(written during “ELL7413: SPEECHWRITING PRACTICUM,” 2023–01.)
I’ve brought with me today a copy of my most recent blood tests.
Under the hormonal exams administered by the IAAF and IOC: organizations which issues the controversial rulings on atheletes like Caster Semenya, advocated by proponents of the controversy, my estradiol and testosterone levels are as such that I would be cleared to participate in women’s sports. In fact, my testosterone levels are well below that of the average woman, not because of a fluke or an abnormality, but as a perfectly normal, mandatory component of my hormonal gender reassignment.
The physical effects are apparent in my daily life: due to the rapid onset of muscular atrophy brought on by my low testosterone levels, my physical strength, as well as the efficacy of physical exercise in building both stamina and musculature in the long term, has been greatly diminished for well over four years. The extent to which these effects manifest vary with the individual, but to whichever degree, this is a universal medical consequence of transitioning. With regards to seeing the long-term effects of the same exercise regimen — running and lifting — I struggle to keep up with my fiancée — a “biological woman,” much less with how well it had worked for me pre-transition.
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Under hormonal verification, it is infinitely more likely that otherwise much more average-looking women with invisible intersex conditions, such as women with polycystic ovary syndrome, or women suffering from menopause, would be found to have an unfair advantage due to her testosterone levels or the resultant ease in building musculature and stamina. Especially when compared to transgender women, whose medical transition involves obsessive readjustment of hormone levels with regards to those very metrics.
The proponents of the controversy claim to concern themselves with the inherent biological advantages transgender women have over other women in sports. I would argue that hormonal transition is, if anything, a strict and persistent handicap in that comparison.
But of course, when we say “biological sex,” we’re not discussing hormones, we’re discussing genitals — never mind the fact that your genitals and chromosomes have little to do with your physical strength and musculature beyond their relationship with your testosterone level, and therefore in the argument of physical advantages it is just of no logical consequence.
Certainly if we just look at athletes’ genitals we will be able to bar people like me from competing and I won’t have to deal with sports anymore while regular women who deserve fair competition would be able to thrive?
In 1980, the runner Stella Walsh, a gold medalist in the 1932 Olympics, was short dead during an armed robbery. The autopsy revealed that her cells had a mix of XY and XO chromosomes, resulting in a largely female-appearing body with no uterus. Upon further examination, what to doctors and family initially appeared to be a clitoris, turned out to be an underdeveloped and nonfunctional penis, something they could only discern from analyzing her urethra.
The population of intersex individuals like Stella Walsh, who are by all appearances, even in their genitals, “regular, biological men or women” and live with mutations in their genitals, hormones, and chromosomes is much larger than that of the transgender population, numbering 1 in 50 people vs. 1 in 500. Even you may be intersex and not know it, because it usually does not affect our experience until we are cut open dead on a table.
But I’m not here today to argue that we should or should not prioritize our experience over biological sex; I mean, in order to do that, there needs to be such a thing as a medically discernible binary biological sex. To do so would accomplish nothing, because this isn’t about science, this isn’t about lived experience, and this isn’t about ethics.
I could stand here and continue to argue that much of contemporary biology, sociology, and psychology has deemed my existence natural. I could and would talk about transgender lions and intersex frogs all day.
But this isn’t about what’s natural. It’s about distaste.
And I could compel feminist theory, which has long since explained why it is that people hold such distaste towards femininity when it is exhibited by people they expect to act masculine. I could historically track these attempts at bioessential legislation down to their predecessors in world-war era eugenics in Nazi Europe, and how those experiments proved to be just as scientifically flawed as what I have discussed today. I could talk about how the bolder facial and skeletal features, jawbones, shoulders and the like, that “tranny-spotters” have obsessed over online in pictures of athletes have more to do with attractiveness and even ethnicity than gender, because when they think “women,” they see the beauty standard — pretty white women.
But it wouldn’t matter. It would change nothing in the minds of those who believe that people like myself should not exist in their spaces, that we should not exist, period.
Because what it is is ultimately, and simply, distaste. This is not a debate over the science. This is not a debate over what is fair. The discussion on those has long since been over. This is about distaste — and those who hold that distaste against myself and any other individual can justify it any way they would like and I cannot stop them. I don’t care to. I’m just some person trying to figure out a way to be excited about being alive tomorrow, and I don’t give a shit about sports.
But this isn’t about sports, either. In high schools, which the first of these restrictions were passed, the amount of trans kids — who suffer the most muscle atrophy from transitioning — it would’ve affected who participated in sports within the past decades number below ten per state.
It’s about the lie.
The lie that this is a debate, that this controversy has to do with anything but distaste, distaste for boys who should be boys and not girls because what is feminine but not, to their eyes, beautiful, is unsightly; that this is about science and fairness instead — the principles of which do not say anything but the contrary:
That lie is what may soon forbid people like myself from becoming teachers under many legislatures worldwide, and denied access to the kinds of gender affirming care that is otherwise easily provided to menopausal or otherwise just insecure women, or even balding men — which have been deemed, for myself, life-saving with no suitable alternative. It’s what’s forcing people who have, after having living through decades’ worth of persistent, ever-looming and cosmic body horror, finally attained happiness back into their closets, stripped of their autonomy to make their own bodies easier to live in. It’s what in many conservative polities would have me imprisoned or killed to dare voice my aspiration to that happiness.
To me, that does not sound very fair. And at the heart of the issue: when we speak of fairness, when we speak of what it is that will allow all of us the equal ability to pursue the same kinds of happinesses and fight for our just ideals regardless of the conditions to which we are assigned, and whether any dualist, sex-based quantification of competitions is a sufficient enough metric of guaranteeing that at all rather than an archaic, patriarchal con which only serves to subjugate and hurt: the buried lede, which should otherwise be the first question on every single person’s minds in 2023, is what it is we are arguing for in our self-proclaimed pursuit of fairness, whether we have considered all the hoarse and broken voices in the room of those who we are have, and will continue to hurt, or we’re just looking for our turn to be the boot.
