Males are not and cannot be female. No amount of hormone suppression, no reconfiguration of musculature, no psychological conditioning can change that foundational fact. This is why “fairness” is such a misleading frame. It tempts us to imagine a spectrum—where enough intervention, enough tinkering, might one day bring male bodies into equilibrium with female ones. But the issue is not one of calibration or degree. It is categorical.
Women’s sport was not created to see whether males could be altered to fit in. It was created because women, as women, deserve categories of their own. The female sports category exists not as a relative space, but as an absolute one: a recognition that females, as a distinct sex class, have the right to compete against one another free from male bodies. To collapse that distinction—to say that males can be made female enough—is to erase the very reason for the category. Once that line is blurred, “women’s sports” ceases to be a protected space for women at all.
"Women’s sport was not created to see whether males could be altered to fit in. It was created because women, as women, deserve categories of their own." Ollie, I'm going to build a shrine in your honor for that statement.
This is why Sports and more specifically the "fairness" argument is a motte and bailey tactic and a straw man. It confuses the issue for the uninitiated and the "be kind" crowd.
The line is drawn at female. Women are not lesser men.
women and girls have periods, pregnancies (wanted and unwanted), miscarriages and abortions. There is a LOT that goes along with those that no male will ever face. i'm sick of the conversation being so focused on T and not all the other biological issues associated with being female. The female body is different in many many ways way beyond hormones.
Yes, the female body contends with these issues (and more), and women and girls are functioning within a context of global oppression on the basis of sex: which means they are basically bullied and assaulted in all imaginable ways by men and boys in every country on earth simply because they are female. No man has this experience. The ignorance around our disparate experiences is astounding but just another example of female oppression.
Once again Sarah, a great article. And NO, you are not crazy! And YES, your responses made perfect sense! The simple acknowledgement that sex cannot be changed, no matter how badly you want it to be, seems and impossible ask for those that support this nonsense. They make the same circular argument about "fairness" when it comes to men wanting women's spots in sports. Apparently women aren't allowed "fairness," only men.
There is no way to make it "fair." And when we let trans people control our language, we lose our rights. Men can be as feminine as they want, but they cannot under any circumstances be women. They mire us down in discussions like this to distract from the truth and waste our energy.
This exactly. As you can see, SoCal runner gets mired in all these absurd hypothetical ways to make men in women's sports "fair" while starting with the insanely misogynistic idea that females as a sex class are not worthy of their own sports simply BECAUSE they are female. Fairness is a distraction. Men are not, and never will be women. End of
No men in women’s sports! I don’t care how many years they have been off hormones or had puberty blockers! Note that only mediocre men ever compete .. like “ Lia” ( Liar ) Thomas!
There is NO wiggle room here. Men , stay out of women’s sports! I’m sick and tired of trans taking away women’s rights with their authoritarian policies!
He’s operating from a flawed set of values. It’s the inclusion philosophy. The idea that we need to find a way to help everyone be included in sports so everyone can participate because there’s some kind of human right to be able to participate in competitive sports. That’s a false premise. There will never be a way for someone who is wheelchair bound to play on a professional soccer team. They will never be a way for someone with down syndrome or cerebral palsy to be able to participate in track and field. If you take any kind of performance enhancing drugs, you cannot participate in any meaningful competitive athletics. everything in life is a trade-off. Competitive athletics is not about inclusion. It is about exclusion. Once there is a winner, everyone else is excluded. Gender transition is a choice, and it is defined by altering the natural physical body. A byproduct of that is that you become ineligible for certain athletics or incapable of participating in certain athletics. that’s the trade-off. No compromise.
It’s like when they came up with that horrible idea to give participation trophies to every child that participated in a sport regardless of how hard they tried or how talented they were.
You just need to ask these people why is it never trans men clamoring to be in men's spaces where there are real stakes (prison, sports, etc.) The idea that the state or policy has a requirement to validate someone's self concept be it gender or something like religion is just insane.
