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olympic sex?

August 2, 2024August 2, 2024

olympic sex? gender apartheid is alive and well in all five rings.

as a very openly genderless, liberal activist who\'s also qualified at the doctoral level in psychology, i would be very remiss if i didn\'t comment on the disgusting debates surrounding olympic boxing in paris. the situation is that a woman, imane khelif, completely overwhelmed her opponent, another woman, angela carini, who gave up only seconds into the match, knowing she was about to get badly hurt. something very important to keep in mind through all this is that this is a woman fighting another woman. much has been made of this from a trans rights perspective, though that\'s not actually relevant to the situation as neither of the women involved are trans women. not that that would matter in the slightest to the situation but it would be nice if people who are anti-trans could at least stop bitching and whining about trans people when there are literally no trans people there to talk about. first, we should talk about the difference between sex, genitals and gender. the first two, sex and genitals, are generally related with occasional exceptions while the third is completely unrelated in anything other than tradition. sex is a biological trait of genetics. humans have various chromosome

possibilities with the most common being xx and xy, though there are several others. most humans have 46 chromosomes (23 pairs with two being sex chromosomes) but some have as few as 45 (one sex chromosome) or as many as 48 four sex chromosomes). if you have an xy pair, you\'re classified as male, if an xx pair, female. there are surprisingly many who have variations, however, many of them going through their lives never knowing. variations are almost always because of genetic errors rather than inheritance so it\'s not something you\'d know about from your family in the vast majority of cases. about 98% of humans are born with typical chromosome and genital patterns, which means about 133 million people are somewhere outside that expected biological binary. that\'s actually fairly normal when it comes to mammals - dogs, sheep and cats exhibit similar rates. that includes those with chromosome patters outside xx/xy, those whose chromosome expression is different from the expected outcome and those with different genitals or sexual characteristics from typical xx/xy development. which brings us to genitals - penis, testicles, vagina. body parts all adults are hopefully aware of and familiar with the functioning of. it\'s expected that someone with xx chromosomes will present with a vagina and someone with xy

chromosomes will present with a penis and testicles. while that is the usual outcome, that\'s not always the case and the variation becomes much more common with other chromosome patterns like xxy or xyy, just two of the usual different options. it\'s quite possible to develop multiple types of genitals at the same time. sometimes only one is visible with the other internally and, other times, it\'s all visible. sometimes they are all functional, other times only some, sometimes none. there\'s also significant variation in terms of development - someone with a vagina and a penis, for example, may develop only one of those in a typical manner while the other remains very underdeveloped but still visible. the notion that biological sex or genitals are distinct binaries without a gradient or variations is simply not reflective of the reality of humans - or any other mammal. only a religious perspective on sex and genitals holds it to be distinct but any doctor can tell you there\'s a huge gray area between female and male with millions of possible combinations. and \"male\" and \"female\" are not the extremes of that gradient. a single-x \"female\" exhibits even more extreme gendered physical traits and an xxy, хуу, xxyy or xxxy \"male\" often exhibits more extreme gendered physical traits in the other direction. that doesn\'t even take into account the myriad developmental variations and genetic expression changes that can happen during the life of a human to

significantly change how sexual divergence and dimorphism may vary from one person to another. this is an area of human biology that has been studied in great depth and whole journals are dedicated to that research, though much of the general public remains in the dark it\'s even something to research or understand in the first place, imagining the only variation in sexual development has to do with being transgender or surgical changes. trans people are actually a tiny fraction of the population compared to those who have naturally-occurring sex or genital divergence from the sexual binary many people think is the reality - much less than half, in fact. before moving on to gender, it\'s important to remember that sex and genitals are purely biological issues and have nothing to do with identity, presentation, pronouns or being trans. these are questions of natural physical development of the body and how it varies across the spectrum of sexes and genitals. gender is something altogether different. it is an optional social characteristic many humans identify with and it is purely human and human-created. no other species has gender and it\'s actually a relatively recent development in our species - certainly not present for at least the first half of our existence and quite possibly only developed in the last twenty or thirty thousand years during our hunter-gatherer phase. a gender is a set of cultural norms applied to a group of people. we have historically identified two general genders in humans as \"man\" and \"woman\" but

