The Science of the Trans Athlete Debate, Made Easy(ish)

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre.

Today, we're going to find out what this sound is.

Why men have nipples, which we can talk about, but it's a good title.

At one point, they were toying with that for the title of the whole book, and I'm like, we cannot.

Right after this ad.

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You are the greatest sports science writer in America, arguably the world, although I don't travel the world as much as I travel America.

You always say that, and I like to add to that caveat, like out of all three of us, you know, and

you're underselling yourself.

I'm a science writer, an investigative reporter.

And the other

of the former Sports Illustrated, I don't remember what corner of the building we were in, but we were part of the SI fest training department.

The Disgusting Brothers in the corner of the Sports Illustrated.

Playing ping pong when they should have been making sure that some SEC team's record was correct.

It is funny that we keep on referring to our mini ping pong wars because you were also actually like a really good D1 runner.

like a college athlete yourself.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was an 800 meter runner in college.

Which is a miserable distance, to be clear.

Well, it's the best distance, to be clear, but someone like you would say it's the most miserable distance.

Someone from the gen pop

might think that it's the most miserable distance

purely because of all the puking afterward, you know.

But it's objectively the best.

But yeah, I don't think anybody gets into that event because it's like their first choice.

It's like you figure out that it's what you're best at.

Because you can tolerate it.

You wanted to run the 100.

You didn't quite have the pop for that.

You know,

you're not like, you can't hide behind a parking meter.

So, you know, you're not doing the 10K.

So you end up in the 800.

Yes.

And then you're grateful for it because lazy sprinters get selected out.

And so you're like, this is, this is great.

Right.

And then one day when you're riding the sports gene, you end up running with Usain Bolt and you can actually do that without puking.

Usain Bolt, when I went to his practices, man, there wasn't a lot of running going on.

He took it easy in the practices I saw.

Oh, Usain Bolt was on the Pablo Torre program of preparation.

One of the days I remember when he was still around at the end of the practice, his coach was going, Hey, big man, what are you doing still here?

'Cause he was there at the end of practice.

Where his training partner johan blake was like you know like bench pressing automobiles in the parking lot i like that you ended up inadvertently forcing young bolt to practice more because you just had questions for him yeah or at least to at least to hang around the area a little longer but the book that you wrote the sports gene um is only one reason why i demanded that you come back in studio with us because

Your background is not merely science writer.

Your background is also guy who used to investigate performance enhancing enhancing drugs.

Yes.

Which is something that required you to use, I think, your background in an academic study of

the human body.

I have a grad degree in geological sciences where I live and attend in the Arctic studying the carbon cycle, which has nothing to do with anything, except for I had a strong science background that turned out to be like the most useful thing imaginable for our moment in sports because it intersected with so many issues, whether that was human performance or doping or brain trauma or whatever else.

So

other fact checkers did not have that credential.

It was really my interest in sort of ability to read medical research that kind of made that, you know, you knew when we were at fact checkers, it was like you use anything you have to try to be doing something that isn't your job and start like writing.

Yes.

And so doping was becoming a big deal.

So I said, oh, this is, you know, I can read some of the studies and find out some things that other people don't know.

Yeah.

So Alex Rodriguez was somebody that you investigated, among other names.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Selena Roberts and I first outed him for steroid use, which I always say I think was a good trade for both teams.

Like, you know, got me like hired and promoted Sports Illustrated, and I think it might have like cured him of a little of his sort of perfectionism syndrome, you know, maybe.

I like to think so.

I think at the very least, it brought you to a table in this studio where the coaster in front of you for people not watching on YouTube is a Photoshopped image we have of A-Rod as a centaur.

Full circle already.

Naturally.

Wait, but how did this come about?

That's a longer story.

Okay.

The science story that we worked on together is actually the impetus for why you're here.

It's not.

in fact, your illustrious career since then.

It's the fact that I think 13 years ago now, we co-reported and co-wrote a big feature for Sports Illustrated that was titled The Transgender Athlete.

It's kind of amazing.

It was that long ago, too, because I remember somebody talking to me at that time and

who's sort of an activist for gay athletes and saying, You got, like, let me come in and pitch your boss at Sports Illustrated.

We should be writing about gay athletes.

And I'm like, just wait.

We got a big story coming out about transgender athletes.

We're like going to.

what we see coming.

That was really you that saw it come.

Since 2009, when Castor Semenya, sort of the South African 800-meter runner who has a difference of sexual development, sort of busted on the scene winning world championships, I started writing about athletes with differences of sexual development.

Yes.

Meaning that for the large, large majority of humanity, all of the characteristics, the sex characteristics line up in one direction.

So it'd be like your chromosomes, genes, psychology, genitalia, you know, self-identity, et cetera.

They all go in one direction, male or female.

But for some people, there's a mix, right?