The female body evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to carry, nurture and give birth to baby humans. The male body basically evolved for sport, in that they evolved to hunt, provide, protect and compete with other males. To ignore this is to be willfully ignorant. We shouldn't have to bend over backwards to prove that including men in women's sports is unfair. It is unfair but its also wrong. It is not a female sport if their are men participating. It is that simple.
Two flaws in your interlocutor’s reasoning: (1) he conflates trans identified men with men who have DSDs. While it’s clear to us that men with DSDs are unequivocally men, he slips them into the conversation to try to argue (foolishly) that it’s just too difficult for anyone to figure out who’s male and who’s female, effectively saying that sex is not a stable category, and therefore not a good basis for categorizing athletes. How we’ve managed to populate the planet with 9 billion of us without knowing the sex of others is truly a miracle. Utterly asinine arguments like his are helping the Democratic Party lose voters, but I digress; (2) he never considers that all decisions people make in life foreclose options, and part of being an adult means taking responsibility for foregone options. When a male athlete decides to call himself a woman, alters his endocrine system with exogenous hormones, and thereby renders himself less competitive in his own sex class, that’s tough toenails for him.
SoCal runner seems to be trying to go for the old canard of “forget sex categorisation, just grade people by ability”. Which as you point out means the top 10 or 20 or 100 will always be men. And who wants to watch (or do) second-tier sports rather than the best on offer?
But let’s go with his idea for a moment, because we need rational arguments to persuade him, not just slogans.
The logical effect, even if you did that, would be that we’d start identifying the best woman (among all the men), and then the best women among all the men, and then someone might have the bright idea of staging an event with *only* the best women to see which one(s) came out top. Do that enough and you could have a league of only women!
And voila, you are back at sex-segregated sports.
As to the “but they take hormones! argument, the response to this remains: if they ate a lot of cake and impaired their performance equally would that count? If not, why not? What’s so special about hormones and hair clips compared to cake?
That Harper study is pretty poor in that the limitations are all over the place. The results are verified but Lia Thomas in particular (one of the study subjects - shh!) shows what a mess it is. And I’m not sure about those who claim to have lost an inch or two in height.
"But let’s go with his idea for a moment, because we need rational arguments to persuade him, not just slogans."
But that's the thing -- you won't persuade him. Rational arguments won't persuade him. Not only have we tried this again and again and again and again and again in these conversations, and it doesn't work, but there's actually quite a large body of evidence that demonstrates that reason, evidence, facts, proof are rarely successful in persuading people. In fact, people who are wedded to their precious ideas only dig in their heels further.
Trans Entitlement Activists and their "allies" are some of the most intransigent, implacable, narcissistic people on earth. They won't be swayed.
OK, you might not persuade him. (Though he seems to offer a strange mix of "allow" and "don't allow".) But if the discussion is public, there will be some people who will be persuaded, or who were weakly in favour and now agree strongly. I think if you can show that their suggestions lead either to paradoxical/self-contradictory outcomes, or lead us back to where we want to be, then you are giving them no room to do anything except be utterly ideological. And then they find themselves caught in all the contradictions of self-identity, and detransition, and the effects of cake v hormones. The only person who can change their faith is themselves, but you can persuade onlookers while also giving SoCal etc the material to realise their belief is nonsense.
SoCal's comments smack of the condescension common among men who think their opinions on anything regarding women matter more than those of actual women. He is trying to appear reasonable, but is still empathizing with the men over the women in this equation.
Also, most everyone focused on testosterone levels or prepubertal interventions, to approximate some kind of physical aptitude equivalence between men and women, is completely ignoring the fact that on average castrati were known to have greater lung capacity and grow taller than men who had not been castrated.
It was known even then that they developed osteoporosis, amid other health ailments. The removal of testosterone probably causes osteoporosis, because "T" causes bone elongation to stop, so that the body can focus on adding density.
