Spikygrasspod

The way I read it, it's meant to reveal the silliness and unfairness of the testosterone rule. The sports organisations seemingly can't decide if their categories are about gender identities or bodies. They're letting in male people who identify as women, only if they meet some arbitrary rule that in no way accounts for the differences between male and female bodies. It should be clear that allowing males with feminine gender identities to compete with women is unfair because of the systematic average advantage of males (which is barely touched by testosterone rules), but a lot of people seem to suppress their knowledge of sex differences when prompted to focus on gender identity, so the question is meant to probe whether people really think that low testosterone equalises male advantage and makes it fair for males to compete alongside female athletes. It doesn't.

You don't need formal education in sports to get an inkling of the differences between male and female bodies. If you're interested in learning a tiny bit about female physiology I can recommend Stacy Simms' Ted talk "women are not small men" about women's training needs. Or you could read Caroline Criado-Perez's book Invisible Women--in particular the chapter on sports and medical research (or rather, the lack thereof) on women.

I mean, maybe, theoretically you could make some rules to totally negate the average advantage of males against females in sports. But then you have another problem. Even though women perform worse at, say, weightlifting than men (with some exceptions), we recognise excellence in women's weightlifting by comparing them to other women. Or take boxing. While the heavyweight champions may be the best, we still recognise excellence in the lightweight categories, too. But a man who competes at the same level as the top female athletes is not an excellent sportswoman, he's a less excellent sportsman. For example, women have on average 8 or 10 percent more bodyfat than men, and that holds for athletes as well as mere mortals. It's absolutely necessary from a health perspective, but an athletic disadvantage because it decreases the power to weight ratio, which is crucial for speed and power. Now imagine we make weight classes based on bodyfat percentage. If your average elite male sprinter has, say, 7% bodyfat and the average female elite sprinter has 14% (just guessing, doesn't matter exactly), what would you make of a male sprinter who has 14% bodyfat and competes with the women? Would he be an example of excellence in that category (let's call it the 14% category)? Or is he a non-elite sprinter? I'm going to say it's the latter. Same for all the other aspects of male advantage. If you found a shorter, weaker, fatter male athlete with lower upper body strength, thinner bones, more flexible ligaments etc... would you say 'here's an example of excellence amongst women-and-some-men!' ? Personally, I don't think so. You'd see at least some excellent women (by which I mean they're the top of that category) being displaced by non-excellent men.