And those, those athletes can present a challenge for sports.

So I started writing about that.

And then you pulled me into writing about transgender athletes, which I didn't see at the time,

the writing on the wall that these issues were, one, going to be treated together, but how big a deal, until we worked on that story, transgender athletes were going to be.

So I'm kind of curious, what did you see at that time when you were like, this is the time to do it?

It just felt like it was going to be controversial at some point.

And we were early.

Like

there's a paragraph in the piece that I will read because in retrospect, we did sort of presage what was to come because we didn't have it at the time.

We basically spent a lot of time with two trans male athletes.

One of them is Keelan Godsey, who's a hammer thrower, visited him in Massachusetts.

The other was Kai Alams, who was the first NCAA basketball player, a trans male.

assigned female at birth, as is said, and then transitioned.

But neither, and this is this is the, the, the line in the piece, neither Godsey nor Alums embodies the true third rail of the gender equity debate in team sports.

We have not yet had someone born male who identifies as female and wants to participate on a women's team.

Yeah, you saw that one coming.

The idea that we have biological boys playing in girls' sports, it is the women's issue of our time.

I'd say it's more.

It's more than just cheating.

It's dangerous and it's insane.

Transgenderism is a lie.

You don't get to choose your own gender.

It's the way that God made you.

You don't get to change.

What I didn't see coming was the fact that last year, 2024, the culture war around trans athletes would mushroom into something that was not merely an object of fascination for people, but it turned into like a blowout loss for an entire political party.

Yeah.

That was not something that I foresaw.

The ad that ran, by the way, at all these sporting events, these football games during the election cycle, in which the ad declared.

Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners.

Kamala is for they, them.

President Trump is for you.

I'm Donald J.

Trump.

Can I improve this month?

Didn't see President Donald Trump being re-elected in part on the back of this fear-mongering around the transgender athlete, in which he declared, by the way, that this would be for him this month a day one priority.

And we will keep men out of women's sports.

And that will likewise be done on day one.

Should I do day one, day two, or day three?

How about day one, right?

Under the Trump administration, it will be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.

Doesn't sound too complicated, does it?

It doesn't sound too complicated, does it?

I think the statement, and this is a lot to say, it's a statement that I might disagree with the most among all of the statements Donald Trump has ever said.

That in itself doesn't sound too complicated.

The problem is that like biology is really complicated, right?

I think that's part of the issue is for a variety of reasons, people don't really want to wrestle with the underlying complexity, right?

So you prefer something.

simple.

Yeah, you prefer a stump speech that you could give on December 22nd of last year in Arizona at, quote, America Fest, which is again this very familiar scene in which he is riling up a crowd in the way that, by the way, this week, Senator Tommy Tubberville, former Auburn football coach, speaking of the SEC, Republican from Alabama, he is also reintroducing a piece of legislation to ban trans athletes from participating in women's sports, particularly with the support of 23 Republican colleagues this year.

following in the footsteps of a year in which there were controversies around Olympic boxing and women's college volleyball.

And before that, it was Leah Thomas and the Penn women's swim team.

And all of this is just mainstream, giant American controversy now.

Yeah.

Usually you mentioned a few cases, you know, volleyball boxing, but usually this was mostly in track and field.

So if you look at the 2016 Olympics in the 800 meters, again, my event.

All three of the female medalists had differences of sexual development, which meant according to rules now, nobody on the metal stand would be able to compete in that event now, right?

And I'm someone who actually like cares about the women's 800 meters, but it's been amazing to see all these people who didn't know that was a thing.

And like the interest in track and field and swimming is just like

incredible.

Yeah.

They were with you posting on letsrun.org.

Yeah.

The message boards.com.

Excuse me.

People don't actually care about most of these sports.

It's symbolic.

Well, as symbolism goes, it feels omnipresent now, which has been this problem of numeracy when it comes to how many trans athletes, how many trans people there even are.

There was a fascinating poll.

It was YouGov that had conducted it in 2022, in which Americans estimated that 21% of the population is trans.

Oh, my 21%.

21, one in five Americans as of 2022, Americans believed were transgender.

That's amazing.

That reminds me of this survey I read a little while ago that asked people to estimate the proportion of their country that was Muslim.

And the, the,

oh, should I put you on the spot?

Do you want to?

What?

Pablo, what percentage of the United States is comprised of Muslims?

I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to go 20%,

taking the under on the line I just said.

Of Muslims.

Okay.

The answer, you're around the average guess, and the answer is like 2%.

Perfect.

And you see the same thing where in surveys, if people are asked, like, what portion of your country is immigrants?

Like, people are wildly off in most countries.

For some reason, the last survey I saw, Australians did much better than others.

But by the way, but the through line in those groups, right?