Apart from the obvious ethical sirens that should go off when considering tinkering with the permanent bodily development of male children, just so that they can look feminine in dresses or garter belts and compete with women in sports, ultimately, those interventions simply don't work, not as intended.
Males are male, period. Whether they grow up to be gay or not, they deserve to have healthy, functional bodies, when they reach maturity, while women deserve the right to women only spaces in their bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons and sports.
Really, though the physical safety factor is not as pronounced for women identifying as men to enter their bathrooms, men deserve the same privacy from women. Some men have a difficult enough time using urinals in front of other men. How much would women in the locker room exacerbate their anxieties?
Because Harper has been widely quoted in the media for decades as she, and virtually everyone I know refers to him as she, I slip up now and then. That is the danger of the ideology. For me, it was a mistake. For SoCal runner, he purposely uses ideological (incorrect) language.
I'm on the fence about this. Sometimes I wonder if refusing to use preferred pronouns is like atheists like me who demand taking In God We Trust off money or make a big show of not participating in civic prayer or who feel the need to push back on anodyne expressions of religious belief in all situations. I have a trans identified coworker who has never been ideological in my presence, has never been demanding or neurotic about, a chill and fun colleague. Should I make a big show of being the only one not to use she? I'm not saying I shouldn't, its just a dilemma.
I hear you. And already I'm walking back my zero tolerance talk because my neighbor is a male with a feminine identity. When we're talking obviously I use the name he'd like to be called. My feelings and actions have evolved over the years mostly because this very "moderate" person has not walked the walk. He said he never felt like a woman or thought of himself as a woman but rather just hated his male body (he's had every surgery on offer and takes estrogen). But less than a year after starting estrogen he changed his birth certificate to F. That's not about his male body; that's being seen by society as female. He also ran in the F category even when nonbinary or male was available. Has stopped doing that but not until called out on it. He said he was all about respecting women's rights and not taking anything away from women but didn't follow through on that. Pronouns are a courtesy. Rights are, well, rights
I will not go along with anyone who thinks that womanhood is a costume. It is demeaning to women for men to try and appropriate a female appearance and force others to participate in their delusion. These people are mentally ill and need to be treated as such. I don't care what anyone wears, wear a dress and heels if you like, but you'll just be a man in a dress and heels, nothing more.
Also, I am a physician. I have had "trans" (sex denialist) patients. I considered them to be their biological sex, it would be absurd for a doctor to pretend that a person was anything other than their real sex. In fact, I consider that malpractice. The one female patient I had was a very depressed, self-hating lesbian who cried all the time. The men were all very flamboyant AGPs or HSTS.
As you say, at the root of this issue is whether you believe women have a right to single-sex sport. If you don't, and you think that men and their self-perception should be prioritised, then you will be looking for ways male athletic performance can be hampered to make men as ‘bad’ as women. If you can’t see that that position is disrespectful and gross, I can’t help you. Using T suppression or weight categories to justify male inclusion in the female category is always detrimental to female athletes, but these conditions will seem like reasonable compromises, a kind of sane middle ground, if you don’t think women deserve a single-sex category. What this issue has made crystal clear to me is that most men don’t understand how differently women move through the world compared to men.
Yes, SoCal runner was talking parallel to you. Perhaps intentionally, perhaps not. Either way its a form of avoidance. Pretending to answer a question but not actually. Seems a bit staged. Like a Brianna Wu tactic.
Males are not and cannot be female. No amount of hormone suppression, no reconfiguration of musculature, no psychological conditioning can change that foundational fact. This is why “fairness” is such a misleading frame. It tempts us to imagine a spectrum—where enough intervention, enough tinkering, might one day bring male bodies into equilibrium with female ones. But the issue is not one of calibration or degree. It is categorical.
