Since when is sports policy meant to please?

Sex-based categories worked quite well until a handful of men demanded to compete in the female category. The IOC chose appeasement over policy

Dr. Kathryn Ackerman, an endocrinologist and sports medicine doctor, and one of the leading experts on female athletes showed the slide above during her talk entitled Care of the Transgender Athlete to an audience of sports medicine professionals. You can read just how bizarrely conflicted and contradictory Ackerman is in my previous post. She bullet points some of the incoherence above, e.g., telling an audience of sports medicine doctors that testosterone is performance enhancing (oh!), and that she is strongly advocating for a policy of male inclusion about which the only thing that’s known for sure is that it’s unfair to women. Allow men in first, ask questions later.

But what I’d like to talk about is that last bullet point: No sports policy will please everyone. That’s odd. Since when do sports policies seek to please? My understanding is that sports policy assures fairness and safety, and if those are achieved, everyone is pleased. Because fairness and safety are at the very heart of sports. Policy is based on reality, on facts.

Ten minutes ago, when we understood basic biology, men competed in the men’s category and women competed in the women’s category. The women’s category was not created to please women, but rather to provide fair and safe sport for women. That worked until a few men claimed to be women, and demanded to compete in the female category. A teeny tiny number of men were not pleased, not pleased with the reality of their sex, not pleased that anyone would question that a person whose body had developed around the ability to produce sperm was, in fact, a woman. That’s when the idea that policy had to please came into being. Prior to 2008, less than six men were not pleased with competing in the men’s category. Note that, while there were undoubtedly women who identified as male, NOT ONE clamored to compete in the male category. The handful of men who claimed to be women should have been gently and compassionately educated about the realities of sex as it pertains to sports performance, and the basis for the policy. And then directed back to the male category.

But that did not happen. Instead, the International Olympic Committee changed the policy to please this tiny number of men. Not because it was fair or safe—they knew it was not fair to women—but to please these few men. In 2003, Dr. Richard Budgett, then with the British Olympic Association, had said: “The effect of allowing male transsexuals to compete as women would be to make competition unfair and potentially dangerous in some sports and would undermine women’s sports.” But Budgett has had a change of mind as medical and scientific director of the IOC, stating now that now trans-identified men should have “no presumption of advantage” over women. It didn’t seem momentous at the time, but ever since they made that initial appeasement, the IOC sacrificed policy. And the meaning of sports.

Ever since sports organizations abandoned sex-based reality, abandoned biology, abandoned male and female categories that were fair and safe, ever since they sought to make some pandering deal that would please rather than simply stand on its own merit, they have been lost, and forced to say ever more absurd things—men have no advantage over women, passport sex is sex.

No sports policy will please everyone. Women are not displeased. Displeased is when you order pepperoni pizza and you get pineapple pizza. This minimizes what women are feeling, and why. Women are rightfully outraged that their sex-based rights are being stripped away in favor of some men who, without evidence, demand to compete in women’s sports and use women’s spaces. Saying that women are displeased with men in their sports equates their completely logical, fact-based outrage with men who are displeased that the rest of the world does not believe, as they do, that they are women.

What Ackerman meant to say was that she is seeking to please men who claim to be women, and women will not be pleased with the abandonment of any policy.