What is going on with athletics? Some poor woman is being forced to undergo a humiliating set of medical tests to prove she is a woman.
Now you could argue that there should be freedom of association and an organisation can set any rules it likes and if there are to be separate competitions for men and women then that organisation can use whatever definitions and tests it wants; you are free not to take part.
But let’s assume people mean it when they proclaim values like, “…our efforts will benefit millions of youngsters around the world and encourage them to live healthier lives and compete in a true spirit of fair play and equality.”
It seems fairly obvious to me that if you set out to discover who can run fastest, you’re quite likely to find that the answer is someone at an extreme of natural variability. It’s not surprising that the fastest woman has man-like qualities. So why wail and moan about it when it happens?
What do genetic advantages mean for equality of opportunity? Do you pretend that we are all born equal and decide that anyone outside a strict set of parameters has a genetic defect and is therefore not allowed to compete? What about equality of opportunity for those people? It seems to me that people who go on about equality don’t quite know what to make of reality. Reality is unfair, and by trying to make it fair you get bizarre outcomes like humiliating someone in an minority.
Maybe the IAAF could create more categories: men, women and other. Or maybe it could accept that if you seek out the fastest runners, surprise surprise, some of them might turn out to be unusual, however annoying this might be for usual people. What it will probably do is come up with some arcane and arbitrary definition of what constitutes a woman, and somehow, because it is sport and sport is good, everyone will gloss over what, if anyone else was doing it, would be called discrimination against those who don’t quite fit in.
This is a fundamental problem with drug testing regimes, too. People who are naturally fastest are likely to have weird body chemistry that gives them sporting advantages. The whole idea of doping is to make an athlete’s body chemistry weirder to give them an athletic advantage. The more technologically sophisticated we become, the harder it becomes to tell the two things apart.