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Something just finally clicked for me.
For years, and years and years and years, the bailey of trans was defended with the motte of intersex. Arguments about how it occurs in nature played loose and fast with definitions of trans or intersex. Arguments about how it's genetic or something you were born with involved similar free association between trans or intersex. For 10 years the steelman for trans acceptance and "the science" involved quoting studies about intersex people.
And now, suddenly, when the wrong people are conflating the two in a bad way "Woah woah woah, she's not trans, she's intersex! There is a huge fucking difference, can't you tell? idiot."
And I almost fell for it. It's so easy to get caught up in current year and that tepid thread of logic from all of only a few years ago that brought us to this point get's washed away.
This is silly, it's important to actually get the facts straight and one shouldn't respond as if attacked when corrected on the facts. The question of how to categorize people with rare genetic defects and whether to rule them in or out of sports competitions are entirely different to the same questions applied to natal males or natal females who identify with the opposite sex and undergo treatment to approximate as much as possible the body and experience of the opposite sex. One can come to the same conclusion on both, and I broadly do, but we must actually keep our thinking straight here.
The problem is it's the very same people (broadly) who spent the last 10 years obfuscating and playing loose and fast with the trans/intersex distinction that are now rolling in and yelling at people for not understanding the trans/intersex distinction. There was little to no difference between the two when it suited them, now there is all the difference in the world when it suits them. And there are no "facts" about how we morally or intellectually should distinguish between the two, only social convention. Which the narrative controllers have decided is now turning on a dime so that they can continue their monopoly on deciding right and wrong, unburdened by their previous statements or arguments.
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Who has corrected anyone on the facts here? The actual status of the controversial athletes is being deliberately hidden from the public, and the other side is just assuming that these hidden facts are always on their side.
Also please give me a definition of "trans person" that doesn't cover intersex people, before making fun of my "ignorance".
A trans person is a natal male or female that identifies with the opposite sex and seeks to undergo treatment to approximate the experience of the opposite sex as close as possible. An intersex person is someone who is born with a rare but identifiable physical ailment that complicates the standard XX/XY binary options that naturally describe male and female people. I'm very sympathetic to annoyance that the various authorities haven't clarified the situation but as far as I know no one who has looked into it seriously thinks this is a trans person.
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The suspicion is that those facts are being weaponized, and that the same people doing the "correcting" would be soft-pedalling them or even being actively misleading if they didn't fit the narrative they wanted to push (and, in fact, have a history of doing just that). You can't (well, okay, shouldn't) make arguments for years on end that rely on conflating "trans" and "intersex" and then get all huffy and indignant when people confuse the two in a way that you don't find politically convenient.
(Generic "you", not necessarily you personally.)
Fighting the facts is just never a good look. When you start out saying something that isn't true you pretty immediately lose the persuadable audience. It's not good strategically and more importantly to me, it's not good epistemics. Keeping these things straight matters.
They weren't doing this though, or at least not the more serious people. Certainly intersex people come up in discussions of exactly where to draw lines on defining what it is to be a man or a woman because they're exactly the kind of edge case bullet people need to bite if they want to rigorously define "woman" and people arguing for expanding the definition will naturally make you bite those bullets. The claim wasn't that trans women and people who were born with a vagina and womb but have an odd genetic disorder are exactly the same thing, just that they're both category errors(or at least the trans advocate will try to claim that trans identification ought to make them a category error, I find this argument dubious).
They're obviously quite different for many reasons, most important to me because intersex is a very objective kind of thing, we can run tests and know what is going on. For this reason we're not at high risk of mistakenly giving someone, especially a kid, inappropriate life altering treatment. We have no risk of a social contagion of intersex diagnoses. Because of this I think we can and should calmly sit down and determine what should be done about these cases where nature is the only party at fault. I do still think in that calmly sitting down, if we avoid invoking the trans culture war mind killing, the natural outcome would be banning intersex cases that provide advantage from serious competition. And invoking trans people in this discussion is not helping.
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That's exactly the problem though. Recognizing the motte and Bailey doesn't lead naturally to therefore attack the motte harder. Instead you recognize and you keep the fight in the bailey, you endeavor to cut off the motte so they can't support the bailey.
Here, I fear that those concerned about trans participation in women's sport are setting themselves up for a fall. Everyone from JK to DJT have publicly attacked Khelif, who is going to leave Paris with a medal around her neck. Perfectly timed for a TV special on CBS Sunday morning, where the crew takes a look at her life growing up, her training, how she never knew about her DSD diagnosis, talking head from the IOC comes in to say it's fair, the "attacks" she suffered, and then gets some talking head with an MD to come on and say "Intersex disorders are very common and gender is really complicated!"
Conflating rare invisible intersex disorders, or just having (eurocentric) masculine features, with being trans is what the TRAs want. They want terfs to make themselves look bad attacking sympathetic targets.
It bears noting two things-
One, Imane Khelif is an extremely sympathetic target. She collected scrap metal to fund bus fair to her boxing gym she attended over the objections of her strict Islamic father in rural Algeria. She isn't trans, she probably has a rare intersex disorder that nobody in Algeria has ever heard of, and being non-gender conforming in Islamic Arab societies is not fun, especially when it isn't your fault and nobody can figure out why you aren't like the other girls.
Two, a lot of the core population of the west has their well of sympathy completely exhausted. I don't care about the oppressed Arab woman rising above the odds anymore. Trans genocide? Bring it on, and if some unfortunate intersex get caught in the crossfire that's the cost of doing business.
