I'm a long-time liberal, and I don't know when it became a leftist value to shove women to the back of the line for *their own activities* to make way for men, I really don't. I used to be quiet about it because I thought it's what you had to do to be a good person--no one wants to be a transphobe-- but no more. I have no moral duty to pretend to believe something untrue, or to use that belief to do something unfair.
No such thing as a transphobia, next time someone says that to you just reply “are you telling me I have a phobia I haven’t stated I have one” Your not scared just don’t believe their fairy tales.
I have come to the belief that there are many more males (and females) than I realized that despise the advancement of women and our full participation in society. The goal is to destroy female sports, more to follow, and this couldn't be happening without the support of many men in high places, along with their transmaidens. Thank you for writing the history of this mess. (Natal) females are Females!
Every war has women "participating," willingly or not, since every war is fought where civilian men, women and children live. Women in the USA has been fortunate in that since our Civil War, we've had no more military conflicts on our land. That is very possibly going to change.
That's for sure. And you've now talked to a woman in whose family, almost every second generation had a women involved in armed struggle. It's not "women participate in war on the sidelines" but our armed resistance was always mixed sex. My grandmother survived Nazis in Bosnia and her father was in Dachau. I don't subscribe to this insanity of denying the sex difference existence, and I not suspicious to the question of women's capabilities. Last time we left a lot of people back in those hills, both men and women, some were buried only years after. So, sports is kind of practical examples what a human body can endure. We don't do it just because of representation or money.
Simple, easy to understand summary, kudos. As I read somewhere, “female is not a hormone”. I’d add clearly that female is neither a choice nor a decision. For sports, it’s just an observation about an athletes body.
Thank you, Linda, for your diligence and attention to detail. This is clear and comprehensive and we must disseminate this information and elect better leadership.
This was an excellent article - I did not know this history in detail. What is happening is astounding and unacceptable. I spent a number of years as a postdoc studying the mechanisms that underlie how hormones like testosterone have permanent programming effects on the brain during early life and again at puberty. The rest of the body is no less affected by these hormones surges and the permanent effects they have. The IOC has to go back to looking at the chromosomes.
Oh, there's a thought! Lets all send this to Kamala Harris and our members of Congress! We can't force them to read this, but we can put it infront of them.
We can't have the first female president of the United States be a woman who puts other women last in their own competitions. Not to mention all the other places they've infiltrated without our consent. THAT would be deplorable, right Hillary?
Amazing how all this happened during the emergence of social media as a dominant form of getting "news".
Why have any changes been made to the category of woman's sport before the science was determined.
Why hasn't the IOC created an open category where anyone can compete. Men, Women, Trans-Men, Trans-Women. I assume it would be mostly trans-women competing.
If there were an Open category and a Women's category, the men who say they're women would lose to other biological males, whereas if they compete as "women," as currently allowed, they tend to win.
This is Leslie, not Susan (e-mail glitch at Substack)
I don't know the technical details of why the Barr-body-negative or SRY-positive athletes were allowed to compete in the specific cases Dr. Blade describes. However a female competitor who is XY but lacks a gene for the testosterone receptor will be phenotypically female in every respect (except for lacking internal sex organs which aren't relevant in sport. ) Despite having a Y chromosome (and a SRY gene) she looks female and is athletically female. This condition, called Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, occurs with a frequency of 1 in 20,000 or so. World Athletics is well aware of this condition and clears them to compete as women, because they are. A handful of Olympic-level athletes have done so. There are other conditions which are harder to adjudicate but there is a process for doing so.
So you could use cheek-swab testing for Barr bodies. It is a microscope technique which takes some practice. Not all women have easily seen Barr bodies in every cell, and some men have clumps of stuff that can look like Barr bodies in some cells. Calling a test positive or negative is not entirely cut and dried. But in doubtful cases -- Barr bodies seen by a skilled technician in, say, 10% of cells -- you could do SRY testing to confirm. Then, if a woman was DQ'd because she had no Barr bodies or had SRY (even though she knew she didn't have a penis), she would have the right to appeal and have the gene assay to prove she had CAIS. There have been world-class athletes who discovered for the first time during their rise to elite level than they have CAIS.
