Be careful what you wish for

In a case of be careful what you wish for the genderist movement seems to have impaled itself on the horns of a dilemma. Having force teamed LGB people to appropriate a civil rights struggle, it force teamed people with Disorders (or Differences) of Sexual Development* to appropriate some useful language and create the myth that sex is not fixed and is difficult to define.

The language games are well understood, of course. The phrase assigned male at birth or assigned female at birth has now been applied to all of us to promote the idea that it’s normal to make mistakes about a baby’s sex, and that we can only be sure what sex someone is when they tell us.

Which is, obviously, rubbish. That some babies are born with ambiguous genitalia is the exception that proves the rule.

That it is nonsense hasn’t stopped male athletes from competing in women’s sports, though, nor has it stopped genderists from using nonsense arguments to justify it. Aided and abetted by far too many sports governing bodies – including the IOC – who have decided that women are men with low testosterone and there’s no good reason to enforce sex based eligibility criteria.

But in Paris 2024, unlike in previous Olympics, awareness has gone mainstream.

It should have been a bit of a result for the genderists that two men are doing very well in the women’s boxing competition. After all, they have for years been dying on the hill that men are women if they say they are. But now that it’s happened on a big stage and we’ve all noticed, the IOC find they must defend it.

For men who “identify as women”, the arbitrariness of being assigned male at birth is key. Allies (dreadful word - apologies) of those who wish to change from the sex they were assigned at birth can’t go around making claims about the importance of birth certificates or the stickiness of that assignation.

Someone should have told Nadia Whittome. Awkward.

And that’s why we’re now seeing different language being used to defend men with DSDs competing with women. Being assigned female at birth and being raised as a female is no longer definitional.   

Now the importance of the sex marker on a passport is emphasised along with being “born as a woman” and “raised as a woman”. Throw in competing as a woman for many years and apparently you have “the clear definition of a woman” according to IOC President Thomas Bach.

The language sounds wrong and clunky as he negotiates the gender logic traps. Nobody was ever “born as a woman”. Babies are girls or boys and are brought up as girls or boys. Bach’s focus on “woman” suggests that he is playing language games, carefully avoiding the fact that these boxers were wrongly assigned female at birth.

(Competing in any sport for any length of time is neither here nor there. Obviously.)  

Bach goes on to say that “some want to own what is the definition of a woman”. This sounds clumsy too, and the temptation is to make some defence against a nonsense charge. But it’s a distraction because it’s he and the IOC who are claiming that woman means something other than adult human female. The rest of us happy with that old, shared definition.

It's just embarrassing when Bach invites dissenters to come up with “a scientific based new definition of who is a woman and how can somebody be born, raised, competed and having a passport as a woman, cannot be considered a woman”. The correct response to this is “stop being so ridiculous”.

He says the IOC are ready to consider a better test of femaleness than passport sex markers, but they are not. Because they already know about sex testing. The IBA and WBO have already sex tested the individuals being discussed, and the IOC have been told what the results were.

They must also know that cheek swab sex tests are cheap, quick, reliable and readily available, but this is kryptonite for the IOC and genderists more generally. It would require them to stop pretending that sex is complicated, mutable or anything other than binary. He simply can’t go there. To do so would be to admit that the IOC have enabled the corruption of their women’s boxing competition and are accountable for the damage done to the women who have been beaten (in every sense) by these two men.

For the gender movement more generally, cheap quick sex tests are an existential threat. It would require adherents to acknowledge that they are “immersed in a fiction” (thanks DocStockk) and that the medicalisation of children can never make them into the sex they are not.

And so the farce continues.

* For more information about DSDs, check out the Paradox Institute