The Female Category

I’m a Title IX woman, which is to say, my large suburban Chicago high school offered a variety of sports for girls. I took advantage of those opportunities, and am quite sure they formed the foundation for a sense of freedom and nascent feminism, and by that I mean being aware of the unique experience of being female.

As a journalist, I gravitated toward what I knew—running (and fashion. I had a street style blog, mnstyle.blogspot.com, from 2008 to 2014). Of the two, who knew that running would become a hotbed of gender controversy. Back in 2015, I was collaborating with a South African sport scientist, Ross Tucker, about 800-meter runner Caster Semenya. Her condition, a Difference of Sexual Development (DSD), was really complex, and I was a little bit horrified that large and respected media outlets could not be bothered to try to understand the science, and instead printed emotional stories that were factually incorrect. Headline after headline declared that Semenya was banned because she didn’t look feminine enough or because she was black or simply too fast. In fact, she was never banned—she refused the option of lowering her testosterone to a level still 10 times that of the highest female level. She has 46 XY DSD that causes internal testes, male level of circulating testosterone, and, in her case, receptors that can utilize that testosterone. These stories quoted only Semenya herself telling how she was being targeted. They were free of both the science behind her condition and the voices of elite women she’d wiped the track with, unfairly.

Most troubling to me, editors seemed more and more bonded to the narrative that Semenya was a victim, and refused to publish anything that even questioned that view. The readiness to defend someone who, science has proven, should not have been racing in the female category at all, and at the same time, to actively ignore the many many women who were negatively affected by this situation was shocking. The few women who spoke up about unfairness, like Canadian Melissa Bishop, who placed fourth in the 2016 Olympic 800 behind three DSD athletes, were threatened with lifelong bans and faced crushing social backlash.

DSD athletes are a tiny number limited by genetics. Not so transgender women. Or, since I’m trying to model accuracy in journalism, trans identified males. Or males who wish to present as female. Fast forward to 2023, every facet of our society has been captured by gender identity ideology—a trans woman is a woman, and everyone has a gender identity that may or may not match their sex. Overwriting sex with gender has come into direct conflict with women’s rights in areas of life where sex matters—prisons, rape crisis centers, changing rooms, toilets, and sports.

Again surprising, not in a good way, has been the gargantuan effort to to shoehorn males who identify as female into the female category. The International Olympic Committee, sports federations, NCAA, even local races have bent over backward to include trans identifying males, and media proclivities that started with Caster Semenya (even though DSD and transgender are entirely separate issues) have only become more one-sided, and often, again, factually incorrect. There have been at least 17 peer reviewed studies that show that male advantage in sports persists, despite identity, hormonal treatment, or surgery, and yet the most-read outlets in the U.S. consistently publish articles that say there is no definitive science on this topic. Neither the substance of these studies nor the experts who conducted them are interviewed or quoted. Also missing are the voices of female athletes, either because they’ve been silenced by their university or sports federation, or because media outlets—other than Fox News, which I find problematic—simply will not publish something that questions the idea that males who identify as women deserve to compete in the female category.

My reason for creating this space is to provide a platform for those voices that support sex-segregated sports, voices that are missing in most media in this country. Athletes, sport scientists, policy makers, advocates. I’ll try to post once a week. I’m new to Substack, but hopefully can figure out how to enable comments, because I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading, and onward!

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