The point is, even with these rare conditions you can still do sensible testing for maleness that doesn't require the athlete to pull down her pants in front of a marshal.
my comment: the genetic testing that took $150K in Atlanta 1980 would likely be much cheaper today. Also, unlike doping testing only needs to be done one in athlete's life
Great no point! I just got my DNA tested for ethnicity background reasons for $50. $50 once for the rest of someone’s life seems more than fair and more than easy.
Thank you for your article Dr Blade, as a father of two Daughters and a Coach of both female & male athletes, this article is mind blowing. How can an association as the IOC be so anti-female? Do they not realise that without Female Athletes the Olympic Games would not exist?
The likely solution, given the intense political pressure from Marxist queers to allow self-identification to play in whatever gender one is most comfortable with, is for fans to stop buying tickets for women's sporting events, or buying sponsors' products, whenever it becomes known that the event will include a man as a competitor. I don't believe fans really want to pay to watch the 250th-best man, who couldn't even meet minimal qualifying criteria in men's events, trounce the world's best woman in every event he enters.
The sad truth is that women's sport (other than the "grace" events like gymnastics and figure skating and some team sports with a real fan base) just aren't as interesting as men's sport: the women are slower and weaker and usually less skilled than the men in every event. The only reason to watch them is to reward someone who has trained all her life for an event she would have no chance of winning unless in a protected female category. That makes sense if the athlete is your friend or family member, or if the tickets are cheaper and easier to get for a marquee event than the men's. If we all know that our friend and family member is going to lose to a mediocre man, we'll have to break it to her gently that we aren't going to come out and watch her at all. Who wants to see that?
Edit: I'd even say that gamblers won't want to bet on women's events with male competitors. The odds will be too short for bookmakers to attract action on anyone else. If a $100 bet on Ralph Kramden pays $101, how does the bookie attract enough bets on Lucy Ricardo to pay $1 to everyone who'll bet on sure-thing Ralph? Think of the incentive there would be to bribe Ralph to throw a race, though!
Actually, US Women's Soccer sold more tickets, and at higher prices, than men's soccer, I recall reading several years back. That was one of the great arguments the women made for equal pay as the men's, which they won.
Maybe you don't find women's sports as exciting, but lots of soccer fans say otherwise.
Many Americans don't find men's soccer exciting at all. Selling more gate than that may not be a high bar. Did the women sustain it, growing the sport, or was that a one-off because they were winning or had colourful characters? I do think youth soccer is growing in North America, with lots of young women trying it out, so you could be right.
Look at women's basketball. Saying women's sports aren't as interesting is just an opinion. They're just different. Women have to play a lot more strategically since they can't rely on brute strength and speed. People are finding that out more and more.
All great questions, Susan. I didn't follow it closely myself, but apparently this was the case, I believe, for several years before the women won equal pay. Are there any women's soccer fans on here who can provide more info, please?
Why would women being slower and less strong than men mean they are less skillful? Thats just inaccurate and illogical. They are equal skillful, just operating a different “machine.”
Men have inferior fine motor control to women. Yet people still show up to watch them play musical instruments. Men process reading and writing and speech and emotion more slowly and generally more poorly than women, yet people still read men’s writing and books, and watch men act in movies. Men underperform women in tests of raw language ability, and write grammatically simpler sentences than women. Yet we don’t say men are stupid and write boring sentences. We say men are “strong,” “direct” and “bold” writers.
Why is it only women’s differences that get interpreted as excuses to disrespect and discriminate against us, and the reverse isn’t the case towards men? Could it be there is a particular ideology of hatred and bigotry towards women and a particular ideology of worship and supremacy towards men?
Just as a fat woman can’t guilt a man into having an erection with her, you can’t guilt a man, or a woman, into digging women’s sports if he thinks the quality of play is less skillful and interesting than the same game played by man. And we’re talking sports here, not music, literature and other pursuits. But the same thing holds. If a male pianist out-draws a female pianist, it’s because he’s more skilled at playing the piano than she is, even if women on average have better fine-motor control, whatever that is. And there’s more to making music skilfully than fine-motor control, and more to writing than being able to yak a lot.
It’s hard for me to see how women could be “just as skilled as men but in different ways” when women never compete against men so we can find out. So if you think women are equally skilled at sport, let them compete against men and see who wins. We have sex segregation in sport, where skilled women don’t have to prove they have the same skills as men, because if there was no female division, women would never win anything. Be careful what you wish for.
