Caster Semenya--a Chromosomal Male--Will Not Run as a Woman in the Tokyo Olympics

I have written about the debate over Caster Semenya, the chromosomal male who claims that she has a right to run in the Olympics as a female, because that is her gender identity.  She has shown that she can run 800 meters faster than any woman in the world.  But the question is whether this is a fair competition, given that she is a 46-chromosome male (XY), which gives her the advantage that comes from the typically high male testosterone.

I have argued that Semenya is probably an XY male born with 5-alpha reductase deficiency, so that she is a chromosomal male who was born with sexually ambiguous sex organs who was raised as a girl.  She identifies her gender identity as female, but she is biologically male, with testes producing testosterone, which gives her an unfair athletic advantage in the 800-meter women's race.

In response to complaints from female athletes who said that she should not be permitted to compete as a woman, the International Association of Athletic Federations in 2018 issued new regulations saying that genetic males with some disorder of sex development would be permitted to compete as women in middle-distance races (400 meters to one mile) only if they lower the level of testosterone in their blood down to the highest possible level for a healthy woman with ovaries.  Otherwise, they can run in the men's events.

Semenya refused to do this.  She has attempted to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics by competing in the 5,000 meters race for women, which favors female stamina rather than male strength.  As indicated in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Semenya has failed to qualify for this event, and so she will not be in the Tokyo Olympics.

What is most interesting here is that Semenya has said in court documents that she is a 46 XY male with female features, probably indicating 5-alpha reductase deficiency at birth, which confirms my suspicions.

Semenya believes it is unfair to force her to compete with men in Olympic running events.  Why isn't it unfair for her as a chromosomal male to compete with chromosomal females?

Should Algerian Boxer Imane Khalif Compete in an Intersex Olympics?

 At the Paris Olympics, there has been an intense controversy over the women's boxing match in which the Algerian boxer Imane Khalif easily defeated Italy's Angela Carini in only 46 seconds.  Khalif looks and fights like a man.  So, it appeared that male violence against women has become an Olympic sport!

It's hard to judge this, however, because the news reports have not clearly identified Khalif's sexual biology.  It is said that she is not a transgender woman--someone born male who decided later in life decided to take on a female gender identity.  Instead, it is said that she was born as a girl but with a genetic condition that gives her an abnormally high level of testosterone.

I have written a series of posts on the Olympic runner Caster Semenya.  I suspect that Khalife is like Semenya:  she's an XY male born with 5-alpha reductase deficiency, so that she is a chromosomal male who was born with sexually ambiguous sex organs who was raised as a girl.  She identifies her gender identity as female, but she is biologically male, with testes producing testosterone, which gives her an unfair athletic advantage in athletic competition with women.  If that is so, then she is not a transgender woman but an intersex woman, who falls somewhere between normal males and normal females.

I have proposed that intersex people like this should compete in an Intersex Olympics, similar to the Paralympics.  Some intersex athletes have agreed that this would be the best solution to the problem, although Semenya does not.

Testosterone and Intersexuality in Female Athletics: Caster Semenya and the Desire for Sexual Identity

              Caster Semenya of South Africa Winning the 800 Meters Race for Women at the Rio Olympics 2016

Here is a full video of the race.

In 2016, at the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, 8 women ran in the 800 meters women's final.  Of those 8, 3 of them were chromosomal (XY) males with disorders of sex development (DSD) who identify themselves as women.  Those 3 intersex women have levels of testosterone far higher than normal for women.  These 3 were the winners of the race: Caster Semenya (Gold), Francine Niyonsaba (Silver), and Margaret Nyaira Wambui (Bronze).  One of the women who lost that race--Lynsey Sharp--expressed her frustration with having to compete against intersex individuals with the unfair advantages that come from male testosterone levels.

Cases like this have created a controversy over whether it is fair for intersex individuals to compete in women's athletic events because they identify themselves as women.  Should we replace biological sex differences with gender identity, so that anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman, even when she has a male body in some respects?  Or should we say that segregating biological males and biological females really does matter, particularly in certain arenas of life like athletic competition, where males have a performance advantage over females?

Both men and women produce testosterone (T).  But men have higher levels of T as produced by the testes, with lower levels produced in the adrenal glands.  Women also produce T in their adrenal glands, and in their ovaries.  In general, men have 10 to 30 times more T than women.  Most women have T levels in the range of 0.5 to 1.5 nanomoles per liter (nmol/L), while most men have T in the range of 10 to 35 nmol/L.  This gap appears first in puberty, when the testes produce more T in men than the adrenal glands and ovaries produce in women.

These higher levels of T during male pubertal growth create physical traits for men that give elite male athletes a performance advantage on average over elite female athletes (Handelsman et al. 2018).  Compared with women, men on average have greater lean body mass (more skeletal muscle and less fat), larger hearts, higher cardiac outputs, larger hemoglobin mass, a greater ability to take in oxygen, greater glycogen utilization, and higher anaerobic capacity.  This gives an advantage to male athletes over female athletes in competitive running, throwing, jumping, swimming, and lifting weights.

Female athletes with T levels at or near the male range are either doping, or they are trans (male to female) or intersex women--that is, 46 XY males with some disorder of sex development (DSD).  Among elite female athletes, the most common DSD is 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD) (Coleman 2017; Fenichel et al. 2013).  5-ARD is caused by a genetic mutation that creates a deficiency in the enzyme 5-alpha reductase, which is necessary for the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone (DHT).  A low level of DHT in a developing XY fetus disrupts the formation of the external sex organs before birth.  At birth, children with 5-ARD have sexually ambiguous sex organs, and they are often raised as girls, although they are biologically male, with testes producing testosterone.  At puberty, their male typical testosterone levels will produce the normal development of secondary male sex characteristics.