Transgender people, Muslims, immigrants, is that they are a focus of political messaging and fear-mongering in a way that belies the truth, which is that

1% approximately of America is, in fact, transgender.

And as for the number of trans gathers...

I would have guessed lower, actually.

In the case of trans athletes, particularly,

it's a statistic that the president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker, former governor governor of Massachusetts, was asked to explain under questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee on a visit to Capitol Hill last month.

How many athletes are there in the United States in NCAA schools?

510,000.

How many transgender athletes are you aware of?

Less than 10.

Less than 10 out of 510,000?

Yep.

Which is a remarkable

statistical reality.

I wonder if that includes

trans women and transformers.

Yes, it does.

It does.

But the implication, of course, is that the population that we did not get to dive into 13 years ago, the trans female athlete, has been swaying elections while also being,

you know, less than 0.002%.

Yeah.

And I should say, I mean, I don't don't think that means we shouldn't be attentive to some of these issues, but I do think it is bonkers not to have some numeracy about these issues if you're claiming to care about them.

Like that also matters.

Like that, that's like my main,

you know, if I could teach like every journalist or just have them learn one thing, it'd be like.

Put base rates in every story.

When you talk about something happening, I don't care what it is, find a statistic for how likely this thing, I don't care if it's like fraud or winning an Olympic medal or whatever, find the base rate.

How common is this thing?

Like, let's help people be more numerate, right?

Yes.

Because that doesn't mean that they don't have to care about an issue because it's small, but perspective matters.

Like how big an issue is this?

How much time should be spent on it in Congress, right?

Those things matter.

I think no matter what you think should be done, Those matter and people don't really seem to have much of a clue about that.

The reason I wanted to do this episode with with you, despite this population being so small, is because I continue to think that the controversy and debate around what is fair, what is the point of sports, who should be allowed to play in what division, all of that's actually still fascinating to me, even more so now.

Totally.

So, there's cases where it's small numbers, but sometimes it gets concentrated.

And this is particularly at the elite level, right?

Because I think it really matters what level you're talking about.

Yes, in a big way.

And it matters, by the way.

It matters because we want sports and believe sports to matter.

Yeah.

I'm not, the point of having this conversation we're about to have is not to say that this is a debate that is worthless because

it affects so few people and because these are just sports.

It's because we care about them and we want sports to be.

taken seriously that we take this conversation seriously and the complications contra the president uh that attend a debate that will get, I think, inconvenient if you're somebody who wants this to be politically useful to either side of this.

But it, again, it is politically useful, right?

Unbelievably politically useful.

I mean, a scientist who studies some issues related to transgender athletes, not only that, but I remember when this boxing controversy was going on in the Olympics with Aman Khalif,

texted me like, I think the election just was decided.

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So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

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Please drink responsibly.

I want to be helpful to people who haven't done the research, who have suspicions, who maybe are, in fact, sympathetic on a human level, but unsympathetic on the level of science, because they have a hard time wrapping their minds around

what are we really saying when it comes to how good women are at sports versus men.

And you happen to have reported a chapter of your book, The Sports Gene, that grapples with what actually

is empirically true when it comes to that performance gap.

So where do you want to start?

Where do you want to start start with explaining uh how in the womb yeah seriously let's do that i i guess is the place i mean

you know in in development everyone starts their journey uh sort of in the as a female more or less that that's how i put it in the in the the book it's in this chapter titled why men have nipples which we can talk about but it's a good title at one point they were toying with that for the title of the whole book and i'm like we cannot it's literally just one chapter So that's sort of like the default setting, right, initially.

And then some weeks into gestation,

if there are XY chromosomes present, you know, long story short, production of testosterone starts.

And that has in the womb what are called, there are sort of two main types of effects of hormones, organizational and activational.

Activational means like later in life, like your testosterone surges and like you get aggressive or something or you get faster or whatever.

Organizational means it's like setting up the biology and the physiology.

And obviously what's going on in the womb is this organizational activity.

And so that's where that's where people start to diverge.

Right.

And almost right away, there are things getting set up like longer proportional limbs that males will have.

There's some evidence of

differences.

that that might help certain types of motor skills like for tracking objects and things like that.

But the differences are pretty limited.

Like if you look at records in track and field through like age nine, they're basically identical.

So we mentioned that you were yourself an 800-meter runner.

Yeah.

What I did not say, which is also true, is that you are also somebody who long ago broke the women's world record

in the 800, right?

Yeah, after like two years of training.

So just give us the blunt truth about how big the gap is between men and women because you're a great runner, but that is a jarring.

The truth about that is that in those two years, I worked harder than any other female runner had worked over the course of her entire career.

Obviously.

Obviously.

No, I mean, the gap in running events between men and women is usually around 11%.

And that holds for the most part, rule of thumb.

Kind of no matter the distance, the gap closes.