I'll go a bit further. At a certain point, it feels emasculating to have to give all of the caveats about how obviously it's a complicated issue and everyone deserves dignity and so on while your enemies just call you a bigot when they're strong and then putter around pettifogging about hormone classes and doing it by weight when they're weak.
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I don't necessarily agree that the intersex argument for trans acceptance is a motte and bailey, any more than the "dolphins have hairs" argument for dolphins not being fish is a motte and bailey (under a morphology-based taxonomy scheme of animals.) Trans activists who bring up intersex people are using them to point to a weakness in people's unreflective definitions of sex, and then adopting a "lumper" position that trans people should be included under their identified sex because of that ambiguity.
There's a few possible places that argument could go wrong:
For my own part, I do think the existence of intersex people is a good argument for "sex" being messier than commonly believed (the same way that I think ring species and occasionally fertile hybrids point to the concept of "species" being messier than commonly believed), but I don't really use that as my argument for trans people. Instead, I have something closer to a socio-legal "adoptive sex" model, where a society can create fictive "sex" categories the same way that adoption can create fictive "parent-child" relationships. Each society or subculture gets to decide what the package of rights and privileges associated with "adoptive sex" are, and so might chose any variety of constructions surrounding bathroom inclusivity, prison inclusivity, and sports inclusivity. For my own part, I'm really only a partisan for there being some sort of protections for employment, housing and financial services, since I tend to think those are the most impactful domains, and I'm okay with less important private businesses denying services or discriminating in most other domains, since I tend to think the market will work itself out in the long run.
Whatever else you may say about capitalism, it does tend to erode discrimination under certain conditions. Black people needed a Green Book from the 1930's to the 1960's, but today every gas station wants the public's money enough that the the only color they care about is your green cash. I doubt McDonald's will ever start denying service to trans people, gay people, etc.
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We don’t actually know she’s intersex. We know the IBA excluded her on gender grounds on one occasion, they won’t specify why. The IOC claims she isn’t intersex.
No, that's the infuriating part. The IOC never clearly stated that they believe Khelif isn't intersex. (When an official accidentally said “this isn't a case of a DSD” the IOC published a rectification on Twitter stating that the official had meant “transgender” instead, tacitly admitting it might very well be a case of a DSD.)
The IOC intentionally abolished sex tests, because they worked too well: they identified some AFAB XY athletes, and the IOC didn't want to be the bad guy that has to tell male “women” with 5-ARD that their bodies are not female enough to be eligible for women's sports.
If the IOC had any integrity, they would say clearly: “We decided to include intersex males in the women's sports competition, so whether the IBA's assessment that Khelif is an intersex male is correct, is irrelevant.”
But they don't do that. They vaguely imply that the IBA is wrong, refuse to do any testing on their own, and let people take their sides in the culture war. It's infuriating cowardice. The IOC needs to decide whether or not XY-males with 5-ARD are allowed to compete. If so, they should say clearly that they don't care if Khelif is biologically male. If not, they should propose meaningful measures to keep males like Khelif out.
Regardless of how evasive IOC is being, I'm not inclined to assign IBA enough trust to move the needle from the zero hypothesis in this case. Not when their Russian pro-Russian CEO has every reason to be pissed that Russia isn't allowed to compete in the Olympics and every reason to stoke Olympic trans athlete controversies.
You don't find it strange that the IBA would stake its reputation on a claim that, if false, could be easily disproven with a simple cheek swab and PCR test? Don't you find it strange that neither the IOC nor either of the accused athletes have chosen to disclose any details on their medical condition?
And even if you believe that the IBA wanted to throw shade regardless of the truth (which is plausible), don't you agree that they'd be more likely to do that if they had actual proof? (Which is definitely not impossible; intersex athletes have been outed by sex tests many times, that's why the IOC stopped sex testing in the first place.) If so, you should agree that by Bayes theorem, that the fact that they have raised the issue increases the probability that the athletes are male.
IIRC they also either didn't appeal or withdrew their appeals after the original IBA ruling. Possibly because going further would have made the matter clear, as with Caster Semenya.
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The IOC didn't test him. The IBA did. They are trying very hard to not get sued for revealing sensitive medical information.
Neither of the XY competitors even pretend to live as women.
Important if true, but warrants at least a link. (That unambiguously states this, not just kinda-sorta suggests it if you squint right.) As this stands I'm skeptical.
https://twitter.com/Glinner/status/1820585888734203937
This looks like a perfectly reasonable set of PT gear for a woman to wear, though. It's not, by western norms, very feminine, but Imane Khelif is butch and Algeria probably has very different norms compared to the west.
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Care to provide evidence they live as men?
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What do you base this on?
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Oh, that changes things. I could have sworn I'd read they live as women.
Edit: do you have a source? I went googling and could not check this (some sources say 'they identify as women' but I guess there's a further question of how they 'live').
https://instagram.com/boxing_ting
https://instagram.com/imane_khelif_10
I mean, what does it mean to „live as a woman“ in current year? Surely there are some butch lesbians having the same style. But this is very male-presenting.
Yeah but that's hardly unusual for womens' sports. The elite female athletes I've met have generally trended towards butchness, and that's been the trend forever. Look at the drama with the WNBA & Caitlin Clark with a tacit theme of 'the traditionally black & lesbian-dominated WNBA don't like that they've suddenly become palatable due to the success of a white woman'.
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