those have varied wildly in terms of their definitions through human history. to say that there have mostly been two and people fit in one or the other is misleading, though. many people have fit in either of those but there have always been overlaps, people who change between them, inhabit a gray zone combining elements of both or simply existing outside gender altogether. how many is hard to estimate but a good benchmark is about 1 in 200 people. which means you probably know a few, even if you haven\'t noticed. and they certainly don\'t all talk about it or identify as trans. the vast majority don\'t say anything about it at all. for most of recorded history, inhabiting that middle area or being without a gender was actually fairly accepted. it wasn\'t until the middle ages that many of the norms of the ancient world were shifted and the more extreme teachings of the christian church changed how people related to each other in the west. being what we think of now as nonbinary, genderfluid or trans today was common enough in the days of the greeks, romans, persians and egyptians not to be unusual or problematic. once christianity became dominant in the west around the turn of the second century but particularly from the renaissance to the victorian periods, many things that were commonplace and accepted in society went underground. homosexuality and gender flexibility were only two casualties of christianization but the impact of the christian church and its destruction of western society is still the basic source of nearly all discrimination in the modern world -

particularly sexual and gender discrimination. gender is just a set of societal norms, though, assigned to traditional notions of man and woman. while a person who wakes up as a female would have to go through very extreme (and so far not perfected) medical procedures to become a male or the reverse, changing from one set of identity norms to another is as easy as making a decision and acting on it. so you can wake up a woman and become a man by breakfast (changing genders) but we have no way to change from female to male (changing sexes), even if you spend years trying. you can certainly change genitals surgically, though it\'s not a simple procedure or particularly painless. hormones can change dimorphic presentation like breasts, fat distribution, muscle development and facial structure. but gender is only a question of identifying with a particular social identity. it\'s about how you see yourself and expect the world to see you, not about your biology or the parts of your body you usually keep hidden or reserved for pleasure and procreation. many of us decide to live outside a gender structure, which i like to call being genderless but is more commonly referred to as agender - similar to being

nonbinary (shortened to nb or enby in most cases). though we typically tend to feel more comfortable in feminine or masculine environments. in my case, i tend to get labeled \"fem-enby\" because i\'m much more feminine in how i relate to the world and present myself. but everyone is different in their identities. the best way to think of gender is like dying your hair. you don\'t have to dye your hair - and you don\'t have to have a gender. but if you choose to have one it\'s a question of what you see yourself as. do you want to fit a typical social norm like blonde or black hair (like choosing to be a man or woman)? or do you want to create a more diverse gender presentation (dying your hair blue or pink, for example, might be more similar to being genderfluid)? or do you prefer to simply exist outside the binary norms and have no gender at all, keeping your symbolic hair its natural color without presenting it any particular way? gender isn\'t for life but it\'s a serious decision. you can change it, of course. but it\'s about making yourself something and embodying it, not just saying the words. how does this relate to sports? sports were traditionally the domain of men in most of the west and that had nothing to do with ability or interest but gatekeeping and exclusion. much the same way that much of the west excluded non-white athletes from much of professional sports even until the second half of the twentieth century. instead of integrating women into existing sports, though, the way most racial

and ethnic divisions were eliminated, men continued to try to monopolize sports and women had to create their own organizations and sports groups to be allowed to play and compete at all. this is not the most extreme example of the patriarchy dominating western society but it\'s very present even today with the vast gulf between marketing, profits and interest in men\'s sports compared to women\'s sports - not to mention the assumption that sports are male unless specified otherwise like the nba/wnba or the nhl and its various women\'s counterparts over the years. with this division came the assumption that men and women couldn\'t compete against each other, a ludicrous statement. i\'ve never been an athlete and the idea of me competing in professional sports is beyond laughable. but anyone who thinks women can\'t compete against men needs to watch the skill, strength and agility of serious professional athletes and stop perpetrating a myth of inequality that only benefits the vast empire of male professional sports and its billions in profits. there is no neat division between biological males and females. you can measure testosterone or muscle density all you like but there is so much overlap these measurements are meaningless. many biological females naturally have testosterone levels and muscle densities higher than significant groups of biological males so either some of those females should be competing in men\'s categories while some of those males should be in women\'s or the whole measurement system is useless - which it is. the reason no group of sports

regulatory bodies can decide what the testosterone level for women\'s sports is is because they either set it so low they exclude lots of biological females or so high they include lots of biological males, either defeating their whole purpose. the only logical solution to this is complete integration of sports. it\'s certainly possible to have multiple streams of sports - for example, gymnastics competitions focused on flexibility and agility and others focused on strength. dividing them by sex or gender is a losing proposition but allowing athletes to perfect their skills in specific types of competition is a reasonable way to avoid one group having huge advantages. the fact that international and national sporting bodies still perpetrate the myth of distinct divisions between sexes or a relationship between biological sex and gender identity is a sign of just how outdated and confused these organizations are. the olympics should lead the way and demonstrate there has never been a need for sexual segregation in sports, just as there has never been a need for it in the workplace or schools. the next games should be completely integrated in all sports. there is no excuse for gender apartheid to persist in the twenty-first century.

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