Once Upon A Time

I seldom play the man instead of the ball but on some occasions I feel a little piss-taking of the overly pompous is permitted.

 

Once upon a time, there was a brave and goodly knight, Sir Frank the Bold, who was the self-appointed champion of all the oppressed people in the land.

 

Sir Frank could not see an injustice without sallying forth to do battle with it and his struggles with tyranny were known the length and breadth of the realm  – mostly, it must be said, by his own pronouncement.

 

Of all his many foes, none filled Sir Frank's heart with such dread nor strengthened his noble resolve more than the terrible TERFs, who he had come to see as the very embodiment of evil.

 

One of these fearsome creatures, cleverly disguised as an 80-year-old lesbian, founding member of a progressive party and veteran of the Sex Equality Wars, committed the awful, nay, the foul, heretical sin of publishing a treatise that questioned aspects of the prevailing trans orthodoxy.

 

Sir Frank prepared to do battle but before he could enter the affray (he was having a bit of trouble sharpening his pencil, or it might have been his wits – one of the two) various haughty young fellows – who were still peeing in their pants when their nemesis was already a veteran campaigner – declared she was an "enemy of the people" and must be “re-educated”. 

 

The co-Sheriffs, fearful of being tainted by the heresy, removed the treatise and genuflected deeply and often before the altar to prove their piety.

 

Eventually, with his pencil sharpened and his wits gathered, Sir Frank mounted his hobby horse and bravely rode out to face the TERF beast, determined to defend those who the TERFs sought to destroy, the most oppressed and disadvantaged of all the persons in the land. 

 

Wielding his mighty metaphorical pencil like a sword he cut the offending article to pieces – line by heretical line. 

 

The fact that it had already been removed from public gaze took a bit of the shine off Sir Frank’s noble efforts, but undaunted by that, he proclaimed triumphantly to the assembled crowd : 

 

“Behold!! I have slain the beast. Do not be fooled by the guise of an elderly, planet-loving lesbian  – she is the Devil and the Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape – yea and perhaps out of our weakness and melancholy, for the Devil is very potent with such spirits, abuses us to damn us. For make no mistake, there is none so evil as the TERF, and whenever they raise one of their growing number of monstrous heads it must be struck off – without mercy! Or they will destroy us all! Hide under our beds and murder us in the night!  Return us to the dark ages when the land was ruled by dragons!!”

 

“All hail Sir Frank,” the crowd intoned obediently, though some could be seen to be smirking behind their hands and several looked very confused.

 

For his noble efforts in fighting to free the land of TERFs, Sir Frank was granted membership of the Exalted Order of Overkill, and he was greatly pleased.

 

 

PS. Apologies to Mr Shakespeare.

 

What A Privilege

While I was resting my poor old post-menopausal bones yesterday – before I went out to start planting another 100 native trees to add to the thousands I've already grown and planted or donated to community groups – I thought about young males who would instruct old females on what it means to be a woman.

I also thought about choice feminism – or what might be described as socially endorsed liberal feminism (SELF) – a strand of populist feminism committed in various ways and degrees to neo-liberalism’s Project of the Self, central to which is the belief that meaningful social change can be brought about by attitudinal change, i.e., if enough people can be persuaded to make the right choices and create better versions of their spiritual / intellectual / emotional and physical selves, all will be well with the world.

Such processes are of course conditional upon people possessing the means by which choices may be accessed and exercised. The most foundational of those means – in a world dominated by corporate and state capitalism – is money, which is the route to accessing and exercising most of the choices capitalism dangles in front of us. 

SELF sits alongside another sort of feminism – queer feminism – which is very attractive to young-ish, left-ish, actually or potentially affluent people in search of a cause, and a possible basis for claiming to be oppressed.  

Queer in this sense is partly a nod to gay men’s appropriation of the pejorative use of the word, but is mostly used in the sense of social practices and beliefs that run counter, or obliquely to prevailing social norms. 

Queer theory owes its greatest intellectual debt to American philosopher and gender theorist, Judith Butler, and through her, the French iconoclast, Michel Foucault. Both are highly influential and owe quite a bit of their influence to their respective writing styles.  

The density and complexity of a lot of Butler's prose often leaves it open to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, while Foucault's elegant and clever use of allusion and metaphor blinds his fans to the gaps in his theorising and to the ethical and political thin ice on which he often skates. Furthermore, the windows he claimed to create where there had been walls, allowed him to escape when he wanted to distance himself from his ideas or interpreters of them. 