Caster Semenya is probably an XY male born with 5-ARD, who has always identified herself as a female, although she has also the athletic performance advantages that come with her biologically male body.  Once this became clear, it was possible for some sports observers to predict that she would have a virtually 100% chance of winning the Gold Medal in the 800 meters race in Rio in 2016, because not even the best elite female athletes with female bodies could come close to overcoming her performance advantage with her male body.

In response to the complaints about the unfair advantage enjoyed by Semenya and other intersex athletes competing in women's athletic events, the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) in 2018 issued new "Eligibility Regulations for the Female Classification."  The regulations applied to those individuals who were legally female and had some DSD causing them to have male chromosomes (XY), testes and not ovaries, circulating T in the male range, and bodies that can use circulating T.  These people would be permitted to compete as women in middle-distance track races (400 meters to one mile) only if they lowered the level of T in their blood down to below 5 nmol/L (the highest possible level for a healthy woman with ovaries) for a period of six months prior to competition.

Semenya filed a suit against these regulations as unfairly discriminatory.  Last May, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled (by a 2-1 vote of the judges) to uphold the IAAF regulations.  Some of the coverage of this case in The New York Times can be found here and here.

The arguments in favor of the IAAS's position have been well stated by people like Dorianne Lambelet Coleman, a law professor at Duke Law School who was a champion 800 meter runner in 1982 and 1983 (Coleman 2017, 2019).  The opposing arguments have been put forward by people like Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis (2019).

Coleman contends--rightly I think--that while sex segregation and discrimination should often be challenged as unfair, the separation of the sexes is justifiable when this serves some valuable institutional goals while minimizing any harmful effects.  That is true for the institution of sports because separating men and women into different competitive arenas promotes the valuable goals of sport in the modern world.  It showcases the best athletes, because in having men compete with men and women with women, the best female athletes have an equal opportunity to be recognized for their athletic achievements, which would not happen if they were competing with men, because biological sex differences--particularly in testosterone levels--give men a performance advantage over women.  This segregation of the sexes in sports promotes liberal reform by weakening the traditional subordination of women to men.  Beginning with the Olympics in ancient Greece, elite athletic competition was a purely male activity, and it was not until the beginning of the 20th century, that women were allowed to compete in women's only events.  To achieve these goals, there has to be some defined categories distinguishing men and women and some enforcement of rules for who can compete as women in the women's events.

Jordan-Young and Karkazis offer lots of objections to this position, but the most fundamental one is that Coleman's reasoning falsely assumes a sex dualism in which sex identity is clearly divided into the bipolar categories of male and female, which includes a "sex gap" in T--men have a high T level, while women have a low T level, and there is no overlap between the T blood levels of men and women.  If this were true, then one could say that a naturally high T woman like Semenya is not "really" a woman, and so she should not be allowed to compete in women's athletics, because her typically male T levels give her an unfair advantage over women with typically female T levels.

This is not true, they argue, because there is no clear sex gap in T levels between elite male and female athletes.  In one large-scale study of T in elite athletes--taking blood samples from 446 men and 234 women athletes in fifteen Olympic events in 2000--it was found that although the average T levels were very different between men and women, there was a substantial overlap in the T levels of the women and men athletes.  13.7 percent of the women had T above the typical female range, and 4.7 percent (12 individuals) had T levels within the typical male range.  The researchers concluded from this that "the IOC [International Olympic Committee] definition of a woman as one who has a 'normal' testosterone level is untenable" (Healy et al. 2014: 294).

And yet another large-scale study of T in elite athletes reached a contradictory conclusion.  Researchers measured the blood levels of T in 849 elite female athletes, and once they removed five doped athletes and five 46 XY DSD women from the group, they found that the median T values were close to the range typical for young women.  They concluded that "doping and some forms of DSD are likely to be the two most important confounding factors when hyperandrogenism in female athletes is considered" (Bermon et al. 2014).  This would explain the contradiction with the other study, because the 12 women in that study with T levels within the typical male range were probably either doping or DSD women.

Jordan-Young and Karkazis have objected that to exclude all women whose high natural T could be traced to variations in sex development--intersex people--as "confounding factors" is question-begging circular reasoning.  T levels look dimorphic only when you throw out women with intersex variations that have T levels overlapping the male range.  But if you include those women, you will see that T levels aren't dimorphic, because they are characterized by two curves for men and women that overlap.

This challenges the claim that I have often made about the natural desire for sexual identity--that human beings generally desire to identify themselves as male or female, which creates a universal bipolarity of male and female in all human societies.  Against this, Jordan-Young and Karkazis insist that there is no clear male/female dualism because the natural reality of sexual identity is too messy for that--some people are male, some are female, and some are in-between.  There are not just two sexes; but, as Anne Fausto-Sterling has argued, there are at least five.  I have written about this here, here, and here.

Jordan-Young, Karkazis, and Fausto-Sterling are correct in pointing out that sex characteristics are not always distributed bimodally into clear male and female categories.  But still, as Coleman has observed, as soon as one considers the incidence of this distribution and the reproductive function of male and female genitalia, sex clearly does appear bipolar.  Over 98% of all human beings have had a normal sex development into either a typical male or a typical female, so that for most of us, chromosomal sex, gonadal sex, hormonal sex, and phenotypic sex all support a sex identity as either male or female.  One can see this in any textbook chart of normal genital development.

And yet even as nature shows this bipolarity of male and female in normal genital development, it also shows genital variation, as in this illustration, which shows the typical male (figure 1), the typical female (figure 6), and the in-between types (figures 2-5).  As a statistical norm, sex is clearly binary, although it's binary with exceptions.  As Aristotle would say, the dualism of male and female is what nature creates "for the most part," but there will always be some exceptions to the rule.  This is generally true for all biological phenomena.

The science of sexuality confirms what we should know by common-sense experience that both the norm of sexual duality and the exceptions to that norm are real.  They are not just arbitrary social constructions.