Women’s sport was not created to see whether males could be altered to fit in. It was created because women, as women, deserve categories of their own. The female sports category exists not as a relative space, but as an absolute one: a recognition that females, as a distinct sex class, have the right to compete against one another free from male bodies. To collapse that distinction—to say that males can be made female enough—is to erase the very reason for the category. Once that line is blurred, “women’s sports” ceases to be a protected space for women at all.
Well said!
"Women’s sport was not created to see whether males could be altered to fit in. It was created because women, as women, deserve categories of their own." Ollie, I'm going to build a shrine in your honor for that statement.
Here here!
*Hear hear!
This is why Sports and more specifically the "fairness" argument is a motte and bailey tactic and a straw man. It confuses the issue for the uninitiated and the "be kind" crowd.
The line is drawn at female. Women are not lesser men.
Women are not lesser men.
This is the crux of the problem with the 'fairness' straw man. Thank you for elucidating it with such brevity.
women and girls have periods, pregnancies (wanted and unwanted), miscarriages and abortions. There is a LOT that goes along with those that no male will ever face. i'm sick of the conversation being so focused on T and not all the other biological issues associated with being female. The female body is different in many many ways way beyond hormones.
Yes, the female body contends with these issues (and more), and women and girls are functioning within a context of global oppression on the basis of sex: which means they are basically bullied and assaulted in all imaginable ways by men and boys in every country on earth simply because they are female. No man has this experience. The ignorance around our disparate experiences is astounding but just another example of female oppression.
Once again Sarah, a great article. And NO, you are not crazy! And YES, your responses made perfect sense! The simple acknowledgement that sex cannot be changed, no matter how badly you want it to be, seems and impossible ask for those that support this nonsense. They make the same circular argument about "fairness" when it comes to men wanting women's spots in sports. Apparently women aren't allowed "fairness," only men.
There is no way to make it "fair." And when we let trans people control our language, we lose our rights. Men can be as feminine as they want, but they cannot under any circumstances be women. They mire us down in discussions like this to distract from the truth and waste our energy.
This exactly. As you can see, SoCal runner gets mired in all these absurd hypothetical ways to make men in women's sports "fair" while starting with the insanely misogynistic idea that females as a sex class are not worthy of their own sports simply BECAUSE they are female. Fairness is a distraction. Men are not, and never will be women. End of
So we need to stop being "nice" and stop taking the bait. They exploit our compassion in trying to make us complicit in giving up our rights.
No men in women’s sports! I don’t care how many years they have been off hormones or had puberty blockers! Note that only mediocre men ever compete .. like “ Lia” ( Liar ) Thomas!
There is NO wiggle room here. Men , stay out of women’s sports! I’m sick and tired of trans taking away women’s rights with their authoritarian policies!
He’s operating from a flawed set of values. It’s the inclusion philosophy. The idea that we need to find a way to help everyone be included in sports so everyone can participate because there’s some kind of human right to be able to participate in competitive sports. That’s a false premise. There will never be a way for someone who is wheelchair bound to play on a professional soccer team. They will never be a way for someone with down syndrome or cerebral palsy to be able to participate in track and field. If you take any kind of performance enhancing drugs, you cannot participate in any meaningful competitive athletics. everything in life is a trade-off. Competitive athletics is not about inclusion. It is about exclusion. Once there is a winner, everyone else is excluded. Gender transition is a choice, and it is defined by altering the natural physical body. A byproduct of that is that you become ineligible for certain athletics or incapable of participating in certain athletics. that’s the trade-off. No compromise.
It’s like when they came up with that horrible idea to give participation trophies to every child that participated in a sport regardless of how hard they tried or how talented they were.
I always thought the “participation trophy” complaint to be funny because kids sports is highly competitive
You just need to ask these people why is it never trans men clamoring to be in men's spaces where there are real stakes (prison, sports, etc.) The idea that the state or policy has a requirement to validate someone's self concept be it gender or something like religion is just insane.
