An update post-ICONS
On the origins of male sporting advantage and trans ideology’s facilitation of sexual abuse of women
In this issue I return to my planned topic for last week’s edition, namely my reflections on the ICONS Women in Sport conference in Denver, which ran from July 21st to July 23rd, which I delayed in order to address Matt Walsh’s criticisms of me. The talks are now online on the ICONS website, if you want to watch any of them back. I haven’t yet watched my own address back, because I was pretty jetlagged when I gave it! Hopefully it was still acceptably coherent...
After this, I’m sending the newsletter on holiday for two weeks, to return in late August. I hope you too are having a nice August break!
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The conference was the second run by ICONS, which was founded by Kim Jones and Marci Smith (Jones’s daughter was among those who had to compete with Lia Thomas in women’s collegiate swimming events). (Last year’s was in Las Vegas, and I didn’t attend.) Like many of the families of young women faced with unfair competition against trans-identifying men, the Joneses had tried to get help from all the obvious places—women’s charities, law centres, individual attorneys—only to be rebuffed. Exactly the same thing happened to the young women forced to run in school-level competitions in Connecticut against boys who identified as trans for my books, who ended up being represented (and are still represented) by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian outfit, because nobody else would help.
The three days in Denver really convinced me that this bizarre, reality-denying movement contains within it the seeds of its own demise. If the trans sports issue had remained as it was back in the 1970s, when Richard Rasskind underwent a “sex-change” operation in his 40s, reinvented himself as Renée Richards and sued to be allowed to play women’s tennis, the injustices would never have become stark enough to force change. But the absolutism of an ideology that insists people are sexed according to their utterances, combined with widespread social contagion and the social kudos that comes from identifying as trans, was bound eventually to lead to a man like Lia Thomas—prime-age, fit and big—competing in women’s events.
I’m sure the saner among the trans lobbyists wish Thomas and his ilk would be more tactful—but those lobbyists nailed their colours to the mast when they insisted that “trans women are women, full stop”, and are now forced to defend the indefensible. And so the uneasy, unstable equilibrium in which only a few women’s rights were destroyed so that a few men could have what they wanted has been destroyed.
What’s happening now is an all-out grab of women’s rights, and as a result, the reaction that is building is broad-based and furious. When it was just “a few greatly suffering people” who sought accommodation as members of the opposite sex, it was hard to interest anyone in the women who lost medals to men or had to share their workplace toilets with a creepy male colleague. When it’s clear that nobody will remain untouched, it’s equally clear that there can be no compromise.
The second thing that struck me was how different the event was in style from any I had attended in the UK. Obviously America’s political polarisation is generally a very bad thing, and so is the almost-total absence there of liberal or left-wing voices opposed to transgender ideology. But sitting in the room where the conference was being held, it had some unexpected benefits: there was no pandering to left-wing sensibilities, and no one felt the need for lengthy preambles along the lines of “I’m not a transphobe, but...”.
In the UK, most of the grassroots opposition to trans overreach comes from left-wing women, who are understandably very keen to differentiate their stance, which is based on concern for women’s liberation, from social conservatism. I know many of these women, and they have suffered deeply by being ostracised by former comrades. There are probably as many ways of dealing with this experience as there are individuals affected, but one common one is to recite at every possible opportunity the many ways in which you are progressive, your record in fighting racism, sexism, homophobia and so on, and your deep compassion for everyone trans-identified, gender-dysphoric or gender-conforming.
Not being left-wing I don’t felt this need to prove my progressive bona fides at every turn, and in any case I very much doubt it does any good. But whether I’m right or wrong on that, there was no such attempt to distance oneself from wrong-thinkers and unwanted allies in evidence in Denver. The attendees were of all politics and none—sport, perhaps more than any other human activity, and certainly more than fighting to keep men out of women’s refuges and prisons, transcends social and political affiliations. There were also more men in attendance than is usual at the events I attend, among them philosopher Jon Pike (@runthinkwrite) and Ross Tucker (@scienceofsport), the latter of whom I had not previously met in person.
Those who were avowedly political were mostly Republican-leaning. Since transgender ideology is overwhelmingly a creature of the Left in America, this absolves them from all the pieties even the most gender-critical lefties feel they must observe. Only a few speakers used she/her pronouns for trans-identifying men (and I’d be pretty certain that that was because policies at the institutions where they work made it very difficult for them to do otherwise). Mostly, male people were simply referred to as men and boys, with their trans identification tacked on.
