It is clearly wrong for men to take part in women’s
sport just as it is wrong for men to go into women’s changing rooms and serve
time in women’s prisons. But there is a desperate lack of clarity and confusion
over an issue that ought to be straightforward.
The transgender debate has done much harm to our ordinary
commonsense ideas of how to determine sex and gender. Until very recently
indeed it was considered obvious that each baby was born either a boy or a girl
and that this was unchangeable. This is what nearly everyone in the world still
believes.
It is no doubt the case that some people throughout history
have been dissatisfied with being a man or a woman a boy or a girl and have
wished to become the opposite sex. Women have pretended to be men in order to escape
female roles. Men have dressed as women. But we have always been able to distinguish
the reality from the pretence. A woman soldier may be discovered to be really a
man when she is treated for a wound. The most convincing male bride will be
discovered on the wedding night to not really be a woman.
The confusion in our thinking on this issue began when
governments and the media began to treat people who claimed to have changed gender
as really having changed it. Someone with a male body is able after some
relatively straightforward steps to obtain a gender recognition certificate
that enables him to claim that he really is a woman, and everyone is expected
to use his new female name and call him she. From this all else follows.
Once someone has been able to legally change from being
a man to a woman even to the extent of changing his birth certificate, then it
becomes discriminatory not to allow him into a women’s prison, a women’s changing
room or a role that is only available to women.
The root of the problem is allowing someone legally to
change sex at all.
Once you allow people to change sex on the basis of
their feelings, you lose all hope of basing sex on objective characteristics
and logically being a man or a woman becomes for everyone a matter of feelings
rather than a matter of fact.
You cannot have two methods of determining whether someone
is a man or a woman one for transgender individuals and one for everyone else.
If the transgender method prevails then it will logically be impossible to
determine a baby’s sex at birth we will have to instead wait for the baby to
grow up and tell us how it feels.
If this way of thinking became widespread it is likely
that the concepts of being a man or a woman would cease too. Once a
characteristic ceases to be objective, it ceases also to be useful as a means
of distinguishing. In this way transgender destroys feminism. You cannot have
both.
But the controversy regarding the Algerian and Taiwanese
boxers at the Olympics is quite different from this and ought to be sharply
distinguished.
It is certainly a form of dishonest and dishonourable
cheating for someone born a boy to try to compete against women on the basis
that he feels himself to be transgender. But both the Algerian and Taiwanese boxers
were certainly born girls.
Pictures of the Algerian fighter as a little girl
dressed with ribbons and girl’s clothes and the fact that she was brought up in
rural Algeria tell us that everyone determined that she was a girl in the
ordinary way. She has therefore not changed sex, but rather remained the sex she
was born with.
The controversy regarding these two fighters is not
about transgender, but rather the fact that they have both male and female characteristics.
It may be that they are genetically male but were born
with female genitalia. It may be for another reason, but both fighters have
abnormally high levels of testosterone.
It is undoubtedly the case that people who are
genetically male but who were born as girls ought not to be competing in women’s
competitions. They have many of the physical advantages of men including high
levels of testosterone even if they were born as girls. This makes the
competition both unfair and dangerous. But by any normal standard these
fighters are women.
In order to determine whether someone is a boy or a
girl a man or a woman we use objective criteria that ultimately depend on the
person’s body. We don’t require either DNA tests or tests of a person’s level
of testosterone to determine their sex.
If someone is born a girl and brought up a girl and
then only in adulthood discovers that she has male DNA or some other unusual
characteristic that gives her high levels of testosterone, it would be unfair and
also untrue to say now you are a man.
I have never had a DNA test, nor most likely have you.
My identity does not depend on such a test that I have never had.
These cases are perplexing, because they do not fit
into the norm. But I think we are forced to say that both fighters are women for
otherwise we would require each baby to have a DNA test in order to determine
whether it is a boy or a girl and this is as absurd as waiting until it grows up
to tell us about its feelings.
Sex is determined by DNA. We know this because of
science. But we do not ordinarily determine sex by means of DNA tests otherwise
no one before the discovery of DNA would have known who they could marry.
The Algerian and Taiwanese boxers would have been
called by Plato hermaphrodites. The danger of allowing such people to compete in
women’s sport is that there would be a temptation for countries to search for
hermaphrodite girls to train to be Olympic champions. This would be as disastrous
for biologically female people as allowing men to compete against them.
But it is not the fault of someone born a girl and who
has grown up to be woman that her DNA is what it is. Though both fighters should
for safety’s sake be banned from fighting, they should not be vilified for
being what they are.
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