Yes, we know men will invade any women’s space or activity. They do it over and over and over again. Men bully women and foolish women help them. We know.
That's really the big key here...All the women who are so eager to be "inclusive" because they are afraid of being "mean", and estranged, so they support their transgender child who might be 13, or 40. All the women who think like this, and hold high positions in the HRW, and Professorships, and say, "men are women too, and can get pregnant, and have babies."
These women full of this madness are what's pushing this God awful, misogynist agenda along.
So, the sane women must be even more diligent, and full.of pushing back against this cruelty, and madness.
What are you talking about? Fat women “guilting” men into having erections for them? “Yakking” female writers? Male piano players “out drawing” (I have no idea what that means) female players? I have genuinely no idea what you’re talking about, but you seem to have a profound hatred of women.
Men aren’t more skillful at sports that woman. Skill is what you do with what you’ve got. Men don’t do more with what they’ve got than women.
Well, then women had better get their act together and keep men out of women’s sport or you will lose it. Men aren’t going to do it for you.
You need to say that no adult or adolescent person who was “identified or assigned” male at birth can play on a women’s team, and make it stick. No exceptions. If you vote Democrat in November just because you want to force red states to do abortions then you aren’t serious about women’s sport because the Dems are all in for trans inclusion.
All U.S. states allow abortion where necessary to save the life of the mother because if a pregnant woman dies, her unborn child dies, too. Abortion that is marketed as contraception is allowed too, because the Supreme Court has ruled that the states may not restrict contraception. But for all practical purposes abortion as a convenient method of family planning is banned in many states....but allowed without restriction at all in many others.
There are very few medical reasons today where continuing a viable pregnancy is truly a threat to the mother’s life. That’s why we have the medical specialty of high-risk pregnancy that can support a pregnant woman through almost anything. There are some obstetrical catastrophes during *labour* where these agonizing decisions have to be made, and have to made in favour of the mother. Very rarely a mother might choose to die that her baby might live but this is not often medically possible to achieve, and the doctor would be criticized if he let a woman die who could have been saved, no matter what the woman said she wanted at the time.
The situation where some states allow abortion only to save the mother's life is clearly not acceptable to many feminists who want to force a more permissive solution on those states, so much so that they will vote Dem no matter who, and no matter what else the candidate would allow or compel in other policy areas like trans ideology. And this even though the U.S. President has no power to dictate what the states can do in this area. But making the right mouth noises is what counts, I guess.
Listening to the excellent podcast Illusion of Consensus today I learned something about male and female babies that I didn’t know before. We are different in so many ways from the very first—even though common practice is to lump all pre-pubescent humans into one category, “children.” Dr. Bhattacharya interviewed a prominent Danish epidemiologist who discussed the discovery, for instance, that male and female babies’s immune systems react differently to vaccines! And they have different vulnerabilities from birth such as females being more prone to autoimmune disorders and males being more susceptible to respiratory problems.
IOC are nothing but a bunch of clowns. No respect for women, surely with all this information someone can publish or push into a documentary. What about that dickhead Snoop Dog!! On what grounds does he make an ambassador, absolutely bonkers, what a joke he smokes and he’s an ambassador!!!!
Linda, you're an absolute treasure. As a Canadian, and fellow Albertan, I had no idea all of this was going on. I bought your book, Unsporting, and it is an invaluable resource. Thank you for everything you have done to stand up for women.
This is a great, if infuriating, read.
I'm a long-time liberal, and I don't know when it became a leftist value to shove women to the back of the line for *their own activities* to make way for men, I really don't. I used to be quiet about it because I thought it's what you had to do to be a good person--no one wants to be a transphobe-- but no more. I have no moral duty to pretend to believe something untrue, or to use that belief to do something unfair.
No such thing as a transphobia, next time someone says that to you just reply “are you telling me I have a phobia I haven’t stated I have one” Your not scared just don’t believe their fairy tales.
I have come to the belief that there are many more males (and females) than I realized that despise the advancement of women and our full participation in society. The goal is to destroy female sports, more to follow, and this couldn't be happening without the support of many men in high places, along with their transmaidens. Thank you for writing the history of this mess. (Natal) females are Females!
