Jon Pike Profile picture
Jul 31, 2024 18 tweets 3 min read Read on X
This threatening and distracting post is, itself, unethical (in my view). Here's why I think this:
... The @DZFOOTBALLDZ account agrees, in another post, that the athlete in question has a condition like Caster Semenya. That condition is a male, 46XY DSD: 5alpha Reductase Deficiency. We have known that this is the condition, since the World Athletics regulations ...
... and the testing of those regulations in the Court of Arbitration of Sport in 2019. You can read the judgment here: ...tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user…
... this confirms that athletes like Semenya are karyotypically male. That is, they have male chromosomes. But this might not be the point if we are interested in phenotype. In sport, we are interested in whether athletes have specifically *male advantage* ...
... this depends largely but not wholly on male puberty and the affects of circulating testosterone. If someone's body is completely immune to androgenisation (CAIS cases), then there is, arguably, no male advanatage at all, and these cases are, ethically, quite hard. ...
... but if @DZFOOTBALLDZ are correct, and the condition in question is 46XY 5ARD, ('like Semenya') then this is not a tricky ethical problem.

What is in question is *whether the athlete in question has male advantage* Let's keep our eye on the ball...
... What *doesn't* count for resolving this question?

Your preferred pronouns
How you dress
How you were brought up
What it says on your passport
Your 'legal' sex
Whether you are, or are seen as 'trans' or not.
Your 'race' or ethnicity.
How your genitals look
...
... People on all sides should remember this: I *don't care* how the athlete in question was dressed in their childhood, or how they dress now.

What matters is, as CAS said in 2019, "immutable biological characteristics". The regulations concern ...
... "a group of individuals who have certain immutable biological characteristics (namely a 46 XY DSD coupled with a material androgenising effect arising from that condition)" ...
... and this is important because "It is human biology, not legal status or gender identity, that ultimately determines which individuals possess the physical traits which give rise to that insuperable advantage, and which do not." ...
... We know, for certain, that the possession of the following characteristics is jointly sufficient for an athlete to be biologically male:
i) XY chromosomes
ii) the existence of testes (producing small motile gametes)
iii) the existence of male-typical levels of ...
...testosterone and
iv) sensitivity towards those levels of testosterone such that they drive physiological change through puberty.
Some people have speculated about PCOS and CAIS in these cases.
PCOS cases fail, obviously, on i) and ii).
CAIS cases fail on iv). ...
... But 5ARD cases, covered by the 2018 regulations and meet all four of these criteria.

The standard story about such athletes is just false. In referring to Semenya as a female athlete with abnormally high testosterone levels, the story has barely a nodding acquaintance ...
... with the truth. Semenya is, indeed, legally female. But Semenya is biologically male. As well as being biologically male, CS have normal levels of testosterone, which has had an androgenising effect. (andros = man, genesis = becoming) ...
... (By the way. I think the World Athletics rules are terrible: there should have been no route into female competition from reducing testosterone).

Let's go back to the rational for separate female competition: Male physiological advantage. ...
... again, this is what justifies female sport both in terms of fairness and safety. Male advantage justifies the *existence* of female sport, and it gives the *conditions of eligibility* for the female category - it must exclude male advantage. ...
... Allowing male advantage into female sport unquestionably undermines both fairness and, where appropriate, safety. And this is precisely what the @IOCmedia is licencing.
This is unethical.
I do not believe that female boxers at the Paris games can have given their ...
... fully informed, rational consent to such match ups. I also believe that the post I'm quoting places unreasonable pressure on those boxers.
It is, for those reasons, deeply unethical.

