Emma Hilton Profile picture
Sep 20, 2020 13 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Three years ago, the Conservative government launched a consultation on a somewhat esoteric piece of legislation concerning the rights of trans people to alter their birth certificate and legal sex.
The proposed changes included ‘self ID’, a radical departure from the current system of careful assessment and mindful transition for those suffering dysphoria.
Self ID would have allowed acquisition of legal sex based on no more than a sworn declaration. But, in reality, the sworn declaration was lip service.
The proposed changes would have, de facto, removed, or at least critically compromised, protections afforded by equality legislation on the basis of sex.
‘I am a woman’ would become sufficient to permit access to legally-protected female spaces.
Three years ago, women realised this might be a problem. Many had seen it coming for a long time, but the potential impact of these legislative changes raised an army.
Women said ‘No.’

Not just famous women expert in the politics and theory of gender, but women who had gone about their lives without even realising that these protections apply to themselves each and every day.
Women took to the streets, handed out thousands of leaflets and wrote thousands of letters, raised awareness, lobbied their government representatives, dissected the legal ramifications.
Today, following weeks of leaks and rumours, it seems that Self ID has been scrapped as a mechanism to acquiring the opposite legal sex.

For me, it has been too bitter a fight to evoke much positive emotion.
The three years of campaigning and lobbying has created a climate among service providers such that ‘I am a woman’ is indeed sufficient to permit access to legally-protected female spaces.
I hope this newly-invigorated movement of women, connected in ways unimaginable a few years ago, can stay the course to ensure equality legislation is not only secured but reinforced.
The prison service has reviewed its position on the transfer of transwomen to the female estate. Sporting federations are beginning to revisit their regulations for the female category.
Sex shouldn’t matter half as much as it does, but there are, in my opinion, a small number of situations where it will always matter, and where female protections are necessary.

Let’s see this through.

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More from @FondOfBeetles

Dec 16
Hello @michaelshermer

Please see the following links to various papers and commentaries I and others have published on sports categories.

Please follow me (obvs 😂), @TLexercise @Scienceofsport @runthinkwrite @cathydevine56 @BrowngaGreg @MaryOConnorMD @DrMJoyner and associated scientists for academic work.

Guys, add your papers below please.
Where it all started (academically): “the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed.”

There are a couple of letter responses linked to this too.

link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Tommy @TLexercise has worked with transgender women with an eye specifically on sports.

academic.oup.com/jcem/article/1…

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jo…
Read 6 tweets
Dec 8
Let’s have a think what hormone categories looks like. And let’s assume that @neiltyson is considering a high/low T category. This has also been proposed by @AliceDreger

Thanks for the shoutout, Colin @SwipeWright
The proposal only works if you don’t deny evolution and sexual selection. Remarkably, there are academics who argue there is no biological basis for why males run faster than females. While it is plausible ongoing underinvestment in female sport means female athletes have not yet reached their full potential, it is frankly ridiculous to think this can explain the entirety of the performance gap.

See Sheree Bekker et al for more details on why, because one time, this one female figure skater won a medal, Usain Bolt should be allowed to race against females.
The proposal only makes sense if we recognise that the action of T on a body gives advantage in sport. This is by no means universally-accepted. Many humanities types argue T is not a key part of sports performance, citing males with low T and people registered as female with high T. Even though both phenomena are explicable by factors like illness, doping and male DSDs, still this argument persists.

See Veronica Ivy, Katrina Karkazis et al for why we should pretend that the stupidly high prevalence of weightlifting males with low T is not because they have just finished an off-period jacking up.
Read 17 tweets
Nov 13
Why male advantage in sport is not a social construct: height.

Height is a key difference between males and females. What is nature v nurture? What does that mean for sport?Image
Bigger skeletons are most obviously driven by longer bone growth. Key bones like those in your thigh (“long bones”) grow from their end to get longer, making you taller. Image
The site of bone lengthening is called the “epiphyseal plate” or “growth plate”. Here, cells divide/enlarge, making new tissue that pushes the bone ends apart. This tissue calcifies and is replaced by bone, leading to lengthwise growth. Image
Read 21 tweets
Nov 11
Ok, my charity wears off.

Bekker’s presentation of the “Hilton and Lundberg” argument is nonsense.

At no point have either of us, or anyone else we work with, reduced male advantage to simply muscle mass/strength. @TLexercise @Scienceofsport Image
In the contrary, we have consistently argued that male advantage stems from many physical then functional outcomes of male development.

We spent hours (actually days 😂) creating this graphic, trying to highlight key areas of physicality that underpin male advantage.

HowTF is this reduced to “it’s all muscle”?Image
In our original paper, we had a table upfront, highlighting (in a less pleasing presentation) the same type of metrics. Image
Read 7 tweets
Nov 11
I’m going to put my charitable hat on, and try to elucidate - maybe even, as good practice, steelman - an opposition argument.

Specifically, this one: Image
Let’s set a concrete example: the 10 second barrier (100m sprint).

Wiki - allowing for small errors - tells me that around 200 male sprinters have broken it. We know, of course, that no female sprinter has been close (Flo Jo record 10.49s).
For the following, I’m going to ignore the premise that humans might be close to biomechanical limits over a 100m sprint. It’s just an illustration.

If we follow world record progressions, we see trends (not just in sprinting, the graph below is from a swimming event). Image
Read 18 tweets
Nov 4
As the latest on Olympic boxer Imane Khelif is reported, a diagnosis of 5ARD is almost certain. I and others first raised the likelihood of this DSD a few months ago.

Understanding how the developmental biology of DSDs interacts with sports categorisation is crucial.
I spoke about this with Andrew Gold during the competition:

And I recently gave a talk at a meeting, on DSDs, male advantage and sports categorisation. I will add some slides below.
Read 15 tweets

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