The New York Times Gives Writer Who's "Obsessed With Queer History" Space To Say The Same Stupid Things About Including Men In Women's Sports

Michael Waters' new paradigm for sports looks a lot like age-old misogyny

For unknown reasons, the New York Times allowed Michael Waters space to inflict some fact-free musings about sex testing at the Olympics on innocent readers, and put forth his bold paradigm for how sports should be organized. Though Waters has written a book with the word sports in the headline, he has no discernible expertise in sports, sport science, sex, gender, or bold paradigms. Even opinion should be hung on a cogent framework. It's disappointing that the New York Times published this. I'd like to add some factual context, and a more thoughtful perspective on this topic.

Sex verification has been used in Olympic sports since women's categories were established in the 1920s because, almost immediately, a few men tried to compete in the women's category. Such is the sex-based male advantage in sports that relatively mediocre male athletes could qualify for the Olympics in the female category. It does not go the other way; there were no women competing at the Olympic level in the men's division. Categories are inclusion strategies—for women, for people of different ages, and sometimes weight classes and para abilities. Otherwise, all sports would be dominated by young, healthy males. If the boundaries of those categories are not defined and defended, they are meaningless. 

Throughout his unsupported opinion piece, when Waters refers to trans or "intersex" (the correct term is a Disorder of Sexual Development) athletes, he is talking about male bodied people who wish to compete in the female category. Gender identity does not affect sports performance, regardless of hormonal adjustments or surgery; sex does. The following sentence is false.

"Since then, international sports bodies have continued to deny or restrict opportunities for trans and intersex athletes to compete at the highest level, in some cases barring them from competition completely — all for failing to meet a subjective definition of “female.” 

Up until 2003, sports organizations were committed to keeping males out of women's sports because it was women's sports.  Transgender and DSD athletes were/are not targeted for being trans or DSD. The condition that makes them fall afoul of the rules is that they are male, not female. Female is not nor ever has been a subjective notion, as Waters' mother would be quick to point out. A female is a human whose body developed along a Mullerian pathway designed to produce large gametes, ova. Because of these developmental differences between men and women that begin in the womb, women are biologically unique from men in ways that specifically impact sports performance. This is one of the few objective, energetically studied, and easily verified truths that exists in our world. It's lazy and disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

"I saw that we had missed a chance to chart an alternate path — to organize sports without the regimes of gender surveillance that dominate it today. We still have an opportunity, though, to design policies that acknowledge male and female sports categories as imperfect and permeable and that place the humanity and dignity of athletes first and foremost."  

A fine example of ignorance and arrogance going hand in hand. It's hard to see how Waters' new paradigm in sports would place humanity and dignity first with male and female categories that are "permeable," thus meaningless.  Waters' bold new plan focuses entirely on the humanity and dignity of males who wish to compete in the female category, but fails to explain how that works for women, since we know that permeability only goes one way. The author, like many dilettantes of gender ideology, confuses sex and gender.  He hopes to get rid of regimes of SEX surveillance. Biological sex is quite objective and perfect and impermeable, which is a stumbling block for males who want to compete in the female category. Waters actually wants regimes of GENDER surveillance, because that's where the whole "subjective woman"  idea comes in, and permeability. 

“Advocates of sex-testing policies cloak themselves in the guise of fairness; they exist, proponents claim, to exclude anyone with a perceived biological advantage in women’s sports. That group ranges from trans women, who are banned from most major sports even after undergoing a medical transition, to many cisgender and intersex women who have not undergone any medical transition but who have testosterone levels considered higher than normal for women. Yet little evidence supports the idea that these women have physical advantages, in strength or otherwise, over other women.”

This is comprehensively false. Fairness is not a cloak, it's at the center, the raison d’etre of sports. If you don’t have fairness, you don’t have sports. That’s why there are rules, categories, anti-doping protocols. Thirty-year-olds are barred from the U12 soccer team because they have real, documented biological advantages. Categories are not arbitrary; all were created after thorough study and more than a century of empirical data collection. Instead of being policed as they had been for 80 years prior, trans women, which is to say, males who identify or wish to present as women, were provided a pathway into women’s sports in 2003. This, despite Richard Budgett, then with the British Olympic Committee, saying, “Allowing male transsexuals in women’s sport would be unfair, potentially dangerous and would undermine women’s sport.” Those were not perceived advantages, they were well known and widely accepted advantages. Women were not consulted but were expected to merely accept unfairness and industrial strength gaslighting by sports officials who insisted that, in fact, these athletes were not male and had no advantage. Humanity and dignity for women, Michael? 

