Link: "Nonbinary Runners Have Been Here the Whole Time"

by Zack M. Davis
in commentary

tagged news, sports

The New York Times reports on nonbinary divisions in competitive footraces. (Archived; hat tip Steve Sailer.)

The piece is impossible to parody, but in a way, the absurdity is—clarifying. I always want to ask trans-inclusion-in-sports people what they think the point of sex-segregation in sports is (as opposed to just having everyone in the same category): if they admit that it's a pragmatic policy to give women a domain to compete in despite the sport-relevant trait distributions of females and males being different, then that at least opens up the empirical debate on whether hormone replacement therapy gets "close enough" for trans women to relevantly count as women.

But with the nonbinary category, there is no empirical issue to get confused with! It's pure identity narcissism—or, in more detail, it's a pure instance of the way in which sex-related high-dimensional trait clusters get reified into social categories, resulting in some people learning a desire to escape their reified social category even in situations where sex actually is the decision-relevant trait, resulting in other people who are frustrated by being socially punished for pointing out that sex is sometimes a decision-relevant trait disparagingly accusing those people of "identity narcissism".

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Ninety-Three•

It's only pure identity narcissism from the runner's perspective. From the race organizer's perspective it is a clever hack to reallocate one third of the prize money to a miniscule group of people that the organizer happens to be quite fond of: identity nepotism, or perhaps reparations.

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phi hbd•

Question:

Isn't the very notion of women's sports divisions also a

pure instance of the way in which sex-related high-dimensional trait clusters get reified into social categories, resulting in some people learning a desire to escape their reified social category even in situations where sex actually is the decision-relevant trait

We could sort of make it into a story. In the Sexist Past, women were discriminated against, not allowed to enter into certain professions and hobbies even though their performance was perfectly fine for that. This was bad and so lead to feminism, an understanding that women should be allowed to participate too. However, feminism didn't limit itself to case where performance was roughly neutral across the sexes; it also wanted women to be able to participate in sports competitions, which could only realistically be achieved by making female-only competitions.

I'm not sure this is the full story. A lot of nonfeminists also support female-only competitions (though modern nonfeminists are probably fairly comparable to a lot of past feminists in views? e.g. supporting women's right to vote). But it feels like it captures an important point. That is to say, the point of sports competitions is to rank participants by sports performance. Sex is a major performance-relevant trait for sports. So it makes sense that women would simply not be able to compete in competitive sports.

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Name•

This is exactly backwards - women were banned from competing in sports they were previously allowed to participate in due to a widespread belief that women were harming themselves and their reproductive abilities. Newspapers from the time corroborate this and so does most of the scholarship.

This belief is still widely enshrined in sporting codes - thousands of sporting bodies the world over explicitly ban girls from trying to compete against women for 'their own safety' as soon as they turn 12 or 13. Teams that allow girls to compete, even girls who excel and beat the majority of the men in the competition, are banned from tournaments or have wins stripped away from them retrospectively.

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Name•

This was followed closely by the introduction of industrial sporting schools by Ford, who promoted 'manly' sports to men and 'womanly' sports to women in order to create or maintain what he saw as 'healthy' gender differences between those groups. The history of segregated sport is the history of "the way in which sex-related high-dimensional trait clusters get reified into social categories."

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