Between men and women, yeah.

Between men and women.

And there are some endurance events where it'll close a little bit, like long distance, like outdoor swimming, the gap is like half.

You know, women have more body fats or sort of more buoyant buoyant and things like that.

When you go to activities that are really based on like speed and power, just power or power, the gap really explodes.

So if you look at something like the long jump, you know, the gap is enormous,

much higher than that 11%.

You can get to like 20, 30%.

Things like the throwing event, throwing is a huge difference.

Like the difference between a typical male and throwing and typical female is much, much larger than like the difference between men and women in height.

So it's a question of like how big are sort of typical differences.

So they're huge.

And you see this manifest in kind of interesting ways.

Like take like the high jump next time you watch the Olympics, right?

In many cases, the female high jumpers will actually be as tall as the male jumpers or close.

And that's because when you're trying to get over that bar, you know, the reason they arch backward is because your center of mass, when they make that sort of doughnut, shape, your center of mass is in the middle of the doughnut.

And so it can pass under the bar while you're going over the bar.

So your center of mass, if you have good form, center of mass goes under while you go over, so you don't have to get as high.

And so once people started going over backward, there became a priority to be taller, to have your center of mass get taller.

And since women don't get as much off the ground, it really is a huge advantage for them to just be really tall.

Whereas sometimes the guys are not nearly as big of height outliers in high jump as the women are.

So some of the women in high jump are as tall as the men.

And that's kind of making up some of the gap of just like not being able to jump as high because the difference is enormous.

Right, right.

I'm being very mature and not making a joke about that Olympic high jumper whose d ⁇ got caught on the, on the, on the pole.

That was pole vault, man.

Oh, sh ⁇ .

That was pole vault.

How are you going to, how are you going to catch your junk on the bar when you go over backwards?

Think about it.

Listen.

You could catch your bubble

going backwards.

Maybe his junk is just that big.

Yeah, that guy wouldn't, you know, he would not be nearly as famous if he had been.

Yeah, if, you know what?

If he got caught when he was high jumping, that would really.

i would know his name and yeah exactly we would he would he would be doing ads he would be selling new products but yeah the differences are huge right but but just the gap though so broadly speaking then just to give the

this i'm talking about elite like the differences at the elite level yes i'm not talking about the fact that like there are plenty of women that can beat lots of men in lots of sports but broadly speaking when it comes to comparing the athletic performance of men versus women in these metrically validated ways, what you're saying is that it's not especially close.

It's not close.

I mean, the reason we have classifications is because there's tremendous social value to having women's sports, just like there's tremendous social value to having men's sports, and that we need a separate classification to preserve a lot of those benefits.

But in terms of why that gap is not close,

this is now taking us, I think, inside of our bodies on the magic school bus that you are driving.

But explain that.

Why is it that way?

Let's see, everything from obviously we know men are usually taller, but that's not always the case.

They have longer proportional limbs, which can be really useful for things like throwing, right?

You have like a longer whip.

They have more muscle mass, a lot more muscle mass, a lot less fat.

Tend to have more explosive muscle types in some cases.

Seem in many cases to be more responsive to training.

So like you'll, they can bulk up.

uh faster just like someone will have you know just like someone on steroids because men are on steroids relatively speaking to women women.

Which is to say that there are these hormones.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, testosterone drives most of these differences, right?

And it doesn't just drive the differences that people think about with like muscle growth, but also, you know, more hemoglobin, which is the protein that carries oxygen in your bloodstream.

So men will have a better oxygen carrying capacity, which is really helpful for, you know, endurance events.

So

well, also pain sensitivity, right?

There is an idea that women have higher pain tolerance than men.

Well, there's a TikTok genre in which guys get hooked up to these electrodes, I think.

Oh, I haven't seen that.

I don't have TikTok.

And the whole bit of the TikTok video is men simulating the pain that women feel during their periods,

menstrual cramps,

as I'm told they are.

And everybody essentially in these videos collapses to the ground.

Is it supposed to hurt?

Like, who them?

Hey, who need to breathe?

I don't.

Right.

Like, I don't f oxygen is for the weak.

That's what's going on in TikTok that I've been missing.

So women do become more pain tolerant as they approach childbirth.

So that is true.

And I'm not denying that men can be a bunch of like sniveling punks.

But the differences you're describing are all differences that would be advantageous competitively, not merely in sports, but also

in the

coliseum that is the natural world.

Yeah.

And I'm always wary of this because I know in evolution, we can get in these like just so stories where anything that exists, we say, well, it exists for this like specific purpose.

But like there's also byproducts and these like spandrels, which like things that arise because they're just like in a side of something that's important for reproduction.

But yeah, a lot of these characteristics are different because

men

were set up better for fighting and killing historically.

And that's that's true.

You can look at other primates too and see this.