Both were/are products and members of the coordinator class – critiquing aspects of the class and historical location that gave them considerable privilege, whilst never really engaging with the ways in which the “political freedom to live in a more equitable and livable world” might be achieved and retained – given that the power which denies or constrains such freedoms never willingly gives away anything that is fundamentally detrimental to it, and will push back hard against anything it sees as a real threat. 

The fact that the Roman Catholic Church and other religiously conservative institutions see queer theory's gender ideology as a threat to them is counter- balanced by attitudes and responses from governments, powerful governmental institutions, NGOs and the corporate world (including the global corporate media) which, at the moment, are largely tolerant or even encouraging of it. 

But enough of that – mostly I was thinking about a concept from the transgender politico-theoretical orthodoxy that is sort of informed by Butlerian theory – the existence of cisgender privilege. There is even a cis-gaze – the cis version of the male gaze – the ways in which trans bodies are viewed and policed by cisgender bodies. 

This is all predicated on there being a definable state of being that is cisgender, i.e.,where a person's sense of self as a gendered being is congruent with their biological sex, and of transgender, as a state of being that exists opposite to or across from it – a framing which arguably reinvents the very gender binary that queer politics purports to want to subvert. 

It is a feature of identity politics in general, to fragment into smaller and smaller interest groups (which may then have to re-aggregate for the purposes of being counted in order to count in political lobbying terms) and to jostle for the lowest position in the oppression hierarchy. 

In this political game, misère is the winning hand, i.e., you aim to lose as many privilege points as possible. Cisgender privilege elevates all cisgender people above all transgender people; cisgender women are elevated above transgender women. The latter lose in the privilege stakes and, by losing, they win. 

In the arguments raging around transgender women's rights of access to women-only resources and services, this idea of cisgender privilege – as an axis of oppression – especially if it can be compounded by claims to intersecting factors of class and race privilege, is a powerful weapon.

So, how about these "luckiest people on the planet" – cisgender women – especially those who live outside the multi-hued bubbles of imperial privilege occupied by the most vocal and visible transgender activists and lobbyists?

I challenge anyone who thinks that any feminism other than SELF or Queer feminism is “so last century”, to carry every drop of water they use in a week, by hand, from a tap 1 km from their home and, when they’ve recovered from their exertions, perhaps they'd care to comment on why it is that most of the manual water carrying in the world is done by poor women of colour.  

And then perhaps they could comment on the privilege of the 90k+ women who are known to be murdered every year globally – the overwhelming majority of whom are killed by men; or the untold hundreds of thousands of women globally who are raped and sexually assaulted.

How about the cisgender privilege of the 100+k mainly poor women who die every year as result of complications in childbirth, 85% of them in India and Africa, often as a result of nutrition-related anaemia and easily treatable infections?

How much cisgender privilege is there in an obstetric fistula – a hole torn between the birth canal and the bladder or rectum caused by prolonged, obstructed labour without treatment – almost exclusively a condition of the poorest, most vulnerable and marginalised women and girls?

And when pondering the cisgender privilege of those women of the global south we need to note that rates of death as a result of complications arising from childbirth in the USA are rising for poor women and poor black women especially. 

Linked to this are the 1 million+ neonates who die every year largely of easily preventable causes, and the 4 million + other kids who die before the age of 5? How does a mother's cisgender privilege figure in that? 

And no, the answer is NOT to obscure or deny the reality of female reproductive biology – the answer is to work to remove all the misogyny, stigma, ignorance, and poverty that combines to create the malign conditions in which poor women are so at risk from their reproductive capacity, and which put all women at risk from male violence.

I could go on and on. I could point to the fact that, in the UK, the life expectancy of poor girls has dropped for the first time in a century. I could point to affluent NZ where the life expectancy and incarceration rates of poor Māori women should be a national disgrace, and very wealthy white Australia, whose treatment of its poor and indigenous women is indefensible.

I could point to the dark heart of the male dominated, extreme porn industry with its lobbyists' appeals to the human right of people to do whatever they want to, and with other consenting adults – as if the concept of consent, in a world riven with a mass of deeply rooted, intersecting and compounding inequalities of sex, class, and race, is completely unproblematic; as if those who are exploited, whose vulnerable bodies are the focus and locus of acts of extreme sexual transgression, are somehow the equals of those who do the exploiting.

