Why can't feminists just accept that there are nontrivial biological differences between men and women? I realize it is nice to think that the only barriers to complete and total equality in all aspects of life is simply to change what we have social constructed, but alas that is just not true.
Feministing is upset about the Olympics testing female athletes to see if they are, well, female, and not just a guy tucking his junk. Feministing raises three points:
First off there is the sexism behind a practice which only targeted female athletes.
This derives from the fact that a woman is not going to pretend to be a man to win an Olympic event. So, it is pointless.
Second, there is the sexist assumption underlying this that men are inherently better at sports than women (an idea that many, including me, would argue against) such that someone might try to sneak into the women's competition to have an advantage. I think athletic ability varies based on a lot of factors and it is overly simplistic to assume gender will be such a strong determinant.
Sorry, gender is a huge determinant of athletic ability. Men are, on average, stronger and faster than women. The best male athletes are stronger and faster than the best female athletes. Therefore, the best male athletes are better than the best female athletes in every sport that strength and speed provide an advantage. Are there women better at basketball then me? Absolutely. However, the best female basketball player will never, ever be as good as the best male player. Society acknowledges this fact by creating separate womens' sports, without which women would medal, or even make the team, in very few sports.
Third is the idea that gender or sex can be conclusively proven.
First, it is pretty easy to determine sex 99.99999% of the time, if the people hadn't had any surgery or very rare genetic abnormalities. Is the Olympics concerned about eunuchs. Who would chop their dick off to win an Olympic event? Anyway, I thought it was pretty easy to determine until I read this:
It's very difficult to define what is a man and what is a woman at this point," said Christine McGinn, a plastic surgeon who specializes in transgender medicine. Because of a range of genetic conditions, people who look like women may have a Y chromosome, while people who look like men may not, she said. Many times, the people do not learn of the defects until they reach adulthood. "It gets really complicated very quickly," McGinn said.
Again, 99.9999% of the time it ain't that hard to determine unless there has been transgender surgery. And if you are XX, then you are a female. Period. Anything else, and you are a male.
All that said, I wholeheartedly believe that girls should have the same opportunities to play sports, which is why we have to acknowledge that there are nontrivial biological differences between women and men, and that these differences require the existence of separate sports for female and males after puberty. To ignore the differences in order to keep an ideological belief in the absolute equality between men and women in all aspects of existence will be detrimental to the feminist cause. Too often feminist thought and theory undermines real world feminist progress.
The issue here is that the female athletes shouldn't be marched in front of people naked to verify that they have a vagina. Instead, the women should provide blood samples for a chromosomal test. As to why the men don't have to, well, let's accept the fact that no woman is going to sneak into the male competition and win in almost every sport. Maybe equestrian or something is an exception.
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