has statistically not been an issue; there have not been enough trans atheletes--and they haven't been such extraordinary talents to dominate their sports (even aside from the fact that many trans people do in fact take hormones to help affirm their gender). But it would be a problem on a number of levels if the top positions of female sports became dominated by trans atheletes (which Caster Semenya is not), something that as our society has become more trans-affirming has become at least concievable. If the top performers in women's sports have similar performance to the top performers in men's sports, then what's the point of women's sports (again, a speculation not supported by evidence...but I could turn it around and say that it's very likely that trans-masculine atheletes are put at a significant statistical disadvantage by being made to compete against cis men who will be statistically larger and stronger).

Honestly, if one is needed, I'd be happy with a solution that got rid of gender categories if possible entirely -- have competitors compete based on weight class, or if that's insufficient to erase statistical differences, find some other way to band competitors so that training and skill can shine through rather than the effects of hormones (artificial or not) or body type.