Like the difference in upper body muscle mass between men and women it's it's high like even among primates uh you know other monkeys and i think it's like not that far off of like where male and female gorillas are it's everything from like sometimes men will have like a more prominent brow ridge to make and a stronger jawline that makes them a lot harder to knock unconscious basically right which is an important thing to just know about ourselves that these are again without being so simplistic these are advantages when it comes to trying to defend yourself from a predator i would say less necessarily a predator than another human than like killing another human you can look at like some primates their primary mating strategy is

is sort of competition and sexual selection like female choice right they compete for like peacock you compete for the attention of the female in in other animals it is fighting and securing access, right, to reproduction.

And to some degree, you can get a sense of which primates are more on one side or the other.

Not that this is like only a one-sided thing, but by looking at like the relative size of their testicles to their body size.

So like bonobos,

right?

Close cousins of ours.

Sexual Olympians, I've heard them call it.

That's right.

Big balls compared to their body size.

And like everything they're doing is, you know,

they're like mating a lot.

And that's how they...

That's how they compete.

Whereas I think where we are, where humans are in the primate spectrum suggests that, you know, we've been set up quite a bit to fight each other, for men to kill each other.

Which is to say that our ethics now in modernity should not necessarily simply replicate Genghis Khan.

Oh, dude, I mean.

But the way that we got here,

in a literal sense, is a function of how evolution, I think you write it this way,

accentuates the qualities that a burgeoning adult is soon to need for reproduction, which is to say puberty.

Yes.

If you look across species in many cases, certainly in primates again, the sex that has a higher potential reproductive rate, or don't even just look at animals in general, has a higher potential reproductive rate.

And obviously, men have a higher potential reproductive rate than women because women can only give birth so often.

A real competitive disadvantage for them.

Yeah.

As the computer scientist Fred Brooks said, no matter how many women you put on the job, they can only give birth in nine months.

That will be the sex that will have more of the characteristics that might

help for something like fighting.

So it's like, so in like, I can't remember if I mentioned this in the book, but some animals like seahorses, where the men have to deal with gestation, the men, the whatever, the male seahorses, the females go out and fight, you know?

And they're bigger.

And they're bigger.

The idea that this means anything about what we should be doing today, right?

Like all this cool stuff that we have is like because we're not doing a bunch of the stuff that we used to do.

But I do want to just be clear that puberty for boys and girls, really different.

That's right.

It accentuates, right, those characteristics that are going to be useful in reproduction or essential in reproduction.

Very, very different.

Right.

And you can see this explode in difference in sports performance.

Well, this where it comes home to Roost, because again, for boys, puberty is late and long relative to girls where it is early and short.

And in that difference, the athleticism gap surges because of, again, as you put it, the natural steroid that is testosterone, the magic word.

I haven't read these papers in a long time, but I'm going to venture into the waters of kind of specific numbers.

Let's say that the typical

testosterone range for a woman, maybe we're talking like, you know, one, two,

two, or three

nanomoles per liter of blood.

You don't have to know.

It doesn't matter what, if you know that that's in the range.

Let's say like five, maybe on the very high range.

The men, like the low end of the range is probably more like nine and then going up to like 40, right?

So if you're looking at like a high multiples more.

Yeah.

So if you're looking at a high end of the female range, meaning like three, four, five nanomals per liter of blood, and the low end of the male range, maybe being like more like nine, ten.

And then there's like a between area where sometimes people will fall if they have certain

sort of unusual biological conditions.

But it's, it's not, it's not really a spectrum.

You know, there is, there is some separation there.

And you see that in this performance explosion.

Right.

Age 14 seems to be the number that, again, these growth charts are indicating.

By 14, I think World Athletics, which is the governing body for track and field, I was just trying to update myself on the way here about what some of their regulations are now because they changed sort of recently and I didn't realize that.

They were looking at, you know, if someone

was sort of having testosterone levels in the male range at age 12 or later, that's where they were like, that's where we're cutting it off.

Or this, what they call the tanner stage of two.

These are are stages of development.

Tanner stage of two for a male would be like you're starting to grow pubic hair, basically.

I mean, again, at nine, when I look at track and field records, which again, I'm a track and field fan, but I use those because they're so easily comparable.

Like, what am I going to refer to in soccer or something?

And also, generally speaking, speed is a useful quality in most sports.

Right.

And it's, and this is totally objectively measured.

Yes.

Yes.

They're like identical at age nine.

Then some separation starts to open up after that.

And then by like 14, it's like the best,

the best boys could be professionals, you know, basically.

And, and obviously, you know,

the best girls can't compete with professional males.

Even just like the physiology of men versus women, right?

Just to again catch people up on this, like

hips,

narrow hips being something that is very useful for men,

but less so for women over time, has informed the type of sports scandal that makes sense in retrospect once you realize that the widening of hips becomes competitively disadvantageous.