Don't worry. Next war will prove the need for women's participation. Sincerely, the South Slavs.
Every war has women "participating," willingly or not, since every war is fought where civilian men, women and children live. Women in the USA has been fortunate in that since our Civil War, we've had no more military conflicts on our land. That is very possibly going to change.
That's for sure. And you've now talked to a woman in whose family, almost every second generation had a women involved in armed struggle. It's not "women participate in war on the sidelines" but our armed resistance was always mixed sex. My grandmother survived Nazis in Bosnia and her father was in Dachau. I don't subscribe to this insanity of denying the sex difference existence, and I not suspicious to the question of women's capabilities. Last time we left a lot of people back in those hills, both men and women, some were buried only years after. So, sports is kind of practical examples what a human body can endure. We don't do it just because of representation or money.
Simple, easy to understand summary, kudos. As I read somewhere, “female is not a hormone”. I’d add clearly that female is neither a choice nor a decision. For sports, it’s just an observation about an athletes body.
Thank you, Linda, for your diligence and attention to detail. This is clear and comprehensive and we must disseminate this information and elect better leadership.
Yes. This article is detailed, accessible, and brilliant.
So, Coach Blade, how do we elect better sports leadership, especially of the IOC, please? What can we readers do?
This was an excellent article - I did not know this history in detail. What is happening is astounding and unacceptable. I spent a number of years as a postdoc studying the mechanisms that underlie how hormones like testosterone have permanent programming effects on the brain during early life and again at puberty. The rest of the body is no less affected by these hormones surges and the permanent effects they have. The IOC has to go back to looking at the chromosomes.
Reading this is absolutely infuriating. I grew up with second-wave feminism and the flourishing of female sports. How did we regress so far?
Because leftist ideologues don't care about women, or anyone else really.
They only care about themselves, and whatever totalitarian wave they decide to ride.
This a really excellent summary. I just wish you could force every politician and decision maker to read and respond to it. Enough is enough.
Oh, there's a thought! Lets all send this to Kamala Harris and our members of Congress! We can't force them to read this, but we can put it infront of them.
We can't have the first female president of the United States be a woman who puts other women last in their own competitions. Not to mention all the other places they've infiltrated without our consent. THAT would be deplorable, right Hillary?
Amazing how all this happened during the emergence of social media as a dominant form of getting "news".
Why have any changes been made to the category of woman's sport before the science was determined.
Why hasn't the IOC created an open category where anyone can compete. Men, Women, Trans-Men, Trans-Women. I assume it would be mostly trans-women competing.
I believe the separate category was suggested for sports, but trans athletes rejected it. I wonder why? I say this sarcastically!
Indeed.
If there were an Open category and a Women's category, the men who say they're women would lose to other biological males, whereas if they compete as "women," as currently allowed, they tend to win.
This is Leslie, not Susan (e-mail glitch at Substack)
I don't know the technical details of why the Barr-body-negative or SRY-positive athletes were allowed to compete in the specific cases Dr. Blade describes. However a female competitor who is XY but lacks a gene for the testosterone receptor will be phenotypically female in every respect (except for lacking internal sex organs which aren't relevant in sport. ) Despite having a Y chromosome (and a SRY gene) she looks female and is athletically female. This condition, called Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, occurs with a frequency of 1 in 20,000 or so. World Athletics is well aware of this condition and clears them to compete as women, because they are. A handful of Olympic-level athletes have done so. There are other conditions which are harder to adjudicate but there is a process for doing so.
So you could use cheek-swab testing for Barr bodies. It is a microscope technique which takes some practice. Not all women have easily seen Barr bodies in every cell, and some men have clumps of stuff that can look like Barr bodies in some cells. Calling a test positive or negative is not entirely cut and dried. But in doubtful cases -- Barr bodies seen by a skilled technician in, say, 10% of cells -- you could do SRY testing to confirm. Then, if a woman was DQ'd because she had no Barr bodies or had SRY (even though she knew she didn't have a penis), she would have the right to appeal and have the gene assay to prove she had CAIS. There have been world-class athletes who discovered for the first time during their rise to elite level than they have CAIS.