We can respect Caster Semenya as an intersex individual with a partially male body and a female gender identity.  But we must also respect those many typically female athletes who want to compete with other females, so that they can display their athletic excellence.  This creates a conflict of interests.  The IAAF has tried to resolve this conflict by telling those intersex individuals like Semenya that they must either compete with men or reduce their testosterone levels to compete with women.  In doing this, they have weighed the possible harm to people like Semenya against the possible harm to typically female athletes.

There is another alternative.  We could say that all athletic competition should be unisex: everyone--whether male, female, trans-male, trans-female, or intersex--could compete in the same events.  If that were done, however, in many events, women would never win.  And surely that would be unfair for the women.  That's why women's only athletic events were originally established--to allow female athletes to display their athletic excellence, free from the unfair advantage that men would have in competing with them.  If that is correct, doesn't that mean that athletic institutions must define what counts as typically male and female individuals for the purpose of distinguishing who is rightly assigned to male or female events?

REFERENCES

Bermon, Stephane, et al. 2014. "Serum Androgen Levels in Elite Female Athletes." Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 99 (11): 4328-4335.

Coleman, Doriane Lambelet. 2017. "Sex in Sport." Law and Contemporary Problems 80: 63-126.

Coleman, Doriane Lambelet. 2019. "A Victory for Female Athletes Everywhere." Quillette, May 3.

Fenichel, Patrick, et al. 2013. "Molecular Diagnosis of 5 Alpha-Reductase Deficiency in 4 Elite Young Female Athletes Through Hormonal Screening for Hyperandrogenism." Journal of Clinical Endrocrinology and Metabolism 98 (6): E1055-E1059.

Handelsman, David J., et al. 2018. "Circulating Testosterone as the Hormonal Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance." Endocrine Reviews 39: 803-829.

Healey, M. L., et al. 2014. "Endocrine Profiles in 693 Elite Athletes in the Postcompetition Setting."  Clinical Endocrinology 81: 294-305.

Jordan-Young, Rebecca M., and Katrina Karkazis. 2019. Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

The Debate over Transgender Equality: Does Darwinian Natural Right Provide Any Standard?

 I have argued that the desire for sexual identity is one of the 20 natural desires of our evolved human nature.  If so, does that provide any natural standard for adjudicating the debate over transgender equality?  Most human beings easily identify their biological sexual identity as male or female.  But in a few cases, men desire to identify themselves as women, or women desire to identify themselves as men.  Does this show that gender identity is a social construction or mental experience that has nothing to do with the biological sex of the body?  Must we respect this gender identity by treating transgender women as women and transgender men as men?

So, for example, must we allow Caster Semenya to compete in the Olympics as a woman, even though she is a chromosomal male (XY) with the high testosterone levels typical for men, which gives her an advantage over other women in running events?  If we allow this, this would probably mean that chromosomal women (XX) will almost never win in Olympic running events competing with transgender or intersex women like Semenya.

Under present rules, Semenya will be prohibited from defending her 800m gold medal (won at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro), unless she takes drugs to reduce her testosterone to typically female levels.  Two days ago, her lawyers announced that they will be appealing to the European Court of Human Rights to ask that they overturn this rule as a violation of her human rights.

In a previous post, I have written about the controversy over Semenya, arguing that the science of sexuality confirms what we should know by common-sense experience that both the norm of sexual duality and the few exceptions to that norm are biologically real, and not just arbitrary social constructions.  We can respect Caster Semenya as an intersex individual with a partially male body and a female gender identity.  But we must also respect those many typically female athletes who want to compete with other biological females, so that they have a chance to display their athletic excellence.  To resolve this conflict of interests, the Olympic committees have properly ruled that intersex individuals like Semenya must either compete with men or reduce their testosterone levels to compete with women.

A similar dispute has arisen in the debate over the Equality Act, just passed by the House of Representatives, which would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity.  By passing this legislation, the Congress would endorse the interpretation of the Civil Rights Act adopted by the Supreme Court last summer in the Bostock case, where Neil Gorsuch (a Trump appointee) wrote the majority opinion that rejected the Trump Administration's claim that the sexual equality of men and women under the Civil Rights Act does not include the equal treatment of gays and transgender people.  I have written about this here and here.

President Biden has nominated Dr. Rachel Levine to be assistant secretary of health, who would be the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the Senate.  In the first confirmation hearing, Senator Rand Paul questioned her about whether she supported genital mutilation, gender reassignment surgery, and hormone therapy for children.  Levine was evasive, replying that, "Transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field with robust research and standards of care."

Apparently, Paul's questioning was motivated by reports that Levine has endorsed a research study concluding that doctors should provide drug therapy for transgender adolescents to suppress puberty, because this would improve their mental health by bringing the sexual traits of their bodies into harmony with their transgender identity.  The study was published in the journal Pediatrics--"Pubertal Suppression for Transgender Youth and Risk of Suicidal Ideation," 145 (February 2020): e20191725.

Transgender people are known to suffer from high rates of suicidal thoughts--with about 40% having attempted suicide.  The claim of this new study is that pubertal suppression for transgender children would reduce this propensity to suicide, which would show better mental health for them.  This would be done by doctors prescribing gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues that suppress puberty for adolescents 9 to 16 years old.

The method in this study was to conduct a survey of 20,619 transgender adults aged 18 to 36 years old, who were asked about their history.  Of this group, 3,494 individuals reported that they had at some time wanted to have puberty suppression therapy, but only 89 of these individuals reported that they had actually had the treatment.  These individuals were also asked about whether they had ever had suicidal thoughts or whether they had attempted suicide.  The researchers were able to show that those who reported receiving the puberty suppression treatment had a lower rate of suicidal thoughts and attempts than those who wanted the treatment but did not receive it.  The researchers concluded: "pubertal suppression for transgender adolescents who want this treatment is associated with favorable mental health outcomes."  And this is the conclusion that has been widely reported in the news media.

But if you read this study carefully, you will see some dubious features of their reasoning.  First of all, there's the fundamental methodological problem with all such survey research: they rely totally on the self-reporting of the people surveyed, although it is well known that people are often not accurate or honest in reporting what they have done or believed (see George Beam, The Problem with Survey Research, Transaction Publishers, 2014).