So gymnastics has some of the strangest scandals, right, where they've had scandals of

having athletes like the Chinese team sometimes, athletes who are too young to be allowed to compete and they'll fake their age to get them into the Olympics.

And that's because being

small and not having gone through puberty

girl.

Right.

Because obviously puberty is very advantageous for male athletes.

For female athletes, it can be all over the place.

So there's this like not super polite saying in running where sometimes you'll have like these incredible phenom young girls and the saying is only the pixies survive.

It's like they may be a phenom.

Let's see what happens when they go through puberty because they could still be phenom

or puberty puberty may actually hurt them like a boy never has a problem with puberty hurting them as an athlete it may help a little it may help a lot well it's going to help a lot but it may be enormous or it may be just okay right and for men for boys the scandal

well the scandal for boys is always they are actually older yeah than they want to reveal this is the opposite right so in gymnastics it's so important to be small for and and to not have these wide hips and things like that because being small you think about it and elite female gymnasts shrunk from, I think it was about 5'3 to about 4'9 or 4'10 over a period of 30 years when gymnastics was getting more competitive and everything.

Because

that means you have a higher power to weight ratio when you're small and a lower moment of inertia, which basically means you have less weight far away from your center of mass.

So you can spin and twist and turn and easier and all those things.

And so you want to be tiny, right?

And that's one of the reasons why it's like beneficial to

have delayed puberty

for female gymnasts.

So you might, you know, might be advantageous to get get someone who's really, really young.

Otherwise, you know,

you sort of can still select for people for whom puberty just didn't change them as much.

So you'll often see some of these characteristics like elite female athletes will just tend to have

narrower hips than the general female population because it's an advantage.

But if we're thinking about all of this as a product of some sort of selection,

as the product of, again, adaptations through evolution, to ask another blunt question,

why are women athletic at all?

Well, most stuff, I mean, you think about our genetic similarities, we're like almost identical.

Almost everything overlaps.

Like almost everything is the same.

And so it's not like, I think as one of the biologists I talked to, he says, this isn't like ordering a car where you're just like, we tailor it to this specific job.

It's like most of the stuff is the same.

And then there are certain things that are really important to survival and reproduction.

There might be some changing, right?

Because there's survival benefit.

And so almost everything we have is similar.

Like lots of adaptations we have for athleticism are similar.

Like humans have, there's one thing we're actually good at, even compared to other animals.

Podcasting.

Podcasting.

We actually do, you know, there's this gene called Fox P2 that's implicated in our ability to use language the way we do and other chimps not.

So, so podcasting.

This is why you're on the show.

Yeah, exactly.

Validating my theories.

So

women have, we have all, so the thing we're actually good at is like ultra endurance running and particularly in the heat.

So unlike the other primates, we don't have body hair, right?

The reason we probably have, you know, we're the only primates that have head hair that continually grows throughout our life.

Like you don't see chimps having to get haircuts, right?

So presumably.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

So presumably this is for sexual selection.

Like for a second.

Why haven't I ever seen a chimp with a mullet?

Yeah.

Great point.

You're like, gosh, how do they keep their hair that length?

No, it's like, it just, so for humans, this is probably for attractiveness and for style because we lose it in the rest of our body where we really need to dispense heat.

Like when we were because humans were ultra endurance predators, you know, sort of chasing animals, running other animals into exhaustion, not able to sprint with them, but running them into exhaustion in the heat.

So we can sweat and we stand really upright.

We have good like butt muscles that help for running and all this stuff.

We have a, we have sort of like a tendon that basically cushes our, cushions our brain for bouncing for distance running.

And women have all those things too, right?

All those things are important.

Persistence hunting.

Women have them.

But then there are some differences where something that's like really important for women, like it's really important for women to have breasts, like female breasts that, you know, and to be able to lactate for reproduction.

That's really important.

And it's not,

it's not so, it's not, it doesn't really harm men to have nipples, right?

So we don't need them.

As Robert Diniero once asked, I believe in a in a great act of cinematic journalism,

I have nipples, Greg.

Could you you milk me?

The efficient evolutionary system is just like everyone will have these.

And, you know, sometimes they'll develop into female breasts and sometimes not.

Like they're not, they're not selected against in men, so they stay.

And like most of the things that we use in sports, they're overlapping for men and women, just a difference of degree.

The question of, okay, it seems obvious to me.

Now, given your explanation, that men and women should not be in the same athletic division, there should be women's sports and there should be men's sports.

That seems incontrovertible to me from that big picture perspective

because of that genetic advantage.

Yeah, or even open sports.

I mean, if the male category was just like an open category and anybody wants to compete, that top division, all are welcome.

I am also fine with that.