As I’ve written before, I don’t seek to prescribe how other people speak. But it was still a pleasure to be in a space where sex-based language was the default—and funnily enough, the result is actually less easy to mischaracterise as “transphobic”. If you call Lia Thomas, Laurel Hubbard and the rest of them “transwomen”, then referring to them as he/him is “misgendering” and excluding them from women’s sport requires some explanation. When you simply call them men, both male pronouns and exclusion from women’s sport (and other spaces) naturally follow.
This is another way in which the totalising nature of the trans doctrine will be its undoing. If transactivists had been sincere when they said “please call us what we prefer as a courtesy and kindness, and to help us with our poor mental health,” then many people would have done so willingly. When they took those counterfactual forms of address to indicate that men can really, truly be women in every respect, they created a pushback that is increasingly seeing people refuse even the requested forms of address and revert to referring to trans-identifying men simply as men.
On the scientific front, the material that most interested me concerned the pre-pubertal male sporting advantage, which came up in several talks and panels. In conversation after the conference, Ross Tucker said that he wonders how he had missed this until recently: in almost everything he has written and said he has focused on pubertal testosterone as the driver of sex-based athletic differences. And yet it is well-known that boys are born heavier and longer, and that they are more active in early childhood. “How did I miss this?” he asked me.
Well, I missed it too, and with equally little excuse. I have two sons, and diligently tracked their weight and height as babies in the “red book”, as the NHS “personal child health record” is known—which has different growth charts for baby girls and baby boys. I’ve known for more than 20 years, therefore, that boys are born on average half a pound heavier—which is a lot when you’re 7-8 pounds—and longer, too. And they stay taller and heavier right through childhood, and are also on average more physically active.
The differences aren’t such that pre-pubertal children can’t play sports or games together without the girls routinely being smashed. But they are big enough that in any but the smallest primary school most prizes in mixed-sex events at sports day will go to boys, and a team of girls will usually lose to a team of boys. And that’s enough, in turn, to mean that girls will give up or drop out unless they are given their own events.
Well, as I say, I knew that, but that bit of knowledge didn’t communicate with the other bits of knowledge in my brain. In my book I talked about the male sporting advantage as driven by male puberty, rather than widened by it. And although I share widely expressed concerns about sporting policies that leave open the possibility that puberty-blocked boys could compete in female events as adults, which run the risk of incentivising early medicalised transition, I understood those policies as reasonable attempts to state precisely the source of the male advantage. I no longer think that.
I suppose this is what is meant by the cliché “joined-up thinking”. It was yet another reminder of the importance of speaking to thinking: people on their own miss even very obvious things and it takes groups to be clever. And that means conferences, journalistic work, academic papers and free-flowing chats with friends down the pub. The embargo on speaking in everyday language about matters of sex and gender has rendered us all stupid—especially, of course, those who have swallowed the ideology whole and must therefore subscribe to some pretty ferocious thought-terminating clichés. (On that subject, if you haven’t seen Iain Anderson, Stonewall’s chair, making a total fool of himself in an interview with Beth Rigby of Sky News two weeks ago, you are in for a treat.)
A final standout for me was the extent to which this ideology is facilitating sexual abuse. Several of the women in attendance had had to share a changing-room with Lia Thomas; one of them, Paula Scanlan, spoke publicly at the event for the first time about the way it resurfaced past sexual assault and gave her nightmares. At one point Scanlan took changing in a storage closet to avoid sharing a wide-open space in which dozens of entirely naked women had to accept the presence of a six-foot-four, physiologically normal, naked man. (You can hear Scanlan and Riley Gaines, who has quickly become one of the most articulate and impressive young women speaking on women’s right to fair sport, in an ICONS panel here.)
I had heard previously, but it gave me shivers to hear it again, that the costumes used by competitive swimmers are very tight and rigid, and therefore hard to put on. A competitive swimmer must strip entirely naked, change into a practice suit, go for a warmup swim, return to the changing-room, strip naked again and then bounce and wriggle while inching the swimsuit onto her, which takes a long time. After the race she returns and inches her way back out of it, only to repeat the whole process if she has another race the same day. There is no possibility of doing this behind a towel, and it’s only bearable because the space is single-sex and everyone else is doing the same thing.
It’s scarcely believable that, in an era so attuned to issues of boundaries and consent, this ideology facilitates such abuse. Not just the enforced nudity in front of men and the unwanted exposure to those men’s genitals, but the gaslighting the women put through this experienced when they turned to the authorities. As Voltaire said: “He who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
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See you all in late August, and hope you have nice vacations!