For instance, when some individuals report that they have had pubertal suppression treatment, and consequently they became less suicidal than they would been without the treatment, how do we know that this is true?  The research collected no medical records or observational data to confirm this self-reporting.  People who would report that they remained suicidal even after having the treatment would be confessing that their beliefs and behavior were mistaken.  Is it possible that they might be reluctant to admit that (even to themselves)?

Moreover, if you look at the actual raw numbers, they do not provide strong support for the conclusions of the article.  Only 16.9% of the people surveyed reported that they ever wanted pubertal suppression, so it seems that the great majority of transgender people do not believe this treatment would be good for them.  And those who actually received the treatment were only 0.43% of the total!

Of those who reported wanting to have the treatment, only 89 individuals (2.5%) reported that they had actually had the treatment.  And of those 89, 67 (75.3%) reported that they had thought about suicide, while 37 (41.6 %) reported attempting suicide.  41.6% attempting suicide is close to the 40% of transgender people generally who attempt suicide.  It's hard to see that the treatment has done them much good.

Now, it is true that those who reported wanting the treatment but not having it have a higher rate of suicidality than those who wanted it and had it.  But the differences are not very dramatic.  Of the first group, 90.2% report suicidal thoughts, and 51.2% reported attempts at suicide--as compared with 75.5% and 41.5%, respectively, for the second group.

The most striking finding in these numbers is that regardless of whether transgender people report having puberty suppression or not, transgender people as a whole suffer depressingly high rates of suicidal behavior, much higher than for the general population.

There's another problem here.  Those who had puberty suppression treatment between the ages of 9 and 16 were minors.  That means that their parents agreed to this.  Did the parents force or coax their children into doing this?  Weren't these children too young to make a mature decision of this sort on their own?

Why shouldn't the law prohibit children and parents from making this decision until the children are young adults with enough moral and intellectual maturity to make this decision for themselves?

A popular explanation of transgender people is that they feel "trapped in the wrong body."  These people are said to have a personal gender identity that conflicts with the biological sexual identity of their bodies, and so they might seek hormonal and surgical treatment to change the sexual identity of their bodies to conform to their gender identity.  It has now become a standard medical treatment for "gender dysphoria" to provide procedures for changing one's sex to coincide with one's preferred gender, so that men can become women, and women can become men.

I agree with Melissa Moschella (a philosopher at Catholic University of America) who has argued against this "wrong body" narrative as based on a false dualist view of human nature that should be rejected in favor of an "animalist" view. Dualism is false because the body is intrinsic to our personal identity. Animalism rightly sees that our personal sexual identity as male or female is rooted in the biological identity of our body.  We are our animal bodies.  And therefore men are those with male bodies, and women are those with female bodies.  It's impossible to change one's biological sex, because biological sex is impressed on our body and brain early in fetal and neonatal life.

Gender dysphoria, she has argued, is not a medical problem requiring physiological or surgical treatment but a psychological problem requiring psychiatric counseling.  Those with gender dysphoria are suffering from the mental delusion that their mental sexual identity differs from the sexual identity of their body.  So doctors who try to help them undergo a biological sex change are not curing them but rather supporting their delusional disorder.  This explains why although patients often feel better initially after sex-change procedures, later on they often become depressed, anxious, and suicidal.

Moschella makes a comparison with anorexia. The cure for anorexia is not liposuction, although the patient might initially feel better, because the problem is not obesity but the psychological delusion of being too obese.

Moschella has also pointed out the incoherence in the "wrong body" idea.  It is said that a person's gender identity is in the mind not in the body.  But then it is said that the sex of the body must be changed to be in harmony with the true gender identity of the person, which concedes that the sex of the body really is essential for sexual identity.

Moschella seems to be agreeing with Dr. Paul McHugh at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, who was responsible for shutting down the sex-change treatment program that had once been supervised by Dr. John Money.  Money was the one who invented the idea of "gender identity" as different from "sex identity," with the thought that "gender" is a mental or social construction that need not conform to biological nature.  This has supported the claim that while animals have "sex," only humans have "gender."  Moschella's animalism seems to deny the gender/sex dichotomy started by Money.

It should be said, however, that biological nature does sometimes throw up anomalous cases that cannot be clearly identified as male or female--the most obvious case being those who are born as true hermaphrodites, who combine male and female traits.  In response to a question about such cases of intersexuality, Moschella has conceded that these cases show a biological disorder creating confusion about biological sex identity, but gender dysphoria is not an intersexual anomaly of nature like this.

For Moschella to sustain this claim, she would have to refute the "developmental mismatch" theory of gender dysphoria.  According to this theory, in utero the sexual differentiation of the genitals occurs separately and earlier than the sexual differentiation of the brain, so that it is possible for the sexual identity of the body to differ from the sexual identity of the brain.  This is not a dualist theory that denies animalism, because both the body and the brain are biological realities of the human animal.

My argument here is that the central tendency of animal biology is to distinguish the sexual identity of males and females as determined by their complementarity for reproduction.  But while this holds for the most part, there are exceptional cases in nature where the bipolarity of male and female becomes confused.

Some of my other posts on intersexuality and gender dysphoria can be found here, here, and here.

Caster Semenya and the Biological Justification for Sex-Segregated Sports

Over the years, I have written about the case of Caster Semenya--the Olympian and World Champion runner who has been excluded from running as a woman because she is a chromosomal (XY) male with a disorder (or difference) of sexual development.  The International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF)--now named World Athletics--has banned her from running as a woman because she has the elevated testosterone levels of a man that give her an unfair advantage over women in athletic competition.