The point is, even with these rare conditions you can still do sensible testing for maleness that doesn't require the athlete to pull down her pants in front of a marshal.
great work
my comment: the genetic testing that took $150K in Atlanta 1980 would likely be much cheaper today. Also, unlike doping testing only needs to be done one in athlete's life
Great no point! I just got my DNA tested for ethnicity background reasons for $50. $50 once for the rest of someone’s life seems more than fair and more than easy.
*Great point!
Damn typos
Thank you for your article Dr Blade, as a father of two Daughters and a Coach of both female & male athletes, this article is mind blowing. How can an association as the IOC be so anti-female? Do they not realise that without Female Athletes the Olympic Games would not exist?
The likely solution, given the intense political pressure from Marxist queers to allow self-identification to play in whatever gender one is most comfortable with, is for fans to stop buying tickets for women's sporting events, or buying sponsors' products, whenever it becomes known that the event will include a man as a competitor. I don't believe fans really want to pay to watch the 250th-best man, who couldn't even meet minimal qualifying criteria in men's events, trounce the world's best woman in every event he enters.
The sad truth is that women's sport (other than the "grace" events like gymnastics and figure skating and some team sports with a real fan base) just aren't as interesting as men's sport: the women are slower and weaker and usually less skilled than the men in every event. The only reason to watch them is to reward someone who has trained all her life for an event she would have no chance of winning unless in a protected female category. That makes sense if the athlete is your friend or family member, or if the tickets are cheaper and easier to get for a marquee event than the men's. If we all know that our friend and family member is going to lose to a mediocre man, we'll have to break it to her gently that we aren't going to come out and watch her at all. Who wants to see that?
Edit: I'd even say that gamblers won't want to bet on women's events with male competitors. The odds will be too short for bookmakers to attract action on anyone else. If a $100 bet on Ralph Kramden pays $101, how does the bookie attract enough bets on Lucy Ricardo to pay $1 to everyone who'll bet on sure-thing Ralph? Think of the incentive there would be to bribe Ralph to throw a race, though!
Actually, US Women's Soccer sold more tickets, and at higher prices, than men's soccer, I recall reading several years back. That was one of the great arguments the women made for equal pay as the men's, which they won.
Maybe you don't find women's sports as exciting, but lots of soccer fans say otherwise.
Many Americans don't find men's soccer exciting at all. Selling more gate than that may not be a high bar. Did the women sustain it, growing the sport, or was that a one-off because they were winning or had colourful characters? I do think youth soccer is growing in North America, with lots of young women trying it out, so you could be right.
Look at women's basketball. Saying women's sports aren't as interesting is just an opinion. They're just different. Women have to play a lot more strategically since they can't rely on brute strength and speed. People are finding that out more and more.
All great questions, Susan. I didn't follow it closely myself, but apparently this was the case, I believe, for several years before the women won equal pay. Are there any women's soccer fans on here who can provide more info, please?
Why would women being slower and less strong than men mean they are less skillful? Thats just inaccurate and illogical. They are equal skillful, just operating a different “machine.”
Men have inferior fine motor control to women. Yet people still show up to watch them play musical instruments. Men process reading and writing and speech and emotion more slowly and generally more poorly than women, yet people still read men’s writing and books, and watch men act in movies. Men underperform women in tests of raw language ability, and write grammatically simpler sentences than women. Yet we don’t say men are stupid and write boring sentences. We say men are “strong,” “direct” and “bold” writers.
Why is it only women’s differences that get interpreted as excuses to disrespect and discriminate against us, and the reverse isn’t the case towards men? Could it be there is a particular ideology of hatred and bigotry towards women and a particular ideology of worship and supremacy towards men?
I think it’s more pushy aggressive trans “women” that are causing the problem, according to the article. They seem to have convinced IOC.
Just as a fat woman can’t guilt a man into having an erection with her, you can’t guilt a man, or a woman, into digging women’s sports if he thinks the quality of play is less skillful and interesting than the same game played by man. And we’re talking sports here, not music, literature and other pursuits. But the same thing holds. If a male pianist out-draws a female pianist, it’s because he’s more skilled at playing the piano than she is, even if women on average have better fine-motor control, whatever that is. And there’s more to making music skilfully than fine-motor control, and more to writing than being able to yak a lot.