The female body evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to carry, nurture and give birth to baby humans. The male body basically evolved for sport, in that they evolved to hunt, provide, protect and compete with other males. To ignore this is to be willfully ignorant. We shouldn't have to bend over backwards to prove that including men in women's sports is unfair. It is unfair but its also wrong. It is not a female sport if their are men participating. It is that simple.
Two flaws in your interlocutor’s reasoning: (1) he conflates trans identified men with men who have DSDs. While it’s clear to us that men with DSDs are unequivocally men, he slips them into the conversation to try to argue (foolishly) that it’s just too difficult for anyone to figure out who’s male and who’s female, effectively saying that sex is not a stable category, and therefore not a good basis for categorizing athletes. How we’ve managed to populate the planet with 9 billion of us without knowing the sex of others is truly a miracle. Utterly asinine arguments like his are helping the Democratic Party lose voters, but I digress; (2) he never considers that all decisions people make in life foreclose options, and part of being an adult means taking responsibility for foregone options. When a male athlete decides to call himself a woman, alters his endocrine system with exogenous hormones, and thereby renders himself less competitive in his own sex class, that’s tough toenails for him.
"Utterly asinine arguments like his are helping the Democratic Party lose voters"
BINGO!!
And brava on the rest of your comment, too.
SoCal runner seems to be trying to go for the old canard of “forget sex categorisation, just grade people by ability”. Which as you point out means the top 10 or 20 or 100 will always be men. And who wants to watch (or do) second-tier sports rather than the best on offer?
But let’s go with his idea for a moment, because we need rational arguments to persuade him, not just slogans.
The logical effect, even if you did that, would be that we’d start identifying the best woman (among all the men), and then the best women among all the men, and then someone might have the bright idea of staging an event with *only* the best women to see which one(s) came out top. Do that enough and you could have a league of only women!
And voila, you are back at sex-segregated sports.
As to the “but they take hormones! argument, the response to this remains: if they ate a lot of cake and impaired their performance equally would that count? If not, why not? What’s so special about hormones and hair clips compared to cake?
That Harper study is pretty poor in that the limitations are all over the place. The results are verified but Lia Thomas in particular (one of the study subjects - shh!) shows what a mess it is. And I’m not sure about those who claim to have lost an inch or two in height.
Heh, agree on the height loss--the heck?
"But let’s go with his idea for a moment, because we need rational arguments to persuade him, not just slogans."
But that's the thing -- you won't persuade him. Rational arguments won't persuade him. Not only have we tried this again and again and again and again and again in these conversations, and it doesn't work, but there's actually quite a large body of evidence that demonstrates that reason, evidence, facts, proof are rarely successful in persuading people. In fact, people who are wedded to their precious ideas only dig in their heels further.
Trans Entitlement Activists and their "allies" are some of the most intransigent, implacable, narcissistic people on earth. They won't be swayed.
OK, you might not persuade him. (Though he seems to offer a strange mix of "allow" and "don't allow".) But if the discussion is public, there will be some people who will be persuaded, or who were weakly in favour and now agree strongly. I think if you can show that their suggestions lead either to paradoxical/self-contradictory outcomes, or lead us back to where we want to be, then you are giving them no room to do anything except be utterly ideological. And then they find themselves caught in all the contradictions of self-identity, and detransition, and the effects of cake v hormones. The only person who can change their faith is themselves, but you can persuade onlookers while also giving SoCal etc the material to realise their belief is nonsense.
SoCal's comments smack of the condescension common among men who think their opinions on anything regarding women matter more than those of actual women. He is trying to appear reasonable, but is still empathizing with the men over the women in this equation.
Also, most everyone focused on testosterone levels or prepubertal interventions, to approximate some kind of physical aptitude equivalence between men and women, is completely ignoring the fact that on average castrati were known to have greater lung capacity and grow taller than men who had not been castrated.
It was known even then that they developed osteoporosis, amid other health ailments. The removal of testosterone probably causes osteoporosis, because "T" causes bone elongation to stop, so that the body can focus on adding density.