In her new book--The Race to Be Myself (Norton, 2023)--she says that her case is "about the struggle for universal human rights" (304); and for this reason, she has appealed her case to the European Court of Human Rights.  I have argued that the natural desire for sexual identity is one of the twenty natural desires of evolved human nature.  Semenya identifies herself as a "masculine woman" with the "natural body" of a chromosomal male with some of the bodily traits of a woman--such as a vagina but no penis (1-2, 173, 184, 279, 283, 303). She says that her body is not a man's body.  Nor is it the body of a transgender woman.  Does she have a natural human right to express her sexual identity as a "masculine woman" by competing athletically with other elite women runners?

I have argued that the natural desire for sexual identity is (mostly) binary.  For most of us, our biological sex is clearly male or female.  And for most of us, our gender identity corresponds to our sexual identity as male or female.  But in rare cases, an individual's sex is a biological mosaic of male and female traits.  Semenya is one of those rare exceptional cases, as she herself says.  Is it therefore fair to exclude her--as a chromosomal male with a female gender identity--from competing in women's races?  Should she either compete with other men, or artificially reduce her testosterone levels to the female range, and then compete with women?  Or should she compete in a third category--"intersex"?  There is a tragic conflict of desires here between Semenya's desire to run as a "masculine woman" in women's races and the desire of biologically typical women to compete with other biologically typical women.

Although I lean to the side of the IAAF in this debate, I see good arguments on both sides; and so, I remain undecided.

MORAL DISAGREEMENT AND VARIABLE DESIRES

The fundamental problem here is the moral disagreement that arises from naturally variable desires, and the need for prudence or practical judgment to resolve such cases.  I identified this problem in Darwinian Natural Right (44-49).

If the good is the desirable, and if there is a natural pattern of desires for human beings that includes the twenty natural desires, why do human beings fall into moral conflict?  The pervasiveness of moral disagreement is the one fact most often cited by proponents of moral relativism, who believe there are no natural, universal standards for resolving moral debate.  It does not follow, however, from the fact of moral controversy that there are no natural standards for moral judgment.

There are four sources of moral disagreement: fallible beliefs about circumstances, fallible beliefs about desires, variable circumstances, and variable desires.  In considering variable desires, we see both normal (typical) and abnormal (atypical) variation.  The normal variation arises from age, sexual identity, and individual temperament.  Natural human diversity is such that the young do not have exactly the same desires as the old, men do not have exactly the same desires as women, and individuals with one temperament do not have exactly the same desires as those with another temperament.  

The abnormal variation in desires arises from abnormality in innate dispositions or in social circumstances.  So, for example, while human beings are normally social animals with social desires that incline them to feel the pleasures and pains of those close to them, a few human beings are psychopaths who lack the social desires that normally characterize human beings, and these people are moral strangers who are not open to moral persuasion.

Intersex individuals like Semenya show an atypical variation in their desire for sexual identity.  Semenya's "natural body" (as a biological male with some female traits) inclines her to identify herself as a "masculine woman," who does not fit into the sexually binary categories of men's and women's athletics.

SEMENYA'S AMBIGUOUS SEXUAL IDENTITY

Here's how Semenya describes her sexual identity:

"I have what is called a difference in sex development (DSD), an umbrella term that refers to the varying genetic conditions where an embryo responds in a different way to the hormones that spark the development of internal and external sexual organs.  To put it simply, on the outside I am female, I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus.  I do not menstruate, and my body produces an elevated amount of testosterone, which gives me more typically masculine characteristics than other women, such as a deeper voice and fewer curves.  I cannot carry a child because I don't have a womb; but, contrary to what many people think, I do not produce sperm.  I can't biologically contribute to make new life" (1-2).

Semenya says that at puberty, she developed typically masculine features, and she began fantasizing about girls.  She announced to her friends and family that she was "into girls" (54-55).  Later, she developed romantic feelings for a girl that she married.  At the marriage ceremony, Semenya dressed as a man, while her bride dressed as a woman.  She thought this was right because she had always been very masculine.  She and her wife now have two children by IVF.  She denies that she is a lesbian (193, 212, 248, 269).

Semenya's "difference in sex development" is 5a-Reductase 2 Deficiency, which is caused by a mutation in the gene encoding the enzyme 5a-reductase type 2 (5aR2).  5aR2 catalyzes the transformation of testosterone (T) to 5a-dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which drives the process of the sexual differentiation in the external genitalia during the development of the male fetus in the womb.  5aR2D in chromosomal males arises from deficient 5aR2 activity, resulting in decreased DHT levels.  Consequently, at birth, males will show ambiguous genitals--a micropenis or no penis and what looks like a vagina.  Sometimes, as in Semenya's case, these biological boys will be raised as girls.  But then at puberty, these biological males develop typically masculine features, because pubertal virilization is driven by elevated testosterone rather than DHT.

The circulating testosterone concentrations in Semenya's bloodstream is within the range for typical adult males (from 8 nanomoles per liter [nmol/L] to 25 nmol/L), which is much higher than the range for typical adult females (0.4 nmol/L to 2 nmol/L).  The International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) has said that this has given Semenya an unfair advantage in competing with women.  One can see this just by looking at the World Records for Running.  In every event, from the 100-meter race to the marathon, the world record times for men is lower than for the women.  For example, in Semenya's best event--the 800-meter race--the world record for men is 1:40.91, while the world record for women is 1:53.28.  The IAAF has pointed to scientific studies concluding that the primary reason for this large sex difference in athletic performance is exposure to high levels of endogenous testosterone in males beginning at puberty.  These male advantages associated with higher testosterone are considered the justification for sex-segregated sports (Hunter et al. 2023).  

In 2009, the IAAF told Semenya that she could compete in women's events only if she took estrogen pills that would reduce her testosterone levels to no more than 10 nmol/L for six months.  Notice that this is still far above the range for typical females.  In later years, the IAAF changed its regulations to drop the maximum level of testosterone first to 5 nmol/L and then to 2.5 nmol/L (Semenya, 195, 267, 299).  For over five years--from January of 2010 to August of 2015--Semenya took the estrogen pills.  By June of 2010, her testosterone had dropped below the 10 nmol/L maximum; and she was then free to run in IAAF races.  Once again, she was winning 800m races with good times like 1:59.90 and 1:58.16.  Any time under 2 is a good time for an elite female runner.  But still these times were well above her gold-medal-winning time of 1:55.45 at the Berlin World Championships.