But I hope I’ve made my point. 

Putting the Boot into Women's Rugby

Once upon a time I worked in a uniformed organisation – which then had and still has a largely white and male, single tier entry workforce. It employed some of the very best and unfortunately, some of the very worst of people.

 

The latter were responsible for a culture of work place bullying that was both enabled and exacerbated by institutionalised racism, sexism and homophobia. 

 

An especially egregious instance of the sort of toxic workplace culture this resulted in - a collection of viciously bigoted materials gathered – as ‘a laugh’ – by a team, was dismissed by a senior officer as "not as bad" as stuff he saw all the time "on the walls of rugby club locker rooms".

 

I mention this because of the rugby connection and the fact that World Rugby has just announced it is striking a blow for gender equality by no longer referring to "women’s" competitions. 

It claims this will enhance the women’s game by no longer specifying it as different from the men’s game.

 

But it is different. It is a nationally and internationally structured rugby football competition for women, members of the female sex who would not ever make it into national or international level rugby if forced to compete against the male sex – for startlingly obvious reasons that are nothing to do with gender identity but which arise from average differences in biology.

 

What would enhance the women’s game would be to pay the professional female rugby players something approaching the amounts paid to their male counterparts and put more effort into the grass roots.

 

And why write out "women"? Why not add in "men’s" to the male competition?  

 

It’s like when women demanded equality in the workplace and men said,  'Ah but you retire earlier than us and that’s unfair discrimination" – and, instead of lowering the retirement age for men, equality was achieved by raising the retirement age for women, i.e., women lost out.

 

This is either just PR puffery or it’s preparing the ground for male to female transgender players to enter women’s rugby 15s and 7s – which will destroy the women’s game because common sense says the traffic will only ever be one way, and the moment one team allows it, the others will be forced to follow or lose. 

 

Blacklists

Blacklisting, aka pre-emptive blocking by mass list on Twitter, for the most part is politically infantile – but that also makes it dangerous. There's a strong whiff of McCarthyism and Cultural Revolution style zealotry that emanates from a lot of the people who deploy Twitter blacklists. 

These mass blacklists are the social media equivalent of deep sea trawling for a particular species of fish. You may catch what you want but inevitably you also catch and waste loads you don’t.

I've recently discovered that I'm on several blacklists – mostly I suspect because I've tweeted, and written on this blog about gender issues in ways that are deemed to deviate from the one true path, or I have followed or been followed by the wrong people, or liked or RTed the wrong tweets.

Well, so be it. I've been on the left for too long and suffered more actual consequences as a result of that than most of the armchair arbiters of what is true and just, so I'm not unduly bothered.

This is not a whinge – well, not much –  more an expression of my concerns about the effects of the politics behind it all at a point in human history when senseless divisions are arguably more dangerous to the entire planet than at any point ever – including when the USA and USSR were at risk of lobbing ICBMs at each other.

I don't reactively block people who've blacklisted me but I did get irked last night when someone, when it was pointed out to him that he'd blocked me, checked out my timeline and declared sententiously – and behind my back – that,  “it's very clear she's on that block list for a reason and I shan't be manually unblocking her.”

The "I shan’t" was so very Christopher Robinish, that shall be his name for the purposes of this post.

My immediate response to Christopher Robin’s patronising and supercilious dismissal of me was adrenaline fuelled and for about five minutes I wanted to rip him up for bog paper but my rational brain kicked in before I put fingers to keyboard – as it almost always does.

One of the other people in the thread is also on the same blacklist – presumably for the same reasons – i.e., being someone who has been declared to be a gender identity deviationist.

Her guilt has been determined by some anonymous person/s who added her account to the mass blacklist, TerfBlocker. However, Christopher Robin doesn't block her, presumably because they share other platforms, which would make it all a bit awkward.

Another person I know is also on the same blacklist and as a result has been blocked by Christopher Robin.

Now, all three us who are on the blacklist that Christopher Robin uses as a sort of force field to protect himself from circuit blowing rage surges, are left wing women who are unfailingly polite and rational – not to mention articulate, erudite, and thoroughly decent human beings.

