When I told Noah that I proposed to write about transsexuals a second time, he popped his clogs.
“Stuck record” was one of his comments; “one-track mind” and “kicking people when they’re down” followed soon after. I reminded him that he was the one who started the rot by haranguing our dinner guests with guff about toilets. No guffaw greeted this comment, but he did scowl a little and harrumph quite a lot.
I am undeterred. If Noah can hold forth about trans-sisters and trans-brothers, I am under no obligation to maintain the radio silence he demands. I too can speak out these people: I am not agenda-dysphasic.
My focus is on transsexuals in sport. Trans-sports I call them, and by doing so, I in no way do them down. Just as their straight counterparts, they are sports persons who are mobilised, coached, and trained, the better to compete. If they remain on track, they will steam ahead with fire in their belly and arrive at their destination in good time. Or, if things go swimmingly, they will make a splash … (that’s quite enough of that, thank you – ed).
The issue is a narrow one. It is about people born male who, now Transing Queens, wish to compete in sporting events reserved for women. It is not about women who, now alter boys, form the desire to compete in men’s events against men. Understandably, few of them aspire to do so – coming last in a competition is not cool unless you are a Jamaican Cool Runner whose team is improbably taking part in the Winter Olympics.
But even if they did, no one would care a jot or, for that matter, a tittle; indeed, I am sure they would actually applaud the entry of a competitor guaranteed to beat them to last place. Truth be told, men’s competitions could be treated as Open without causing a murmur.
Bridle sweet
Guaranteed? Not so fast. There are sports in which women do compete against men and not only do well but often emerge in top spots. Equestrians, for instance, make no distinction between the sexes, and the result, far from being troubling, is a bridle sweet. For all I know, the same is true of Tiddlywinks, model airplane flying, Scrabble and chess, but I’m not sure and, to be honest, I simply don’t care.
What I do care about is cheating. Here’s why.
Competitions are not segregated by sex unless there is a good reason for doing so. When the competition is not dependent on strength, as in the cases referred to above, no such reason exists. But the reverse is true when strength does matter, and then we feel that giving women, genetically the weaker sex, their own events to reflect the difference is fair.
So we set aside events in which women can compete on even terms, and we declare that only women may compete in them. No men may do so. The rule is firm and, even supposing women are less speedy, a fast one too.
Keen-eyed readers will notice that our rule says nothing about women competing in men’s sports. For reasons already explained, there is really no need to deal with this matter. If there is an equivalent of GI Jane, however, her right to compete against men should be entrenched by changing the rule to read: “Women can participate in whatever sports they wish, but men cannot participate in women’s sports.”
To say otherwise
Fair enough, says the trans camp, but this fails to meet the point. It is that a man who becomes a woman is a woman in every sense of the word. Being so, the he now recast as she is as eligible to participate in women’s sports as every other member of the female sex. To say otherwise is to be sexist (a bad thing), homophobic (bad too) and transphobic (very bad indeed).
Missing the point, however, is actually what the trans camp is guilty of. Using sex as a criterion to differentiate is just a convenient way to set up the distinction. It provides a simple objective standard, a proxy if you like, by which we can segregate people who are genetically weaker from their stronger counterparts. The true concern is with a divergence in strength, not in gender.
People who are born male are, or at least become, stronger than people who are born female. So much is generally true to everyone except the experts, who show a determination to be as perverse as they are abstruse. No doubt there are cases in which the sex of the baby is unclear – the case of the intersex (hermaphrodite?) Caster Semenya seems to one such – but they can be resolved by assessing chromosomes or evaluating the actual physical make-up of the person concerned. The test would be whether the matter of gender makes the entrant so much stronger that permitting participation would be unfair.
Once we place the matter on this footing, the solutions become easy. No need, now, to test for the incidence of testosterone or earnestly consider whether the presence of a penis should serve to penalise. All we have to ask is whether the entrant had a male package at birth and stamp the person accordingly, that is, either surface male or no. This is all that is needed to justify, by operation of our proxy, whether the entrant is either weak enough to comply or simply too strong. One day, no doubt, we will discover some kind of a strengthometer to make the process of segregation more precise. Until then, the proxy – male or female at birth – should be treated as enough.
Contrived identity
Whether international sports bodies will treat it as such remains to be seen. At present, organisers agonise over men who pass themselves off as women so as to win now where before they couldn’t. Asked to endorse a fiction – that the contrived identity is real – they ponder over the metaphysical dilemmas presented by the implausible belief that life is being lived in the wrong body. No doubt this keeps them busy, but they could spare themselves the trouble by reminding themselves of the original reason they divided women from men in physical sport. It was the disparity in strength, no more, no less.
While the officials dither, males take part in women’s sports with impunity. They do so when they have mutilated themselves to provide the simulacrum of a female, and sometimes even when the best they can proffer is a spot of cross-dressing.
Since they are stronger than real women, they invariably win. They take pride of place on the podium when, being if not cheats then literal bad sports, they should be taking first prize for odium.
They are not, to be sure, sexist, homophobes or transphobes; but still, they are bad people who are making a cock-up not just of their lives but of the lives of their fellows.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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