After IAAF lost a court case in 2015 about their testosterone regulations for women, the regulations were dropped, and Semenya stopped taking the estrogen pills.  One year later, Semenya won the gold medal for the 800m at the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics with a time of 1:55.28.  8 women ran in the 800 meters women's final.  Of those 8, 3 of them were chromosomal (XY) males with disorders of sex development (DSD) who identify themselves as women.  Those 3 intersex women have levels of testosterone far higher than normal for women.  These 3 were the winners of the race: Caster Semenya (Gold), Francine Niyonsaba (Silver), and Margaret Nyaira Wambui (Bronze).  One of the women who lost that race--Great Britain's Lynsey Sharp--expressed her frustration in televised interviews with having to compete against intersex individuals with the unfair advantages that come from male testosterone levels.  She and other female runners called for the IAAF to impose new regulations that would ban biologically male DSD athletes from women's events.

In 2018, the IAAF announced new rules:  athletes with DSD competing with women in the 400m, 800m, and 1500m distances would have to lower their testosterone levels down to 5 nmol/L for a period of six months before they were eligible to compete.  Then, in the spring of this year, the IAAF announced new regulations requiring women with DSD to lower their testosterone to 2.5 nmol/L or below for a continuous twenty-four months.  Semenya is contesting those new rules in her appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

THE IAAF'S BEST ARGUMENT

In her book, Semenya gives her version of her dispute with the IAAF as presented in 2019 at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland (Semenya 274-88).  Reading this along with a recent article by scientists supporting the IAAF's position (Hunter et al. 2023) makes clear the best arguments on both sides of this debate.

The best argument for the IAAF is that the biological basis of sex differences in athletic performance show that biological males--including those with DSD--have an unfair advantage in athletic competition with women, and therefore fairness requires that these men be excluded from women's athletic events.

This argument makes three claims.  First, in elite athletic competition, the performance of men tends to be superior to that of women.  Second, a primary reason for this is the sex differences in anatomy and physiology as determined by sex chromosomes and sex hormones, so that adult men on average are typically stronger, more powerful, and faster than women of similar age and training. Third, biological males with DSD (such as 5a-reductase 2 deficiency) will on average have this male advantage over women in athletic competition.  Semenya seems to accept the first two claims, but she rejects the third one.

The claim of male athletic superiority is easily supported by glancing at the world records for athletics.  Consider just the racing events, for instance, in which all of the world record times for men are faster than those for women.  In the 800m race, the world record for men is 1:40.91, set by David Rudisha running for Kenya at the 2012 Olympic Games.  The record for women is 1:53.28, set by Jarmila Kratochvilova running for Czechoslovakia at the Munich World Championships in 1983.  In the Marathon, the world records were set just two months ago.  The men's record is 2:00:35, set by Kelvin Kiptum running for Kenya at the Chicago Marathon.  The women's record is 2:11:53, set by Tigst Assefa running for Ethiopia at the Berlin Marathon.

One good criticism of this kind of evidence is that what looks like a male superiority in biological ability is really only a consequence of the differences in the cultural circumstances of men and women.  For a long time, women have been discouraged from participating in athletic activity.  In 1896, at the first Olympic Games in the modern era (in Athens, Greece), no women were allowed to compete.  In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon as an officially registered competitor.  In 1984, the first women's Olympic marathon was held in Los Angeles.  It was not until 2021, that there were similar numbers of women and men at the summer Olympics in Tokyo.  So, historically, women have had much less time and opportunity to develop their athletic skills than the men have.

In 1992, the journal Nature published an article by two biologists with the title "Will Women Soon Outrun Men?" (Whipp and Ward 1992).  They pointed out that over the previous century, both men and women were improving their world record times in racing, but the rate of improvement for women was double that for men.  The predicted that if these trends continued into the future, the world record times for women in the marathon would be the same or better than those for the men by 1998.  They also predicted that the records in all other racing events would be no different for men and women by the middle of the 21st century.

This has not happened, however, because beginning sometime after about 1985, the rate of improvement in women's running times began to slow and level out, so that there has been no intersection with the times for men.  In all of the running events, the gap between men's and women's world records is narrower than it has even been, but it's still there.

The best explanation for this continuing performance gap, according to the second claim of the IAAF, is that this shows biological sex differences:

"Sex differences in athletic performance that involve strength, power, and/or endurance are sizable and determined by biological differences between males and females.  Adult men ov average are stronger, more powerful, and faster over short and long distances than women of similar age and training status.  The sex differences emerge with the onset of puberty, coinciding with the increase in endogenous sex hormones, in particular testosterone in males . . . . The sex differences in the world records and best performances of many athletic events that rely on endurance and muscular power ranges from 10% to 30%. . . . The largest sex differences are apparent for sports and events relying more on muscular power such as in weightlifting, jumping events, and short distance swimming. . . ." (Hunter et al. 2023: 2332-33).

On the other hand, sports that rely less on muscular power such as archery and shooting show minimal sex differences in performance.

But even if we agree with all this--that typically biological males tend on average to have an advantage in athletic competition over typically biological females--it's not clear that this must hold true for atypically biological males with DSD like Semenya.

 

SEMENYA'S BEST ARGUMENT

Consider what Semenya says here:

". . . The IAAF's position was that women with high testosterone levels had an unfair advantage equal to the advantage that male athletes had over female athletes.  On its face, this is ridiculous.  We are not men.  I am a great runner, and I train with men, some of whom I can maybe give a hard time to on my best day, just like any other elite female athlete could, but I have never been able to even approach an elite male runner's times.  Likewise, there are plenty of men who normal 'male' testosterone levels whose only hope of beating a female athlete with 'female' levels is in their dreams" (238).