One is a very dear friend on whose behalf I have decided to be deeply offended. Like me, she has reservations about aspects of the current transgender orthodoxy but unlike me she is too worried about the toxic nature of the on-line debate to engage in it publicly. Yet she is also on the blacklist and so is blocked by Christopher Robin.

I can imagine the enlightened ones would say, "Ah but she's a closet TERF so she deserves to be on the blacklist because she thinks bad thoughts.'"

The likes of Christopher Robin don't matter much because in the great scheme of things, they're inconsequential lightweights – but overall it's the left's loss. 

It's a classic own goal. Self-censorship. Political infantilism.

On the SCAR Intersection

To those who are finding that sitting on the Jessica Yaniv fence is cutting deep into their political and ethical nether regions – let me say this: Yaniv is an exhibitionist with a menstruation fetish focused on girls; demonstrates racist attitudes, and possibly has a personality disorder. 

I think it's fair to say that, on the good ship Trans Rights, which is navigating increasingly choppy seas, Yaniv is a very big, loose cannon.

I don't know if Yaniv is genuinely trans. Who can know for certain in these days of the primacy of self defined gender identity and blurred boundaries? Whatever the truth of it, #WaxMyBalls has become the quintessence of polarisation in this most polarised of debates.

 

In an era in which the concept of intersectionality is tossed around a lot, the busiest and most dangerous intersections of all remain the ones where sex, class, and race meet. A large number of people wearing gender identity blinkers (many of whom really ought to know better) are hurtling into that intersection at breakneck speed, shouting, "we are on the right side of history, give way bigots!"

 

By so doing, they are helping create the conditions for the father of all pile ups, and as in all great ideological crashes, there will be multiple casualties – mostly poor, genuinely marginalised, highly vulnerable people. 

 

The blinkered ones will largely emerge unscathed because typically they wear quite a lot of protection – in the form of varying combinations and degrees of white, male, middle class, educated, affluent, socially and geographically mobile privilege that serves to cushion them from the damage of the pileups they've helped create. 

 

Sure, the blinkers are very trendy and those who wear them no doubt firmly believe they not only look cool but they're on the right side of history (politically speaking the operative word in that phrase may well be right) but it’s a foolish left wing activist who ignores manufacturers’ labels, i.e., who fails to question why the blinkers have been created and marketed and made so very popular in a world dominated by the malign influence of global corporate capitalism.

 

The intersection in the middle of which Yaniv has set up camp, is the deep (think Mariana Trench deep) belief in the fundamental division between : Female, as in possessing a vulva, vagina, uterus and ovaries; and, Male as in possessing a penis, prostate, and testicles.

 

The roots of the belief in an essentially binary biological sex were well grounded at the dawn of the phallocracy when the rise to dominance of patrilineal descent systems and the triumph over mutuality and cooperation, of aggressive, individualised competition, provided the material impetus for the drive to control reproduction through the sexual sequestration of women, and formed the foundation for all subsequent forms of oppression and hyper-exploitation of women.

Gender identity activists will not change all that with essentially emotive appeals – generated from within the bubble of western privilege – to the primacy of gender identity over biological sex, but they may very well strengthen deeply held conservative beliefs about the latter.

Some of the comments I've seen about the Yaniv Affair are troubling, and all those who have tacitly or overtly supported this person's ascent into global notoriety should be having a serious talk with themselves. 

 On a linked issue, I saw a Twitter exchange this week that tagged the Twitter accounts of the New Zealand Prime Minister and the Minister of Immigration. 

 

The exchange was between an NHS doctor who is a UK Labour Party member, a former Young Tory, and self-appointed crusader for trans rights, and a Kiwi trans activist. 

 

The former suggested that NZ should provide UK trans kids with "protection and refuge" because they "are facing ongoing systemic oppression and mistreatment" in their own country.

 

The latter responded with enthusiastic agreement and cited the precedent of NZ having granted residence on humanitarian grounds to a British trans woman who had "fled discrimination" in the UK. (1) 

 

I’ve been seeing National Party billboards going up – in preparation for local government elections I assume – and I'm trying to imagine the political mileage that could be made out the preposterous suggestion that NZ should take British minors as refugees because the NHS won’t automatically prescribe puberty blockers and cross sex hormones and perform genital surgeries on kids who are not yet neurologically mature. 