It’s hard for me to see how women could be “just as skilled as men but in different ways” when women never compete against men so we can find out. So if you think women are equally skilled at sport, let them compete against men and see who wins. We have sex segregation in sport, where skilled women don’t have to prove they have the same skills as men, because if there was no female division, women would never win anything. Be careful what you wish for.
Yes, we know men will invade any women’s space or activity. They do it over and over and over again. Men bully women and foolish women help them. We know.
That's really the big key here...All the women who are so eager to be "inclusive" because they are afraid of being "mean", and estranged, so they support their transgender child who might be 13, or 40. All the women who think like this, and hold high positions in the HRW, and Professorships, and say, "men are women too, and can get pregnant, and have babies."
These women full of this madness are what's pushing this God awful, misogynist agenda along.
So, the sane women must be even more diligent, and full.of pushing back against this cruelty, and madness.
What are you talking about? Fat women “guilting” men into having erections for them? “Yakking” female writers? Male piano players “out drawing” (I have no idea what that means) female players? I have genuinely no idea what you’re talking about, but you seem to have a profound hatred of women.
Men aren’t more skillful at sports that woman. Skill is what you do with what you’ve got. Men don’t do more with what they’ve got than women.
No offense, but you seem deranged.
Yeah, you just seem like you don't like women very much.
What sports fans wanting to sit on their couches and watch is so not the point. And being male isn’t a talent and it’s not a skill.
Well, then women had better get their act together and keep men out of women’s sport or you will lose it. Men aren’t going to do it for you.
You need to say that no adult or adolescent person who was “identified or assigned” male at birth can play on a women’s team, and make it stick. No exceptions. If you vote Democrat in November just because you want to force red states to do abortions then you aren’t serious about women’s sport because the Dems are all in for trans inclusion.
That's right. Dems are throwing women, and girls totally under the bus, (as well as creating more war) but so many Dems refuse to see that.
(,Abortions are still legal in all states as far as I know. Limits are a good thing, eventhough some currently are a bit insane).
All U.S. states allow abortion where necessary to save the life of the mother because if a pregnant woman dies, her unborn child dies, too. Abortion that is marketed as contraception is allowed too, because the Supreme Court has ruled that the states may not restrict contraception. But for all practical purposes abortion as a convenient method of family planning is banned in many states....but allowed without restriction at all in many others.
There are very few medical reasons today where continuing a viable pregnancy is truly a threat to the mother’s life. That’s why we have the medical specialty of high-risk pregnancy that can support a pregnant woman through almost anything. There are some obstetrical catastrophes during *labour* where these agonizing decisions have to be made, and have to made in favour of the mother. Very rarely a mother might choose to die that her baby might live but this is not often medically possible to achieve, and the doctor would be criticized if he let a woman die who could have been saved, no matter what the woman said she wanted at the time.
The situation where some states allow abortion only to save the mother's life is clearly not acceptable to many feminists who want to force a more permissive solution on those states, so much so that they will vote Dem no matter who, and no matter what else the candidate would allow or compel in other policy areas like trans ideology. And this even though the U.S. President has no power to dictate what the states can do in this area. But making the right mouth noises is what counts, I guess.
Listening to the excellent podcast Illusion of Consensus today I learned something about male and female babies that I didn’t know before. We are different in so many ways from the very first—even though common practice is to lump all pre-pubescent humans into one category, “children.” Dr. Bhattacharya interviewed a prominent Danish epidemiologist who discussed the discovery, for instance, that male and female babies’s immune systems react differently to vaccines! And they have different vulnerabilities from birth such as females being more prone to autoimmune disorders and males being more susceptible to respiratory problems.
IOC are nothing but a bunch of clowns. No respect for women, surely with all this information someone can publish or push into a documentary. What about that dickhead Snoop Dog!! On what grounds does he make an ambassador, absolutely bonkers, what a joke he smokes and he’s an ambassador!!!!
Linda, you're an absolute treasure. As a Canadian, and fellow Albertan, I had no idea all of this was going on. I bought your book, Unsporting, and it is an invaluable resource. Thank you for everything you have done to stand up for women.
I understand the complexity of intersex issues, but it looks like the IOCs decision tree was not about biology at all, but politics. Shame on them.