In fact, Semenya observes: "The IAAF knew that not one woman with a confirmed DSD diagnosis had ever even approached the running times of male elite runners" (269).  If biological males with DSD have the same advantage as normal males over women in athletic competition, then why don't runners like Semenya achieve the same running times as elite male runners?  Since Semenya's running times are within the range of other elite female runners, that suggests that she does not have an unfair male advantage over her competitors.

To counter this argument from Semenya, some IAAF officials have accused her of cheating by running slower than what she is capable of, thus hiding the fact that she has the same male advantage as other elite male runners (Semenya 281-83).  But this is implausible.  Throughout her running career, Semenya's great ambition has been to break the world record time for the 800m in the women's event, but she has never done that.  If she was easily capable of breaking this record, why would she slow herself down and fall short of the record?

There is one alternative explanation.  Most men with normal male testosterone levels cannot run faster than elite female runners; and even most good male runners who can run as fast as elite women cannot run as fast as elite male runners.  Is Semenya a good male runner who is good enough to compete with elite female runners, thus showing his male advantage, but not good enough to compete with elite male runners?  If so, could this be true for other "46 XY males with DSD"?

I don't have good answers to those questions.

AN "INTERSEX" OLYMPICS?

In any case, we should consider that one way out of this debate would be to create a third category for sexually segregated athletic competition--"intersex" events in which atypicaly males/females could compete against one another.  This would be similar to what is done now with the Paralympic Games--a highly successful event for athletes with disabilities.

Kenya's Margaret Wambui--the biological male with DSD who won the bronze medal in the 2016 Olympic 800m event when Semenya won the gold--has proposed this.  But Semenya rejects it.

REFERENCES

Hunter, Sandra K., et al. 2023. "The Biological Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance: Consensus Statement for the American College of Sports Medicine." Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 55: 2328-2360.

Semenya, Caster. 2023. The Race To Be Myself: A Memoir.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Company.

Whipp, Brian J., and Susan A. Ward. 1992. "Will Women Soon Outrun Men?" Nature 355 (January 2): 25.

The Evidence Proves That the SARS2 Virus Leaked from the Wuhan Lab: The New Report from the House Foreign Affairs Committee

In May, I wrote a post arguing that the relevant evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally leaked out of Zhengli-Li Shi's laboratory in Wuhan, and that this virus was probably created by her genetic manipulation of viral material for "gain-of-function"--altering a virus to increase its pathogenicity for human beings.  I then asked whether we should blame Francis Bacon for this, because he had proposed the modern scientific project for mastering nature that has supported the research done in laboratories like those at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Now we have a new assessment of the evidence sustaining the lab leak theory from a report (83 pages long) released today that was written by the minority staff of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee under the direction of the ranking Republican member Michael McCaul.  This report is actually an addendum to a previous report issued at the end of September 2020.

Their first general conclusion is clear--that the preponderance of the evidence proves that the SARS2 virus leaked from the Wuhan lab.  Their second general conclusion is ambiguous--in their summary, they leave open the question of whether the virus originated in the wild or was the result of genetic manipulation, but in the text of the paper, the evidence weighs on the side of genetic manipulation.

Compared with what I presented in my previous post, this report adds some new evidence and it presents a clear chronology of events.  For me, six points were especially prominent.

First, the report shows that on September 12, 2019, the WIV's online, public database of samples and virus sequences was taken offline between 2:00 am and 3:00 am local time.  This is the data that would have identified the appearance of the SARS2 virus in the WIV's lab.  The WIV and the Chinese government have refused to allow investigators, such as those from the World Health Organization, to see this data.  So it is likely that the virus was in the lab by early September of 2019, which was four months before the Chinese government announced its lockdown of Wuhan on January 23, 2020!

Second, the report indicates that the Military World Games (the Olympics for military athletes) opened in Wuhan on October 18, 2019, with over 9,000 athletes from 109 countries.  Some of these athletes became sick--coughs, fever, chills, diarrhea--during the games and after they returned to their home countries.  At least four countries that sent athletes to the games--Italy, Brazil, Sweden, and France--have confirmed the appearance within their borders of COVID-19 cases in November and December of 2019.  So this suggests that the games in Wuhan became a super-spreader event that spread the virus around the globe many months before the pandemic was publicly recognized.  This is a crucial point because it suggests that the pandemic could have been avoided if the spread of the virus out of Wuhan in the fall of 2019 had been stopped by closing the borders of Wuhan.

Third, satellite imagery of Wuhan in September and October of 2019 show a big increase in the number of people parking at hospitals near the WIV lab.  These hospitals are also close to the lines of the Wuhan Metro.  This indicates how researchers in the lab infected with the virus carried it out into the city.

Fourth, there is plenty of evidence that the Chinese Community Party and scientists affiliated with the WIV have tried to hide the kind of research being done there.  To cite just one brazen example of lying, in an interview with The New York Times in June, Shi (the top researcher at WIV) said: "My lab has never conducted or cooperated in conducting GOF [gain-of-function] experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses."  This contradicts her own published research where she reports creating "chimeric viruses" in her lab, which I indicated in my previous post, and which is even indicated in the article on her interview.

Fifth, although critics of the lab-leak theory have repeatedly claimed that the virus does not show any of the telltale signs of genetic manipulation, this ignores the fact that Ralph Baric (a frequent collaborator with Shi) has published research in which he reports doing genetic manipulation with a "no-see-um" method, so that genetically manipulated viruses were, in Baric's words, "indistinguishable from wild type," so that there was no way to clearly identify them as artificially created.

Sixth, scientists studying how SARS2 binds to the ACE2 (the entry point on the surface of animal cells for coronarviruses) concluded that "SARS-CoV-2 is uniquely adapted to infect humans, raising important questions as to whether it arose in nature by a rare chance event or whether its origins might lie elsewhere."  A virus that is uniquely well-adapted to humans and that appears suddenly without any evolutionary precursors is more likely artificial than natural.

