[kstrauser]

Genetics isn’t as tidy as you seem to think. Many people with 5-ARD are born with functional vaginas. Personally, I call someone born with a vagina, who was raised as a woman, who identifies as a woman, who presents herself to the world as a woman, a woman.

I have no knowledge, nor interest in having knowledge, of the shape of any of those athletes’ genitals. That also means I have zero reasons, even specious ones, to doubt their sex.

It turns out the world is a lot more complex than we thought, and a lot of stuff we use to take for granted isn’t actually true. “XY is male” was a reasonable guess when we only had information on a few test subjects. Now that genetic testing is widespread, we know that’s not a hard and fast rule.

[dispin]

It's worth taking a step back to consider why we have separate categories for male and female sporting competitions, which is: the significant physical advantage that male development confers on an individual. If sports were mixed-sex, males would dominate almost every competition. So we have women's and girls' sports separate from males, to recognize and celebrate female athletic excellence.

With that in mind, it should be obvious why exclusion of male athletes from the female category is necessary: for fairness, and in contact sports like boxing, also safety.

The reason that males with 5-ARD have testosterone levels in the normal male range is that they have testes which produce it. They go through male puberty and thus have bodies which, in a competitive sports context, have the physical advantages conferred by male development.

These males have no female organs. Some develop a perineal pouch which may be mistaken for a vagina, but it isn't a vagina in the female sense - not anatomically nor histologically - and certainly isn't functional, given that the function of an actual female vagina is copulation and childbirth.

Whether they're raised as if they're female or believe themselves to be women isn't relevant in the context of competitive sport. The reason they should be excluded from the female category is the same as any other male: the categorical advantage from male development.

This is why it's so controversial that every medal winner in the women's 800m at the 2016 Olympics was male, and that two males took gold in women's boxing in the 2024 Olympics.

[kstrauser]

This argument devolves to "we can't let women compete until we dissect them".

At what point in a woman's competitive career do we decide that she's sufficiently talented that we have to examine her body and approve of her gender expression? Is it reserved for Olympic athletes? Or do talented college women need approval? Skilled high school students? A surprisingly good tee ball player?

Down this path lies madness.

You keep saying they're males as though it were fact and not your personal opinion. That's not at all a factual statement. Every bit of public information about these women says that they're women. Misgendering them isn't transphobia because they're not trans. They're cis woman and have been their entire lives.

[dispin]

Athletes competing on an elite level should certainly have their sex verified. In almost all cases this will be less intrusive than the anti-doping tests they're required to do; a simple cheek swab is sufficient for screening via karyotype analysis. And the blood samples already taken for drug testing can be used to measure testosterone levels for this purpose.

Only if there is an anomaly might further investigation be done, with the athlete's permission. No dissection is needed - at most some imaging to determine internal anatomy may be done by medical experts.

This is already the policy adopted by some sporting bodies, and was essentially the process used with the athletes I mentioned in my earlier comments to observe that the sex of each is male.

Ideally this would be done as early on in an athlete's career as is practical. It only needs to be done once, as a person's sex cannot change, and for most will be a straightforward confirmation of what is already known. Otherwise, it's better for the athlete too, to know sooner rather than later if there has been any anomalous development.

I would suggest you examine the public information on the aforementioned male athletes more closely. In particular, 5-ARD is an indisputably male condition; the mutations in the SRD5A2 gene that cause this have no effect on female sexual development. This is fact, not opinion.