Waters could have better spent his time looking into the perplexing million dollar question of why, after 80 years of trying to keep men out of women’s sports, in 2003, the International Olympic Committee committed themselves to allowing men into the women’s category, though they knew it was “unfair, potentially dangerous and would undermine women’s sports.” Scientists scrambled to prove what we all knew five minutes ago, and robust science showed that, despite testosterone reduction, trans-identified men retained male advantage. Larger heart, larger lungs, greater oxygen carrying ability, wider shoulders, narrower hips, more lean muscle mass. It's irresponsible and  lazy  of Waters to assert without evidence  that  these male advantages are fictitious. As a result of that evidence, since 2023, trans-identified males who have been through male puberty have been banned from competing in the female category in some sports at the Olympic level, though they are free to compete in the male or open category, and those restrictions do not apply to lower levels of competition.

The “cisgender” women Waters mentions as unfairly banned (Waters has clearly not given two seconds thought to anything involving women—women’s conditions, women’s physiology, women’s rights, women’s feelings, and other foreign concepts) might be women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome which causes testosterone levels slightly higher than the normal women’s range, up to 5nmol/liter. That’s still half the T level at the bottom of the men’s range. Women with PCOS are indisputably female, and have not been banned from competing in the female category. The “intersex women,”  or more correctly, athletes with DSD, are not women. Waters should have done some research before simply parroting falsehoods. Caster Semenya, and likely Maximila Imali and Francine Nyonsaba too, have 46 XY5-ARD, a type of DSD that only affects males. They are male with an anomaly that causes internal rather than external testes, and a poorly developed penis. “Testosterone levels considered higher than normal for women”? No. They have testosterone levels in the normal range for men. 

Waters links to a thoroughly discredited Canadian study written largely by trans lobbyists, heavy on ideology with a sprinkling of science-y words. Anyone, man or woman, competing in the female category with a male level of testosterone (10nmol/liter - 35nmol/liter) would have a massive unfair sports advantage. Of course, a woman could only achieve that level by doping. 

“These sex testing policies also fail to acknowledge natural variations in human bodies. There’s no single way to cleave people into binary categories, but that hasn’t stopped sports officials from trying.”

The only natural variations sex testing turns up are the condition of being male or female. That’s what it is designed for. There are of course limitless variations in human bodies, but in sports, the major performance gap is between sexes, not, say, between tall people and short people. We accept and celebrate variations within the female category and within the male category.  It seems Waters has no interest in understanding that women are a separate and unique biological class of human who are trying to assert that reality in an oppressively patriarchal culture. Across time, across sports, men as a biological class have a 10% to 12% advantage over women as a biological class. In some sports that involve static strength and/or punching power, that sex gap can be as much as 162%.

“Doctors at the time knew full well that biological sex existed on a spectrum, with no single trait — from chromosomes to internal organs to genitalia — demarcating a universal difference between the sexes.”

Here, Waters locates himself well outside the spectrum of critical thinking skills. The fact that sex is binary and immutable is one of the few incontrovertible facts of our world. Trans ideologues invented sex-as-a-spectrum as a work around to the problem of “transition." It's tough for a movement whose mantra is a trans woman is a woman, because in any physical sense, trans women are male. Here's how sex-as-a-spectrum works: If sex is a combo of hormones and chromosomes and internal and external bits, none of which is more important than the other, then by changing one of those factors, like hormones, you can change your sex. They couldn’t figure out how to change sex, so they just changed the definition of sex.

People can easily be divided into one of two sexes.  A cheek swab will reveal XX or XY chromosomes, or in .018% of people, a DSD chromosomal anomaly, which only affects one sex or the other. Thus, still binary. These anomalies do not represent a third sex or a sex spectrum, but rather something that has gone wrong with the XX or XY pattern.

Sports officials stopped using cheek swab sex testing in 1996 (the IOC said it was too expensive, but female athletes overwhelmingly supported it) because it actually was effective at determining who was female and who was not, and that was a problem for the IOC’s new campaign of “inclusion.” Which is to say, inclusion of males into female sports.  "Strip searches," a lurid picture that's absolutely irresistible to Waters and the 473 people who have written this article before him,  were used for a very brief time in the 1940s. That’s when the IOC actually didn’t want men in women’s sports. From 1948 to1968, female athletes were required to have a note from their doctor that indicated they were healthy enough to compete, but also confirmed that they were female. Cheek swabs were used from 1968 to 1996. Since 2003, the IOC abandoned fairness for women and committed themselves to making it easier and easier for men to compete in women’s sports. They tried hormone levels, which could be easily adjusted (see above) in an effort to make that happen. And they introduced a “subjective definition of femaleness” to try to obscure the fact that female is, in fact, quite straightforward. All of the athletes Waters mentioned—Lia Thomas, Maximila Imali, Caster Semenya, Francine Nyonsaba—are male. That’s why they are ineligible to compete in the female category. Waters is determined to make sex confusing, to “cloak” his misogyny.