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More from @runthinkwrite

Jan 18
There are a couple of features of this extraordinary statement that I'd like to unpick ...
unison.org.uk/news/article/2…
"Unison stands by its beliefs". Unison is a trade union with 1.3m members. It's a collective institution. Beliefs are propositions affirmed, held to be true, by an agent - a human being. I have beliefs and so do you, but there's a problem with *any* claim about a collective agent having beliefs. There isn't a collective brain that affirms a proposition. Sometimes this isn't a big problem. It makes sense - roughly - to say that Unison opposes the privatisation of the NHS, but in fact this means that the current leadership, and the majority of the members have a belief that the privatisation of the NHS is a bad idea. Unison has *policy* on this, and the vast majority of its members will, we can predict, affirm the belief 'privatising the NHS is a bad idea' ...
But Unison, strictly, doesn't have beliefs. So whose beliefs are we talking about? Obviously, the person or people who wrote this statement. Probably, the current leadership coterie. They, individually, have beliefs. And they are presenting their beliefs as if they were held by the (non-existent) collective brain of Unison. This is a weird metaphysical version of what Trotskyists (following Trotsky in 1904) like to call 'substitutionism' ...
Read 8 tweets
Oct 19, 2025
Neither *safety* nor *fairness* can be met by 'case-by-case' inclusion of males in the female category, but in different ways. Both values need to be explained before we do the analysis, so here we go:
... Absolute safety is not really available to us in any sport since sport is a matter of trying to do difficult things. Difficult actions involve risks. So the criterion we need is not 'safety' but *informed consent to foreseeable risk* ...
... If you allow any male into female sport you alter the risk matrix in a way that is unusual and unexpected. Even a male who 'passes' has different and unfamiliar physical characteristics to female athletes ...
Read 11 tweets
Oct 13, 2025
How justified are age bands in sport? Highly justified, they preserve fairness and make sport inclusive. There are no serious arguments against them. ...
... No one serious would say 'well, we should be flexible about age bands, so as not to upset anyone. And perhaps we need to consider scrapping age bands altogether.'
... Here are a couple of unserious but interesting arguments.

(i) 'moving from 20 years and 364 days to 21 years old is not a magical change which makes you stronger and faster overnight. So the under-21 rule is arbitrary' ...
Read 7 tweets
Sep 30, 2025
More good news, that deserves a bit of comment. The rules that established male puberty as a cut off for entry into the female category, were, at the time (2022-4) a largely welcome step towards fairness in sport. They marked a significant break with the ideological claim that TWAW...
... and effectively said: 'No, the science counts more than identity claims.' Some of those who pushed for these policies at the time were brave, pushing against the influence of Stonewall and other pressure groups in NGBs. ...
... I argued, at the time, that the idea that these created an incentive toward puberty blockers was right, but it was a social and ethical problem, not just a sports one. ...
Read 10 tweets
Aug 24, 2025
There are far more important things wrong with that piece by Dr Kennedy, but I know my place, so I'll just do a thread on this one, since Kennedy has a PhD in Philosophy, apparently ... Image
Oh dear, where to start? Maybe with (1) a *bog standard* debate in the philosophy of equality about affirmative action or positive discrimination. And (2) a *bog standard* feminist political principle. Now, I'm not going to try persuade you of my views on these matters, but I am going to try to spell out the argument, and its relation to the debate on trans identifying males in female chess competitions. ...
... So, (1) what is the argument for preferential entry to university for African Americans? What is the argument for all women shortlists? It's that years of exclusion and discrimination have moulded the structures of opportunity and constraints for each group, first in to higher education, and second into representative politics. Rules that are insensitive to that moulding - 'may the best man win!' replicate the structures of subordination that anyone interested in equality ought to oppose.

The argument is not 'African Americans are cognitively deficient so we have to lower standards.' It is not 'Women are naturally more self-effacing so we have to push them forward.' The argument rests on a pretty simple (indeed crude) distinction between structure and agency. It rests on the claim that there are disabling structures for which we should compensate.
Read 10 tweets
Aug 5, 2025
There are some general questions for @ConversationEDU @ConversationUK @ConversationUS that arise from the Sinclair piece.
The conversation is an international brand with regional autonomous organisations. Its reputation rests on the integrity of the pieces it publishes. ...
... it is fairly simple to demonstrate that the Sinclair piece lacks integrity and makes serious errors, thereby misrepresenting the policy it discusses. This isn't a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact.

The ever reliable @Scienceofsport and @FondOfBeetles have ...
... dissected the errors and misrepresentations, so check out their threads, if you haven't already.
It's a frustrating experience: a network of academics have thought quite carefully about these matters: Where should the cut be? What about CAIS? what about Swyer syndrome? ..
Read 7 tweets

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