 

For the ideologically motivated participants, those tweets were either a conscious decision to poke a stick into the spokes of the NZLP’s election bicycle, or they demonstrate a stunning narrowness of political focus and a complete lack of political nous.

 

 Notes:

1) In that case, which was reported in the media in late September 2017, the applicant was a TW who had moved here to join family already living here, and the application on humanitarian grounds was made after a failed application for residency under the entrepreneur category.)

 

When A "Mother" Becomes A "Carrier"

In this article the writer of the tweet above – who also stubbornly insists on further depersonsalising and commodifying the role of women who carry a child for someone else by referring to them as "carriers"– takes a theoretical biotechnology that is laden with complex moral, political and legal issues and which is highly unlikely ever to be available to people outside the thin layer of very affluent people who want designer offspring, and weaves a fantasy in which women are all but written out of reproduction.

And not just women. In this monstrous new world, any imperfect human is to be written out at embryo stage – and who knows where the definition of imperfection will end? 

 

The use of the term surrogate was intended to break down the belief that the woman who gestates a foetus, is that child's mother. The idea is a woman capable of producing viable eggs and/or carrying a foetus to term fills a gap in the creation of a child for a single person or a couple who cannot have their own children.

 

Describing a woman as a "carrier" (NB. a carrier is also what we call a person infected with a disease causing organism) depersonalises and commodifies that pregnancy even further, and it illustrates both the vacuity and the rampant narcissism of those people who believe in a future in which female reproductive capacity will be fully controlled and commodified by being technologised, with the ultimate aim of rendering it obsolete.

 

Those who have sunk to this nadir of rank misogyny compound their offence by pretending it is for the good of women – that it is to "free" women up from the restrictions of their biological role in the production of eggs and the gestation of new humans.

 

In this bleak vision, all that is required of the genetic female will be some skin cells and the leasing of her uterus – until such time as science develops a viable artificial womb at which point she will be fully relieved of her role as the mother of the species. 

 

The fact that there may not be a social world in a hundred years, let alone one capable of sustaining this technologised future, seems to have escaped their attention. But of course it would, as they have neither the wit nor the wisdom to conceive of a different, more human way organising both production and reproduction.

 

Trans humanism, which is the soil in which these notions take root, clings to variations on the theme of a technologised future of "perfected" humans – either fully human but genetically manipulated to be free from disease and to possess desired physical and behavioural characteristics; or cyborgs, humans with robotic parts.

 

In the context of a highly stratified world built on the premise that progress equals unending growth and consumption, a world that is ruled by a tiny minority of powerful people motivated solely by self-interest, how would such a project end?  With the development of a super elite whose every physical and psychosexual need is served by legions of genetically designed humans and cyborgs? 

 

Forgive me if I see in that, the most monstrous of dystopian nightmares.

(Added after publication :  see this comprehensive thread on Twitter from Bea Jaspert)

 

More on Testosterone

Those people who use their public platforms to argue that the case is not proven for testosterone (T) being a performance enhancer (PE) for genetic females, are either several studies short of a valid opinion, and/or are beating an ideological drum with one hand and with the other,  conducting a chorus that loudly proclaims all those who have concerns about women’s sports are ignorant and / or bigots.

 

There has been loud condemnation of an Otago University study which calls for a weighting system to be introduced to allow transgender women (TW) to compete fairly in female sports events.  This has been attacked by various people – including some extremely problematic claims of incompetence and /or bigotry. Some people have allowed their ideological fervour to cloud their judgment to the point where, if I were them, I’d be worried about a libel suit.

 

Jack Byrne, a human rights researcher at Trans Action, in an RNZ piece, cited a 2014  study  (drawing on data collected in 2011) that was published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

 

Byrne claimed the study showed "no clear scientific evidence proving that a high level of testosterone is a significant determinant of performance in female sports," and he further claimed that a literature review in Sports Medicine found no direct and consistent research that transgender female athletes have an advantage in sport. (1)

 

Apart from the highly selective nature of that quote, the 2014 study claimed no such thing and it is worrying that RNZ, as NZ’s flagship of quality journalism, seems either not to have read the study, or chose to ignore both its purpose and its findings. 

 

The study was concerned with “establishing valid normative serum androgen values” –  i.e. a standard reference range (SRR) for elite female athletes – "to help develop the blood steroidal model of the Athlete Biological Passport and by so doing, to improve policies around hyperandrogenism in female athletes." 

