Been thinking about it since I saw JK Rowling posted this yesterday about the IOC's new policy, calling Imane Khelif a man.
Imane Khelif was born female. She was raised as a girl. Her original birth certificate says female. She's always been a woman.
But sure. "Men punching women."
There's a respectful version of this conversation. You could say: "This woman may have a genetic trait that confers a competitive advantage, and we should figure out how to handle that fairly." That's a real discussion. Have it.
But that's not what's happening. They're calling her a man. A girl born female who didn't even know she carried the SRY gene for most of her life. A man, apparently.
This is mission creep. It started with "trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports." Even that conversation can be had without calling trans women "men."
But now it's crept into "any woman who fails a DNA test is actually a man." They're not protecting women's sports. They're policing womanhood itself.
Who counts. Who gets to call herself a woman. If a DNA test says something they don't like, you're out. Born female, raised female, lived your whole life as a woman. Doesn't matter. You're out.
Transphobia cooks your brain. You spend years screaming "everyone fits neatly into two sexes!" and then reality hands you Khelif or Caster Semenya and you can't adjust. You can't say "this is more complicated than I thought." You just call her a man, because the framework demands it. Fundamentalism.
And I saw this happen yesterday. There was a guy on here arguing about this who kept reiterating that Khelif and others who would potentially fail this new DNA test are unequivocally "male," and therefore must be banned from women's sports.
Okay, but where does that end?
Because if you're going to outright call someone a "male"/"man" (not just place restrictions on sports participation) because she doesn't pass a DNA test, does that mean government ID documents should also have to say "male" for these people? Should this also determine what bathroom they can use?
And the IOC does create a carve-out for women who have CAIS. They can still compete. But genetically, they'd still be "male" according to the Rowlings of the world. Still, born with a vagina, raised as a girl, potentially unaware that they have a DSD at all, should they be lumped in with men?
And if this is the case, then should we DNA test all infants to know how to properly classify them? Doesn't that contradict some of the stuff that anti-trans people have said for years about how sex is so very obvious? Yes, these are rare cases, but these are still real people.
Personally, I think it's probably not a good thing that the Rowlings of the world seem to want to not only create rigid binaries, but to also increase the salience of sex segregation in society as a whole.
Because for a while, it really did seem like things were headed more in the direction of this stuff not mattering quite so much. Gender neutral restrooms that have full-length locking individual stalls with a communal hand wash area — cool, right? Nope. Now, the mere existence of one is enough to
set some "gEnDer CriTiCaL" people off, even if this is simply something that's created *in addition to* men's and women's restrooms. Bizarre stuff, to be honest. There are certainly some instances where it makes sense to split things into "men's" and "women's" (and figure out how to define all that)
but every time I see some story out of the U.K. (almost always the U.K.), there's some new call for strict sex segregation in daily life in an area where it didn't exist (or existed in a much weaker form) before. Kind of patriarchal.
