Trans-Gender Nonsense

Silly Billies

In the mad world of secular humanism, autonomy is a demand.  "I am who I am" has matured and developed in "I am whom I identify as".  It represents the extremity of self-worship or will-worship.  The claims and refutations of the ideology known as trans-genderism are the front line of the argument.   But ideology is not necessarily reality--not by a long shot.

An article has appeared in Quillette  entitled "A Victory for Female Athletes Everywhere".  It presents the scientific foundation for the decisions recently taken with respect of elite female runners.  These decisions have defined "female athlete" for the purposes of sport.  These decisions have set the benchmarks.  Will they be acknowledge or accepted?  Well, the hard truth is that if they are not, it is the end of women's sport.

 The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) this week upheld the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) regulations governing eligibility for the women’s category in international elite athletics competition. In effect, CAS decided the question “who is a woman” for purposes of elite sport. And it ratified the IAAF’s preferred answer: A woman in sport is anyone whose legal identity is female—whether they personally identify as such or not—and who has testosterone (T) levels in the female range. That may seem like a mere technical ruling. But as I’ll explain in this article, the ramifications are profound for female athletics everywhere—a cause that has been central to my life and to the lives of millions of girls and women worldwide.  [Doriane Lambelet Coleman]

Why is this such a critical decision?
  Well, simply, because it faces the truth.  Men and women are different--substantially so.  Men may want to identify as females and partake in women's sports all they may like, but the reality is they would have a huge natural advantage that cannot be ignored.

The female range for testosterone is categorically different from the male range. In general, males have 10 to 30 times more T than females. Most females, including most elite female athletes, have T levels in the range of 0.5 to 1.5 nanomoles per liter (nmol/L). For men, typical values are 10 to 35 nmol/L. The reason there is a gap, with no overlap between the ranges, is that beginning in puberty, the testes produce a lot more T than ovaries and adrenal glands combined. And so the IAAF maximum of 5 nmol/L for women has been set, generously, to reflect the upper bound of T levels that can be produced even by polycystic ovaries.

No single tool is perfect for these purposes, but testosterone comes pretty close. Sport already tests for T levels as part of standard anti-doping controls, and it is much less intrusive than other diagnostic techniques used to determine sex. Most importantly, it’s the best single physiological marker for sport’s purposes. That’s because the primary reason for the sex differences in the physical attributes that contribute to elite athletic performance is exposure to much higher levels of testosterone during male pubertal growth. Those physical attributes include power generation, aerobic power, body composition and fuel utilization. Compared to females, males have greater lean body mass (more skeletal muscle and less fat), larger hearts (both in absolute terms and scaled to lean body mass), higher cardiac outputs, larger hemoglobin mass, larger VO2 max (i.e. a person’s ability to take in oxygen), greater glycogen utilization, and higher anaerobic capacity.

Without an eligibility rule based in sex-linked traits, we wouldn’t see female bodies on any podium.  Equally important, without such an eligibility rule, it’s unlikely that societies could continue legally to sustain separate girls and women’s only sport. The set-aside is premised on inherent biological differences between the sexes. If that basis were eliminated, it’s unclear how the classification would pass muster under standard legal anti-discrimination analysis.

Males and females are distinctly, physically different.  The differences give males a physical advantage in athletics and many other sports.  This has been accepted for aeons.  But not in our day.  We have achieved a higher truth where a person can be whatever he or she wants to be.  It's their right to "identify" however they choose. 

So it has finally come down to this.  Choose you this day whom you will serve.  Are we to bow down to the  will worship of the Silly Billies, or the truth?