If the general public learns that the SARS2 virus did indeed leak from the Wuhan lab and was perhaps even created artificially in that lab, will people conclude that we cannot trust scientists to protect us from risky research that has killed over four million people and shut down much of the world economy?  Will public outrage damage the whole modern scientific project initiated by Bacon?

If John Locke was right, and we have a natural right to punish those who harm "our life, health, liberty, and property," then surely we have the right to punish those scientists who release--even if only by negligence--dangerous viruses that threaten our lives and our health.  That should be part of our behavioral immune system, which should include holding those scientists legally liable for their research.  This congressional report proposes some measures for doing that.

The Natural Desire for Sexual Identity Is (Mostly) Binary

 

                                            The Binary Sexual Reality of Two Kinds of Gametes

I have argued that the natural desire for sexual identity as either male or female is one of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  But even as I stress the dualism of sexual identity as male or female as the biological central tendency of our human nature, I recognize the variation from this strict bipolarity--such as true hermaphrodites who combine both sexes, other kinds of intersexual people, and people who are transgender in crossing from one sex to another.  

The natural desire for sexual identity is mostly binary.  For most of us, our biological sex is clearly male or female.  And for most of us, our gender identity corresponds to our sexual identity as male or female.  But in rare cases, an individual's sex is a biological mosaic of male and female traits.  And in some cases, an individual's gender identity diverges from his or her biological sexual identity.  I have written about this here, here, here, and here.

I was recently prompted to think more about this as I read an article in Skeptical Inquirer by Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja on "The Ideological Subversion of Biology."  They consider six examples of how "progressive social justice" denies the truths of biology.  The first example is the popular claim that "sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum."  They reject this:

"This statement . . . is wrong because nearly every human on earth falls into one of two distinct categories.  Your biological sex is determined simply by whether your body is designed to make large, immobile gametes (eggs, characterizing females) or very small and mobile gametes (sperm, characterizing males).  Even in plants we see the same dichotomy, with pollen producing the tiny sperm and ovules carrying the large eggs.  The size difference can be huge: a human egg, for instance, has ten million times the volume of a single sperm.  And each gamete is associated with a complex reproductive apparatus that produces it.  It is the bearers of these two reproductive systems that biologists recognize as 'the sexes.'

"Because no other types of gametes exist in animals or vascular plants, and we see no intermediate gametes, there is no third sex. . . ." (35).

Although I generally agree with everything they say, I would emphasize the significance of the adverb in the first sentence: "nearly every human on earth falls into one of two distinct categories."  Coyne and Maroja admit that a few human beings cannot be clearly identified as either male or female.  In some previous posts, I have commented on Anne Fausto-Sterling's claim that there are at least five human sexes.  In addition to males and females, there are three other sexes.  True hermaphrodites ("herms") have both male chromosomes (XY) and female chromosomes (XX); and consequently, they have can have one testis and one ovary, or a fusion into an ovotestis, and they might have a vagina with a large clitoris that at puberty grows to the size of a penis.  Female pseudohermaphrodites ("ferms") have ovaries and female chromosomes (XX), but they might have beards, what looks like a penis, and other apparently masculine traits.  Male pseudohermaphrodites ("merms") have testes and male chromosomes (XY), but they might have a vagina, a clitoris, and breasts.  Merms and ferms are intersexual individuals whose sexual development has deviated in some way from that of a typical male or typical female.  This includes various disorders of sexual development that create anomalies in the sex chromosomes, the gonads, the reproductive ducts, and the genitalia.  For example, Caster Semenya of South Africa, who won the 800 meters race for women at the Rio Olympics in 2016, is probably a chromosomal male (46 XY) who was born with sexually ambiguous sex organs, and who was raised as a girl, despite being biologically male.

While Coyne and Maroja recognize these anomalous cases of confused sexual identity, they deny that these represent "other sexes."  They insist that there can only be two sexes--male and female--because these are the two reproductive systems designed by evolutionary natural selection.  The male reproductive system contributes sperm to the reproductive process, while the female reproductive system contributes eggs.

One can see this in hermaphrodites, they argue.  Most hermaphrodites are infertile.  But in those few cases where hermaphrodites are fertile, they must be fertile as a male (Parvin 1982) or as a female (Schoenhaus et al. 2008).  In the one case, a phenotypically male fertile hermaphrodite fathered a child by impregnating a woman with his sperm.  Remarkably, blood tests showed that 81 per cent of his cells were 46 XX, and 19 per cent were 46 XY.  He was a biological chimera who had arisen from the fusion of an XX zygote and a XY zygote.  In the second case, a phenotypically female hermaphrodite gave birth to a child after being impregnated by a man.  Blood tests showed that 96 per cent of her cells were 46 XY, and 4 per cent were 46 XX.  She was probably a biological mosaic arising from a mutation in one zygote.

That human beings must be fertile either as a male or as a female proves that male and female are the only sexes, Coyne and Maroja suggest, because reproduction is the only natural function of sex.

But as I have argued in my posts on animal homosexuality, sex has other natural functions beyond reproduction.  Pair-bonding, for example.  Heterosexual and homosexual couples have a natural desire for sexual bonding even when they are infertile.  And while sexual pair-bonding often promotes reproduction and parental care of offspring, it can be a naturally desirable good in itself.

REFERENCES

Coyne, Jerry A., and Luana S. Maroja. 2023. "The Ideological Subversion of Biology." Skeptical Inquirer 47 (July/August): 34-47.

Parvin, Simon D. 1982. "Ovulation in a Cytogenetically Proved Phenotypically Male Fertile Hermaphrodite." British Journal of Surgery 69: 279-80.

Schoenhaus, Samantha A., Scott E. Lentz, Peter Saber, Malcolm Munro, and Seth Kivnick. 2008. Fertility and Sterility 90 (November): 2016.e9.