Feminist Hypocrisy

So, the results are in and the South African runner is a hermaphrodite.

Femisting responds:

Depressing news on Caster Semenya as the obsession with binary gender continues as she is ostracized for potentially transcending comfortable notions of gender, including biological ones. She might lose the medal. Related.

DoubleXX:

Vilain is an especially honest researcher in a highly politicized field. When I first asked him, he said that Semenya should probably not be allowed to compete against other women. The testosterone, he surmised, would give her an unfair advantage.

We were talking on cell phones and got disconnected, and in the span of time it took to call back he reconsidered. Testosterone levels in men are highly variable, he said. A man with naturally high testosterone would never be disqualified from competing. We don’t disqualify basketball players for being unusually tall, or tennis layers for having bigger biceps. “The problem is,” he said, “sports is inherently unfair.” What he mainly wanted to emphasize was that it’s the sports categories—men vs. women—that are artificially rigid, and reflect nothing about the reality of gender itself.

I have to say that I feel really awful for Caster Semenya for this all to play out in public. Yet, I find the idea that feminists are up in arms about binary gender categories to be entirely ludicrous in this context. Simple fact of the matter is this: Few women would ever compete in world-class track and field, probably any sport, and forget about winning a gold medal, if it weren't for the so-called binary gender categories.

According to Wikipedia, the current women's world record for the 100m is 10.49 and held by Florence Griffith-Joyner. Current men's record is 9.578, held by Usain Bolt. That's almost a full second faster. If women were to compete, they wouldn't get past the heats. Every single competitor in the men's quarterfinals of the 2008 Olympics bested the women's world record. Every single last one.

So, if we got rid of those awful binary gender categories, then few women, if any, would ever compete in the Olympics and none would get medals. Strength, Size, and Speed simply matter too much in most sports. The question then becomes -- are those binary gender categories helping or hurting? I'd argue it's far better to allow women to compete and deal with very, very occasional issue of hermaphrodites than to eliminate gender categories.

Perhaps that's why we aren't hearing too much from the feminists on this issue. Their ideology crumbles. In this instance, you cannot be in favor of the advancement of women and for removing binary gender categories simultaneously.