“Often these women are allowed to compete only with men — not a realistic or desirable possibility.”

Now Waters says the quiet part out loud. “These women” are male and, as such, have always been free to compete in the male category. In much the same way that female athletes who identify as male often continue to compete on the women’s team. Think Quinn, the Canadian soccer player, Nikki Hiltz, mid-distance runner, and Iszac Henig, collegiate swimmer. They would not be competitive on the men’s team, so they compete in accordance with their sex, and there is no controversy, no unfairness. What there is is a lot of humanity and dignity for female athletes, regardless of how they identify. (Henig later switched to the men’s team, where she participated but was not competitive). Mark Weston, the example Waters gave from 1936, was also a female who competed without controversy in the women’s category. I’m mystified as to the point Waters intended to make by using that example.

Competing in their sex category regardless of their identity is working out very well for women. Why would it be unrealistic or undesirable for men to do that? Perhaps unrealistic, in that Lia Thomas was a good but not great swimmer on the men’s team—he never even qualified to attend the men’s national championships. He won a women’s national championship. Caster Semenya’s best time for 800 meters is 1:54, a time that’s bettered by thousands of high school boys in the U.S. alone. So, yes, it is unrealistic for a trans-identified man to expect to have the same success in the men’s category as he enjoyed in the women’s. And undesirable? This is where the rubber meets the road. Trans-identified men simply want to compete in the women’s category, and feel entitled to do so. To quote from professor emeritus and author Robert Jensen, who has spent 26 years studying and writing on patriarchy, “One feature of patriarchy is that men’s interests are routinely placed above women’s interests. In general, boys matter more than girls. Most progressives will say they are just being sensitive to the emotional needs of the trans-identified young male without even considering the emotional needs of the girls.” Waters seems to be taking a centuries-old patriarchal stance by saying that trans-identified males should not have to compete in their sex category because they don't want to. It’s undesirable. And that they should be allowed to self-identify into the women's category, regardless of unfairness to women, because they do want to. Males' interests are placed above women's. Got it.

“But the current system — in which trans and intersex women are simply turned away, with no path for inclusion — isn’t working. Certain sports, like figure skating and some skiing competitions, probably don’t need to be divided by sex. These divides may make more sense in other sports. But if we do lean on sex categories, we have to accept that they are messy and imperfect. Ultimately, all athletes should have a realistic path to participation in their lived gender category. The days of cruelly stripping athletes of their right to play need to end.”

I struggle to discern any intelligence whatsoever behind the author’s random assertion that figure skating and some skiing competitions (I've got good money that says Waters cannot name a skiing event) probably don’t need to be divided by sex. Why figure skating? How does Waters explain the fact that male figure skaters routinely land more quad jumps than females? Why do males lift the female skaters and not the other way around? Do the sparkly outfits erase male advantage? Let’s look at the graph he linked to re: skiing.

This shows 66 years of results from Olympic downhill skiing speeds of males and females. Do you see the complete male dominance in those 66 years, with the lone exception of Lindsey Vonn? For the most part, the men’s and women’s speeds don’t even overlap. Is this not the best argument ever for separation of downhill skiing by sex? Would women even have continued skiing on a mixed sex team until Lindsey Vonn came along if men won everything very decisively for 62 years? Did Waters even look at this graph before including it?

Let me repeat, NO TRANS OR INTERSEX ATHLETES ARE TURNED AWAY WITH NO PATH FOR INCLUSION, NOW OR EVER. They have always been welcome to compete in their sex category. How can the author claim the current system is not working when clearly he doesn’t know what the current system is? Even a rudimentary search of various sports’ trans inclusion policies shows that most sports at the elite level, all in the NCAA, 30 states at the high school level, and virtually any recreational event does offer “a realistic path to participation in their lived gender category.” Which is to say, ways for men to be in women’s sports, because those “realistic pathways" don’t go the other way. 

Waters' "realistic pathway to participation in lived gender" comes at the cost of women’s rights to fairness in sport, their right to a lane on the track, the right to a single-sex sport, their right to privacy in the locker room, their right to the word woman. All these rights are stripped away because some men want to compete in the women’s category. Those rights are erased with two words—gender identity.  Of the Biden administration's  overwriting of sex with gender identity, UN expert on violence against women and girls warned, "If the proposed changes are adopted, they would contravene the United States’ international human rights obligations and commitments concerning the prevention of all forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls on the basis of sex." 

Waters almost got it right: The days of cruelly stripping women’s right to play need to end. Turns out, his brave new paradigm for sports is as old as patriarchy, the central feature of which is a lack of humanity and dignity for women.