I’ve been thinking about the discussion surrounding women’s boxing and the Olympics and I felt kind of crazy. I kept thinking, “Why do educated people think Imane is female? Where did Imane’s Y chromosome come from? Why is this even debatable?”
So I went online and started reading a few things about sexual development disorders. I then went to my bookshelf and reviewed a couple books on this subject. Then I went to social media to see what these authors were saying about this controversy.
Still, I don’t know how anyone considered Imane to be female.
From what I read, the situation of someone like Imane is that they are conceived when a sperm with a Y chromosome fertilizes an egg. However, one of two things or a combination of both happens; there is an underproduction of testosterone, and/or the receptors are desensitized to testosterone.
What ends up happening is they develop incorrectly and upon birth, they have what appears to be female genitalia and are raised as such. But there are internal developmental differences that nobody would know. Then as they hit puberty they develop further into the appearance of men. Maybe the underdeveloped testicles drop, a version of a penis may even develop, and they do not generally develop breasts.
This development gives them, to one extent or another, male attributes. Why? Because they have the chromosomal makeup of a man. They are, in a sexual sense, underdeveloped men.
This is what we see with Imane. We also know that the other boxing federations disqualified Imane for having a Y chromosome. Our eyes plainly tell us that Imane isn’t a typical female by Imane’s masculine face and posture.
I kept thinking about my experience with my wife’s pregnancies and how we determined the gender of our kids. The blood test looks for the chromosomal makeup of the child whose blood is already circulating throughout the mother. If there are only XXs, then you’re having a girl. If you find an XY in the mother’s blood, then you’re having a boy.
If Imane was conceived and born in the US today, we would likely already know that there is something different going on as her parents would have expected a boy based on blood tests. That likely would have led to investigations and scans which would have revealed the anomaly and changed their outlook.
Then, I saw that Richard Dawkins complained about his Facebook account being deleted shortly after saying “Imane Khalif (XY undisputed) should not fight women in Olympics.” (He later apologized for the assumption around the deletion, but not his assessment of Imane and inclusion in women’s boxing.)
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist. I would think he is in a position to understand such matters.
So still, I had no clue why anyone thinks that Imane is female and/or should fight women in any sporting arena.
I kept thinking, “What don’t I understand? What am I missing?”
Scholasticism
This is what I think is happening.
The discussions reminded me of something psychoanalyst Carl Jung called ‘scholasticism’. Scholasticism is a type of mental gymnastics as a means to exercise thought which often served as a precursor to true scientific understanding of reality. Much of scientific thinking developed this way.
Classic arguments like Thomas Aquinas debating how many angels could fit on the head of a needle resulted not in actual numbers of angels, but in mental pathways which guided us towards the ways to argue abstractly that now produce scientific realities.
It’s like getting in the gym with a bunch of friends and comparing maximum bench press and squats. The actions themselves are arbitrary but they can prepare you for real world activities in that you gain strength applicable to daily tasks, sports, and even war.
That’s how a lot of these discussions felt to me. It was more like the people I talked to were exercising their brains more so than searching for a truth which could be applied to reality. It was more like choosing a team and finding ways to argue for that side than a search for truth.
For people with no skin in the game, it doesn’t really matter. If you aren’t a female sports competitor or you don’t have daughters or wives, then it is easy to bandy about these types of arguments. You don’t pay any price for being wrong. Well, not yet.
Category Error
Another aspect of the arguments was a category error. The manner in which the category of male/female was being discussed included talks about levels of testosterone during and leading up to the competition. It was as if the male/female dichotomy could be determined by testosterone levels only. I know why this can seem reasonable.
The idea is that testosterone levels can lead to different body types and different amounts of muscle.
Discussions go this way because we are discussing fairness in sports which is directly tied to the results of hormones which lead to physical differences in the sexes. But the male/female binary is not based solely on testosterone levels.
Gender and sex are categories of sexual reproductive potential and/or purpose. This is why my children, who cannot yet produce eggs or sperm, are already considered either male or female. They have the potential in the future for these reproductive capacities.
That’s why women who have had a hysterectomy or men who have had a vasectomy are still female and male. Their reproductive purpose was to create eggs and sperm.
Seeing potential is what separates human thinking from the rest of the animal kingdom. By talking about testosterone levels, it changes the male/female category from sexual reproductive potential to a performance category based on hormonal levels.
Men and women have different categories in sport because of their different reproductive potentials, not just their different levels of hormones. The categories produce immense historical, cultural, and social differences beyond just the material and physiological differences that these discussions are pretending they are.
None of this is to say that we should treat any of the people in these categories poorly nor does it excuse anyone harassing them. All humans should be treated with dignity based on their humanity regardless of their developmental differences.
But we have to be discerning. There will always be situations where some people fall outside of a category. That is unavoidable if we have any categories. Categories define and differentiate.
In this case, categories provide fairness, safety, and opportunity to half of the human population that just a few decades ago were excluded. Let’s make sure we’re not moving backwards. Let’s protect our daughters, wives, and mothers. That’s our job.