 

It was not directly concerned with the issues around transgender athletes who compete in female events; it did not screen for a Y chromosome, and nor did it carry out specific  diagnostic tests for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) an endocrine disorder which elevates T levels and has implications for female reproductive health. 

 

The statement Byrne was drawing on is :

“With the exception of data extracted from doping programs in female athletes in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), there is no clear scientific evidence proving that a high level of T is a significant determinant of performance in female sports.”

That data has been used both to demonise the GDR and as the basis for sports governing bodies' and the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) ban on all anabolic and androgenic substances.

 

If that data is now being claimed to not be clear scientific evidence proving that a high level of exogenous T is a significant determinant of performance in female sports- then all criticism of the GDR should cease immediately because it has been exposed as pure agit prop.

 

But, the truth is that exogenous T is a potent performance enhancer in genetic females – for evidence of that you only have to look at what happens to the strength related athletic performance of trans men (genetic females who transition) who are granted an automatic therapeutic use exemption (TUE) for exogenous T use, and for whom there are no limits on that use in competition. (Obvious health implications aside)

 

There is also strong evidence to suggest that higher endogenous T levels enhance performance, in power events especially. 

 

 A study of endurance athletes cited in the 2014 study reported that the: 

“hyperandrogenic subgroup (T concentration 1.9 ± 0.2 nmol/L) showed a more anabolic body composition, a higher total bone mineral density (BMD), and upper to lower fat mass ratio as well as the highest maximal oxygen uptake and performance values in general than did oligomenorrheic or amenorrheic athletes with normal androgen levels (1.1–1.2 ± 0.4 nmol/L).”

 

The researchers also cited other studies that have reported an almost 2 to 1 over-representation of women with PCOS in female Olympic athletes (37% vs 20% in the general population). Importantly,  "the PCOS subgroup showed a higher T concentration and free androgen index than those observed for regularly menstruating or non-PCOS Olympian athletes.”

 

They concluded: 

“This last recruitment bias supports the assumption that there is an ergogenic effect of T in high-level female athletes.”  (2)

 

Although the 2014 study was not designed to diagnose PCOS,   the researchers felt that several of the athletes in the study had this endocrine disorder.  (3)

 

“In our present cohort, the 99th percentile for T concentration is calculated at 3.08 nmol/L. It is close to the 2.78 nmol/L threshold proposed as one of the criteria for the diagnosis of PCOS and the 3.0 nmol/L cutoff proposed by others to detect hyperandrogenism.” 

 

They also noted that the calculated prevalence of athletes with a hyperandrogenic 46 XY DSD in their cohort gave them a ratio of 7.1 per 1000.  Because they did not screen for SRY, they note that the actual prevalence of 46XY DSD was possibly even higher. (4) 

 

In light of studies that have estimated a 46 XY DSD occurrence at a rate of 1 in 20,000 in the general population, this study’s reported prevalence is approximately 140 times higher than expected in the general population.

 

The researchers noted that the 46XY athletes in their study tended to be younger and showed a higher T concentration than the female athletes who were known to have been doping.

 

In summary: the researchers noted the significantly higher proportion of elite female athletes whose T level was at or above the diagnostic level PCOS plus, what appears to be a highly skewed representation of athletes with a 46XY DSD.  (5)

 

It may be argued that this study does not categorically prove T is a PE for genetic females but it provides strong evidence to suggest it is nonsensical to argue that it proves it is not. 

 

The fact remains - and this is an issue the Otago researchers have tried to grapple with - if there were not separate events for women and men - in most sports, women would never make the podium. 

 

The background to this is complicated.  The IOC and IAAF adopted a quick and arbitrary solution to the complex organisational and ethical problems posed by both athletes with 46 XY DSDs and transgender athletes competing in female sports, which was to set a limit for all competitors in female events of below 10 nmols/L ie the lower end of the male SRR - unless athletes were able to prove they had complete androgen insensitivity.

 

This arbitrary definition was chosen in the absence of normative statistics of androgen levels in an elite athlete female population – hence the 2014 study.

 

A study "Serum androgen levels and their relation to performance in track and field" was commissioned by the IAAF after its hyperandrogenism rule was challenged in the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The study which has been criticised for methodological flaws, found there was a performance advantage to female athletes with higher endogenous T level in several track and field events, ranging from 4.5%  to 1.2%.