But the trouble being that the human body actually doesn't break down as cleanly, as neatly.

How would you describe how porous those categories are?

Male on the one hand and female on the other?

So there are different levels of sex determination.

Chromosomes, genes, psychology, genitality, reproductive organs, self-identification.

And in the very large majority of cases, all those things go in one direction or the other, male typical, female typical.

Easy.

In some cases, they don't.

In these cases, they end up being much more prominent in sports than in the wider world.

and so in some of those cases so let's say again i there are instances where someone can have xx chromosomes which normally would be female but this one gene sex determining region y gene has broken off and stuck onto an x chromosome and so they develop male There are other cases, these are the ones that have been more prominent in sports, where someone can have X Y chromosomes, but for some reason,

they stay on that default female path when they're in the womb instead of going down the down the male path.

And there's a whole bunch of shades there.

Like that person could end up actually being able to use some testosterone, their body being able to use some testosterone, but for some reason it didn't ingestation at the right time.

Or they might be totally insensitive to testosterone, right?

So this is a case where you could have someone with, like when people say, oh, just test everyone's chromosome.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, there are people with XY chromosomes who are, their body completely cannot respond to testosterone, not even as much as a normal female.

And so once all of the signals aren't pointing in one direction, then you get these cases that don't map easily onto the categories that are used for sports.

And you have to decide where those people, where those people should go.

But in either event, what you said earlier, which is fascinating, is that they are more commonly found in elite sports.

That's right.

But the whole complexity of this topic of DSDs, as broadly described, differences of sexual development, was actually embodied at the Olympics in Paris with this boxer from Algeria, Iman Khalif, who Donald Trump in October of last year described in an interview with The Undertaker.

Really?

The wrestler.

Oh, I know.

The Undertaker, also a podcaster, whose daughter, just for the visual here, was on his lap while conducting this interview with Donald Trump during election season.

Donald Trump described said boxer like this.

Now, there were two people in the Olympics, because I didn't even know they have female boxing.

There were two people that transitioned into women.

Both of them won the gold medal.

Shockingly, are you shocked to hear that?

Imagine that.

Did he say, I didn't know we had female boxing?

Yes.

So he said two things of note.

One is that he didn't know, speaking of how much people care about these sports in reality, that female boxing was apparently a thing.

He didn't know that we had female boxing?

That's what he said.

That's what the president said.

That's number one.

Number two, he basically calls these two boxers that were, again, controversial during the Olympics

trans athletes.

This being, again, Iman Khalif, the 145-pounder from Algeria, and Lin Yuteng, 125-pounder from Taiwan, who both won gold, by the way.

A bit more context is that they're not career-undefeated fighters.

They both...

lost to women a number of times before.

Khalif has nine losses on a record.

Lin has 14 losses on a record.

Only knocked someone out once before.

They are obviously really good at women's boxing, a sport which exists, but they are also not transgender athletes.

And now we get to the commingling of all of these terms.

I think when you're commingling those terms, that is.

It could happen because some of this is really confusing.

Like I can tell, like, I've been trying to keep track of what chromosome things and hormone things I've dropped even in this conversation.

Yeah.

It's a lot.

It's a lot.

But But I think usually when you're commingling those things, it's because

you're trying to denigrate those people and to lump them into a category for the purposes of a certain kind of signaling.

It's politically useful to say these are trans athletes too, even if they say, and they've lived their entire lives based on all the records available, according to the IOC and others, as women, born female, registered female, female passport, boxes of female, lived life as a female.

I have no idea what their biological situation was or anything like that.

Yeah, medical records, we do not have them

to your curiosity.

In fact, what we have is a controversy in which Aman Khalif is threatening legal action against international outlets that are saying that they failed some sort of biological test, which again does not speak to the transgender aspect of this, but to this question of DSDs, which is again, not the same thing.

No, not the same thing and something that like has taken time for governing bodies to figure out how to regulate and all these things.

And in this case, I think compounded in this case, you had, you know, the International Boxing Association, the IOC, which are like two of the most like ridiculous, like corrupt, you know, incompetent

organizations.

You can imagine trying to deal with something like this.

You're just like,

what a perfect storm of nonsense.

You know,

that's different.

Like these, these differences of sexual development, in a lot of cases, the first that any of these people will learn of the fact that there's something unusual about them is

when some sporting body tests them and tells them, right?

This is very different than someone who's transitioning.

It's very different.

Well, I think we should consider that something else Donald Trump said in October at a Fox News town hall provided, again, a very attractive solution because of this controversy that had emerged in women's college volleyball at San Jose State.

And it sounded like this.

You look just yesterday, they had a volleyball match.

Did you see that?

Where a person that transitioned, okay, we have to be very careful because this can terminate your political career if you say it slightly off, all right?