Apart from the obvious ethical sirens that should go off when considering tinkering with the permanent bodily development of male children, just so that they can look feminine in dresses or garter belts and compete with women in sports, ultimately, those interventions simply don't work, not as intended.
Males are male, period. Whether they grow up to be gay or not, they deserve to have healthy, functional bodies, when they reach maturity, while women deserve the right to women only spaces in their bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons and sports.
Really, though the physical safety factor is not as pronounced for women identifying as men to enter their bathrooms, men deserve the same privacy from women. Some men have a difficult enough time using urinals in front of other men. How much would women in the locker room exacerbate their anxieties?
Everything you said -- yes, yes
Men don't belong in women's sport!
My question is: why are you both referring to Harper as "her"? Zero tolerance means rejecting language that obfuscates the truth.
Because Harper has been widely quoted in the media for decades as she, and virtually everyone I know refers to him as she, I slip up now and then. That is the danger of the ideology. For me, it was a mistake. For SoCal runner, he purposely uses ideological (incorrect) language.
Bejesus, I did it again. HE, ffs
🙏
I'm on the fence about this. Sometimes I wonder if refusing to use preferred pronouns is like atheists like me who demand taking In God We Trust off money or make a big show of not participating in civic prayer or who feel the need to push back on anodyne expressions of religious belief in all situations. I have a trans identified coworker who has never been ideological in my presence, has never been demanding or neurotic about, a chill and fun colleague. Should I make a big show of being the only one not to use she? I'm not saying I shouldn't, its just a dilemma.
I hear you. And already I'm walking back my zero tolerance talk because my neighbor is a male with a feminine identity. When we're talking obviously I use the name he'd like to be called. My feelings and actions have evolved over the years mostly because this very "moderate" person has not walked the walk. He said he never felt like a woman or thought of himself as a woman but rather just hated his male body (he's had every surgery on offer and takes estrogen). But less than a year after starting estrogen he changed his birth certificate to F. That's not about his male body; that's being seen by society as female. He also ran in the F category even when nonbinary or male was available. Has stopped doing that but not until called out on it. He said he was all about respecting women's rights and not taking anything away from women but didn't follow through on that. Pronouns are a courtesy. Rights are, well, rights
I will not go along with anyone who thinks that womanhood is a costume. It is demeaning to women for men to try and appropriate a female appearance and force others to participate in their delusion. These people are mentally ill and need to be treated as such. I don't care what anyone wears, wear a dress and heels if you like, but you'll just be a man in a dress and heels, nothing more.
Also, I am a physician. I have had "trans" (sex denialist) patients. I considered them to be their biological sex, it would be absurd for a doctor to pretend that a person was anything other than their real sex. In fact, I consider that malpractice. The one female patient I had was a very depressed, self-hating lesbian who cried all the time. The men were all very flamboyant AGPs or HSTS.
Wish I could upvote your comment a hundred times, Estrojen.
I, too, will not go along with the fiction of pronouns. It is de facto "affirmation" of these people's delusions.
As you say, at the root of this issue is whether you believe women have a right to single-sex sport. If you don't, and you think that men and their self-perception should be prioritised, then you will be looking for ways male athletic performance can be hampered to make men as ‘bad’ as women. If you can’t see that that position is disrespectful and gross, I can’t help you. Using T suppression or weight categories to justify male inclusion in the female category is always detrimental to female athletes, but these conditions will seem like reasonable compromises, a kind of sane middle ground, if you don’t think women deserve a single-sex category. What this issue has made crystal clear to me is that most men don’t understand how differently women move through the world compared to men.
Men are not women. Ever.
Good on you having the exchange.
Yes, SoCal runner was talking parallel to you. Perhaps intentionally, perhaps not. Either way its a form of avoidance. Pretending to answer a question but not actually. Seems a bit staged. Like a Brianna Wu tactic.