I spent decades arguing against types of social constructivist essentialism in feminism which ignored/side-lined reproductive biology; I now find myself arguing against forms of biological determinism and essentialism in feminism. Go figure.
Women's sports has become a battlefield – not for equity with male peers but in relation to transgender and intersex athletes' right to compete in women's events.
In the past, women athletes were subjected to inferior status, remuneration, and conditions. Training regimes were based on data drawn from male studies, to the detriment of female athletes. Female sports were almost completely dominated by male coaches, administrators, judges etc all without as much as a peep of protest from most people, including a lot of feminists.
That so many people have recently developed an interest in women’s sports and issues of fairness and equity is great and long overdue but perhaps they also need to consider how much of a role the rampant commercialisation and commodification of sports has played and still plays in all this.
“Bread and circuses” is now "fast food and football".
Professional and semi-pro sport in the modern era is ALL about money, and in realms where the mighty $ reigns, aided and abetted by toxic nationalism, fairness struggled to survive even before transgender and
We know that men on average run and swim much faster; jump and throw much further/higher; lift much heavier weights; punch and kick way more powerfully than women …. because, evolution.
We also know the more extreme the endurance element in a sport is, the smaller the male APA gets…. also because, evolution.
At the core of that evolutionary, material reality lies the two different roles in reproduction. Fact.
There are a few sports in which women have an average performance advantage over men, they’re just not the ‘blue riband’, big money events largely because sports have been and still are designed to showcase male abilities – and in the modern era, to make money, mostly for men.
Star athletes – mostly male – are paid obscene amounts of money, and trailing behind them like a school of suckerfish, are a host of agents, PR people, trainers, nutritionists, psychologists, consultants …. And on a wider front, a vast array of mainly male technocrats, bureaucrats, administrators etc.
As some women’s sports move out of the cinders in terms of financial and status rewards, and with the rise of transgenderism as a political movement, there are now people who were born male, who went through male puberty and competed in male sports, who see a financial and competitive / status advantage in identifying as women and competing against natal females.
These are not elite athletes; they are, to date at least, the also-rans and the has-beens. The financial and status rewards in male sports are simply still too great for an elite male to make the switch.
I very much doubt the elite pro bike rider who, as Robert Miller, won stages of the European Grand Tours, would have transitioned to compete as Philippa York in women's races back in the day.
Even with the genuinely gender dysphoric, the switch only happens once an athlete is over the top of the elite male performance hill, or if they were never going to make it up the hill.
The rewards gap is still too huge and it’s natal male athletes who either no longer make the elite grade, or were never going to make it, who are moving into women’s sports.
We know that the post-pubertal physiological and psychological performance advantages accrued by male athletes are not all lost with a lowering of androgen levels – and that an average performance advantage still applies, especially in those areas where the APA is huge, like weightlifting.
Most of the world's elite female super heavyweight weightlifters were out-lifted by a 42 year-old transgender lifter who, even at his male peak was never likely to make it beyond national junior level competition.
And with the acceptance of a surgically transitioned trans athlete’s right to add back, on health grounds, synthetic androgens up to the IOC limit of 10 nmols/L, the playing field is completely unlevel - tilted even more against natal females.
Having presided over the debacle, the IOC has raised its manicured hands, rolled over and waved its be-suited legs in the air and tossed the hot transgender/intersex potato to sporting federations to deal with.
And there are no easy answers. The simplistically-minded, ideologically blinkered on the transactivists' side say that it's all down to a subjective gender identity and any male APA a trans athlete has must be viewed as no different from any other naturally occurring physiological advantages.
The simplistically-minded on the other side look for the solution in DNA, eg the presence of a Y chromosome makes a person male and ineligible to enter women's events. End of story.
Maybe the answer lies in decommercialising and denationalising sport, making it about the individual’s love of sport not national hubris and money.
Yeah, I know - like action on climate change, mass pollution, and species extinctions, that ain’t going to happen because ... bread and circuses.
No comments:
Post a Comment