But transitioned from man to female and was on a volleyball and i saw the slam it was a slam i never saw a ball hit so hard hit the girl on the head but other people even in volleyball they've been permanently i mean they've been really hurt badly women playing men but you don't have to do the volleyball we stop it we stop it we absolutely stop it you can't have it It's a man playing in the game, I mean, physically from a muscular stand, even if it was a little bit less, maybe they do all sorts of tests and drugs and everything else.

Look at what's happened in swimming.

Look at the records that are being broken.

So how do you stop it?

Do you go to the sports leagues?

Do you go to the Olympics?

You just ban it.

The president bans it.

You just don't let it happen.

Not a big deal.

Wait, so what he's referring to there is this October 10 game in which the player for San Jose State, who is said to be transgender, spiked the ball.

Her opponent, according to a video review, got hit in the arm, not in the head.

And her opponent actually successfully dug the ball out and the play continued.

So it didn't quite happen in the way that seemed so apocalyptic, according to the president.

There's no danger there.

And it's like, that to me would be like arguing we shouldn't have like mixed doubles and tennis because a male serve may hit a female player or something like that.

Like, yeah, it could happen, but I don't think it's

something that people are getting too exercised about or should be.

Well, it's also the case that, according to Katie Barnes' reporting at ESPN.com, there are male practice players all of the time for these female college volleyball teams.

They're used to interacting, playing against, competing, training against men.

And in fact, in the case of this one specific senior at San Jose State, she had never been, by the way, an all-American,

had never contended for a national championship, had played in the exact way that was uncontroversial for three years.

At college sports and like high levels of sports, you're going to be hard pressed to convince me that most people really care about the athlete's health.

It's interesting because I think that is true of the people who originated this argument in the culture war.

But now, when you hear whether it's a mom at a town hall who's getting information from these sources,

I don't necessarily dispute the authenticity of her concern.

No, no.

Even if, in fact, the context and the evidence directly contradicts the magnitude of fear she should actually have.

No, that's right.

And look, and I want, I think women's and girls' sports have tremendous social value, and I want them to have a space where they feel safe.

Yeah.

And just to be clear about this, yeah, nature versus nurture.

Your book is,

it's the case for why nature should not be underestimated here.

Right.

That's a good way to put it.

I wish I would have come up with that.

When I was writing the book, I felt like eventually I sort of got an idea of the spectrum.

And the spectrum was, at least of people who were not just.

like yammering on the internet, but who were actually trying to study this stuff, either biology, sociology, whatever, was

one extreme side was genes don't matter at all.

And the other extreme side was both genes and environment matter.

And to me, only one of those sides was really extreme.

And that was the one saying the genes don't matter at all.

So there were these sort of extreme, extreme takes, but that's like, there's extreme takes on so many sides.

But the point being that I am left now re-evaluating the legislation that is happening as we speak in Washington, D.C., reintroduced by Tommy Tuberville, again, former college football coach at Auburn, in a very on-the-nose enactment of the morality play we've been describing.

And the title of this bill, of course, is the, quote, protection of women and girls in sports act.

And it would, yeah,

define gender as, quote, recognized based solely on a person's reproductive biology and genetics at birth, end quote, which would affect all schools receiving federal funding, whether they be elementary schools or D1 colleges.

And now this has a pretty damn good chance of passing in the Republican-controlled Senate.

And so that criteria, Dave, is what we're left here to assess.

I still don't see how that gets you anywhere with athletes with differences of sexual development, right?

Because there, you're still in a place of saying,

well, because again, there's this issue where some aspect of their biology doesn't all line up in the male typical or female typical direction.

between the genes and the chromosomes and other aspects of biology and psychology.

And so it doesn't really get you out of that of having to sort of make some

somewhat arbitrary policy of where do you draw the line for those athletes.

That would obviously regulate transgender athletes.

Yes.

But it seems like the variable that we have

alighted upon here as the key one that does

feel like the brightest line available is the thing that emerges from puberty.

Yeah.

Which is.

Yeah.

Testosterone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's the most sensible way to go about it.

Again, understanding that it's imperfect and that some people are going to feel unfairly treated.

Right.

But we are arguing, though, at the end here that gender is actually not the bright line.

What we're really talking about is hormone that should decide whether an athlete is in that top division, the open division, aka men's sports, or that secondary division, aka women's sports.

Yeah.

And again, not that testosterone is the only influence on sports and not that it is a perfect dividing line.

But I think when you're trying to draw, you know, for understandable reasons, a binary on what is sometimes messy biology,

I think it's the best practical tool you got because it's because it's not a spectrum and it is responsible for a lot of those differences.

Right.

Which is also an acknowledgement of something that I think I knew,

have known for my entire life, which is that we are all still haunted by puberty.

Speak for yourself, man.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark media production,

and I'll talk to you next time.