 

The IAAF/IOC then complicated the matter further this year by lowering the level to 5 nmols/L for some track events only, which was perceived as targeting a specific cohort of African middle distance runners, Caster Semenya among them. (6)

 

There is a range of factors which enable people to reach elite levels of any given sport; some are naturally occurring physiological advantages, others are cultural and socio-economic.  Sports is not a level playing field but the single biggest divider is the performance difference between female and male athletes – averaging 10-12% and rising to 25% in power events like weight lifting.

 

Against the blithe and often spectacularly ill-informed or ideologically motivated assertions that testosterone is not a proven factor in female athletic performance, transgender athlete Kristin Worley, who surgically transitioned in 2001, successfully argued for an increase, on health grounds, in the amount of exogenous testosterone her sporting body (the UCI) permitted her to take. (7) 

 

Others, like Rachel Mackinnon, argue that any imposed limit on endogenous testosterone is a violation of trans women’s human rights, ie only TW should determine their levels of androgen suppression, if any.

 

Clearly for both of these cohorts of people who went through a male puberty - in which the average athletic advantage that males have over females is triggered by testosterone - the amount of androgens and ratio of male to female hormones that their genetically male bodies need in order to be able to perform athletically and to maintain general health, is of great concern. 

 

Having had an orchiectomy, athletes like Worley no longer produce any appreciable amount of T naturally and some want to increase the allowed exogenous level to enable them to compete at a level commensurate with their competitive drive  - which may be highly problematic if, as some have argued, exogenous T is a more potent performance enhancer than endogenous T.

 

Some TW athletes, like MacKinnon, who have not had an orchiectomy see any requirement to reduce TW’s endogenous T to be unfairly discriminatory given other women have no imposition on their naturally occurring T. 

 

The point in question here is whether higher T levels and going through a T triggered and fuelled puberty – and possibly even the possession of the Y chromosome itself  - confers an average performance advantage (PA) over 46XX women. 

 

We may all agree that performance advantage is complex and multi-faceted and that the PA of trans women and 46XY DSD women with partial androgen insensitivity will not be as great as that of genetic males, but it is highly likely to be enough to skew female sports significantly – especially in events in which power and strength are major factors.

 

 

Notes:

(1) Byrne is not the only person to misrepresent this study; sports writer Andy Brown made the same claims in 2015 and the statement that a literature review finds gaps in the research into trans athletes is hardly controversial or remarkable given everyone knows there isn’t enough  – yet – and there needs to be.

 

(2)  They discounted congenital adrenal hyperplasia as a possible cause of virilization in the study cohort. “Among our studied population, none of the 13 athletes with a 17-hydroxyprogesterone serum concentration above 8 nmol/L showed increased T or A4 (data not presented), ruling out the possibility of an untreated 21-hydroxylase deficiency, the most common form of congenital adrenal hyperplasia, as a cause of the high T levels.

 

(3)  PCOS is an endocrine disorder which, in severe forms, has implications for overall and specifically reproductive health. Women with PCOS are either more likely to enter/succeed in sports, or possibly there is something about training regimes for female athletes (most rely on male data) which affects endocrine health. Another big question is where the incidence and/or severity of this endocrine disorder is increasing as a result of increasing exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals in the wider environment.

 

(4) Four had 5α-reductase deficiency and two had partial androgen insensitivity.

 

(5) The androgen sensitivity levels of those 46XY athletes is not known but as athletes with 46XY DSD with complete androgen insensitivity are over represented in elite female sports the question has been raised at to whether the possession of a Y chromosome itself confers a performance advantage.

 

(6)Caster Semenya has refused to take androgen suppressing drugs to lower her endogenous T level to the new level of 5 nmols/L – which is still well above the top of the level for natal women.

 

(7) Worley’s claim and the arguments underpinning it should be noted by all those who have enthusiastically embraced the medical and surgical transitioning of children. If a post-pubertal orchiectomy leaves a person unable to maintain a general level of health, let alone be competitive in a sport, without higher exogenous T levels than are permitted by a sports governing body, what might happen to the overall health and wellbeing of children whose genetic puberty is suppressed with drugs and who have a counter puberty induced with cross sex hormones, and whose endocrine health thereafter must be maintained by constant doses of a mix of synthetic male and female hormones?